Seeing Beyond: Prada CMO Lorenzo Bertelli on Ocean — and Luxury — Education

Vogue: You are making this first deposit of €2 million in the fund. Have you already approached other entities you work with to tell them about this initiative and maybe encourage them to become members?

Absolutely. I can’t disclose who, because it is for them to disclose. But absolutely. Sea Beyond has always been an initiative open to third parties, but maybe the reason that we were leading it was making, if not a barrier, then a reason to prevent others from joining. So, for it to be independent is the best way, I think, for it to attract as much capital as possible. And help shape the project and vision for what we have been trying to do.

Vogue: Luxury is a competitive industry, as you know, so even when members of that industry are engaged in philanthropy or CSR work such as this, I get the impression that they sometimes cannot shake that competitive mindset. They become territorial about ‘owning’ whatever category of work they are engaged in, so that even when the cause in question is for the common good, they want to be the only brand seen to be undertaking it. I used to see this a lot with brands working through sustainability initiatives…

Can I tell you something? It is still very competitive today. There are some very important groups, not necessarily in fashion, who were not happy about having us. And they actually excluded us from some charity opportunities just because they feel it is a competition. To me, this is weird. Because there can be no competition in sustainability. So if in this fund we were to be joined by Vuitton, or Gucci, or any of our competitors, I would just be happy, because this mission is for everybody.

Vogue: Human nature is hard to shake…

But you can’t be egoistic when it is about sustainability.

Vogue: Your business card is printed with two titles: as well as Prada’s head of CSR, you are also group chief marketing officer. So when you make these investments in the ocean…

Hold on: we are not investing in the ocean, we are investing first and foremost in people. The ocean is the subject, but we are investing in people’s minds, spirits and hearts.

This is the scope of it: in sustainability, there are many people looking at short-term impacts, things like decarbonisation, waste reduction, water-use reduction, sustainable products — and that’s all correct and makes sense. But ultimately, if people’s mentalities [about the environment] do not change, then we will not see a corresponding change in consumer behaviour. So in order to help this change in consumer priorities and mindset, we need to think about education, and look forward 20, 30 years.

Politicians, most of the time, their horizontal landscape is understandably limited to the length of their mandate. So we are maybe losing, also in the public space, strategic long-term thinking and planning. And education is the subject with the widest horizontal time frame. We want to invest in that long term — to help explain how human behavior that [preserves the environment] is also convenient and beneficial to the people who enact it. That is the most important thing.