Michelle Gabriel Brings Fashion to the Heart of the Climate Conversation
Too often, people don't consider fashion when thinking about climate change. Michelle Gabriel wants to change that. As a CBEY Resident Fellow, Michelle leads Sustainable Fashion at Yale — CBEY's interdisciplinary initiative advancing research, dialogue, and innovation in one of the world's largest, most resource-intensive, and most overlooked industries. The numbers tell part of the story: fashion contributes an estimated 8-12% of global greenhouse gas emissions, employs a substantial share of the global labor force, and shapes a supply chain that has yet to seriously engage with sustainability. Polyester, the dominant textile of today, is derived from petroleum. Many of the country's Superfund sites trace back to a legacy of textile production. "You cannot achieve sustainability goals without including fashion," Michelle says. "It is a connective tissue to deeply divergent global problems: climate, labor, inequity, development. If we change fashion, if we make people care about it, then we can regulate it, educate people about it, and bring it into the conversations that are shaping the future."
A circuitous path to academia
Michelle didn't arrive at this work through a straight line. She spent the first fifteen-plus years of her career inside the fashion industry, dealing with supply chains and “things you can’t unsee,” and says there were no early indicators that she'd eventually become an educator, researcher, and political economist focused on transforming the fashion system. "My life changed when I got my master's in sustainability. I fell in love with research — it offered a way for my own experience to inform my work. The questions I bring to my research come from things I lived through in the industry."
That dual fluency (industry practitioner and academic researcher) is rare in sustainable fashion, and it shapes how Michelle approaches her work today. She lectures at Yale and at Columbia University's Sustainability Management program, is completing her Ph.D. in Social Policy and Political Economy at Glasgow Caledonian University, and previously designed and led the first research-focused sustainable fashion master's program in the Americas. She chaired the NYC Local Law 112 Textile Purchasing Task Force and is part of the coalition advancing the New York State Fashion Act.
What Sustainable Fashion at Yale is for
Sustainable Fashion at Yale began as a student-driven idea. Graduate students at Yale were asking why fashion wasn't showing up at the center of business and environmental conversations. Michelle joined the CBEY community as an affiliate, developed a course at the Yale School of the Environment that draws on her industry experience, and watched the program grow into a space where students, staff, and schools across Yale could meet around the same set of questions.
"Students were asking about fashion at the intersection of business and the environment and CBEY took up that call," she says. "I fell in love with this community — these are amazing people trying to solve problems with the levers they have. The opportunity here is to bring fashion to the table and to bring other disciplines into fashion. That kind of collaboration is exactly what makes this work."
Fashion, she points out, has a footprint in nearly every domain CBEY touches: green chemistry (textiles are chemistry-intensive), supply chain, climate finance, labor, equity, and consumer behavior. "There's an angle for everyone," she says, "and we need everyone to bring solutions to the table."
An evangelist for the work
Asked what made her leave a higher-paying career in industry to take up this work, Michelle is direct. "You see things you cannot unsee. I've been changed by what I've seen done in the name of fashion. I feel like it's my job to be an evangelist for this work, to collaborate on change."
Part of what Michelle brings to her new Resident Fellow role is a network. Her previous work as a green educator connected her to brands, NGOs, and global actors who often have influence but lack the kind of partnership and academic infrastructure that helps them do better. "I'm excited to introduce that community to Yale," she says. "No one can do this work alone — not at the company level, not at the industry level, not at the government level. CBEY is the kind of place where you can platform that collaboration in a way that actually leads to action."