Moderator: Kate D. Levin

Fashion Model

Kate Dillon is known in the fashion industry as a groundbreaker and a passionate advocate for environmental and humanitarian causes. For 19 years, she has leveraged her career in fashion to campaign for positive body image in the media, eating disorders awareness, and global poverty reduction, and her work has been widely featured in the media, including on Anderson Cooper 360, Good Morning America, and the PBS NOVA series as well as in Vogue, Glamour, and People. In order to be a more effective advocate, Kate completed a Masters in Public Administration in International Development at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2009 where she won two academic awards. Now back in the fashion industry full time, Kate continues to model while serving as vice-president of the Komera Project, a fund that provides scholarships for secondary education to girls in Rwanda.

Julie Gilhart

Barneys NY

Julie Gilhart is the Senior Vice President, Fashion Director of Barneys New York, a high-end luxury specialty store based in the United States. Barneys New York has 8 flagship stores, 2 regional stores and 19 Barneys New York CO-OP stores. A Dubai investment firm that plans to expand Barneys New York both domestically and internationally purchased the company in 2007.

Julie has been at Barneys since 1992. Before working at Barneys she did a variety of fashion related jobs. Her home base was Dallas, Texas until she moved to New York in 1990. She has spent her whole entire work life in the fashion business. In spring of 2007 she spearheaded the development of an all-organic collection of casual, sexy clothes that can be bought in every Barneys store. She inspired many designers to develop "green" product and was instrumental in having Barneys change their 2007 Christmas campaign to "A Green Holiday" focusing on fashion products that are environmentally conscious supported by windows, in-store displays, a Christmas catalogue and a website tie-in. In her work at Barneys, Julie is involved in many areas. Her most important task at hand as Barneys opens more stores, is to have the store speak to the customer as well as the many designers Barneys partners with in a newer, better way. There is an essential need to create more awareness in how to approach the development of product and how the customer makes decisions in buying. All this falls under the umbrella of trying to create a new paradigm of how the fashion business operates so as to leave a lighter footprint on the earth.

Debra Kellner

LeAF Generation

After beginning a career in the Stock Exchange, Debra traded the world of skyscrapers for the silk road as a photographer, author, and cinematographer. She has published with magazines like National Geographic, Paris Match, Geo, Le Figaro, Elle, Stern, and The New York Times. She divides her time between Asia and Europe where she works and lives with her husband and two children. Debra's long time relationship with India gives LEAF the authentic hands in field experience it needs in order to do business on this unique continent. Using organic farming practices, LEAF's natural cotton does not pollute or leave any by-products. By purchasing from marginalized producers and workers, LEAF consciously seeks to improve and empower the lives of these individuals by moving them from a position of vulnerability and exploitation to one of security and self-sufficiency.

Matthew Amengual

Political Science Department, MIT

Matthew Amengual is a PhD candidate in MIT's Political Science Department. In 2006, he researched the implementation of codes of conduct and national labor laws in the garment sector in the Dominican Republic and Honduras. This work has been published the journals World Development and in a co-authored paper in Politics & Society. With the support of the Social Science Research Council, he spent 2008 and 2009 in Argentina conducting field research on state-society relations and labor and environmental regulation in Argentina. In addition to academic projects, Matthew has been a consultant to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the International Labor Organization. Before starting the PhD program in Political Science, Matthew received a Master in City Planning degree from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, and an A.B. in Environmental Studies from Brown University.