Chris Peters

When I was in high school, my senior year of high school, I decided that I didn’t want to go to a regular college because it felt like that was such an abrupt and kind of bizarre thing to do—to come out of school, and not really do anything other than school and just figure out what I’d be doing for the rest of my life. I managed to find this woman in Princeton who helped set up people for alternative learning paths, and she found this program through the University of Southern California before it became a research institute. They gave out credits if you were actively working in a field, and so, like, the day after I graduated high school I flew to Australia.

I was very much into the outdoors and nature and all those things, so I took a hiking trip in the Kimberley in Western Australia. I did that for a month, and then I came back and went on to Hawaii. When I was in Hawaii, I was working as a research assistant to this marine biologist and it was wonderful. When I think about my life back then…We were living on a military base on the top of a volcano on a big island, and every day we’d go out and swim with sea turtles and little fish and do all these really magical things. I remember thinking at this moment in time, My life isn’t real, this is such a magical way to live and exist. Then I went on to Fiji and I was living in this small coastal town, and I was doing the same sort of thing there. It was just magic, but then I started to realize that the downside of studying conservation is the endless—not hopelessness, but you feel sort of helpless in the ways where you’re kind of observing things, or you’re monitoring things and recording things that have a very temporary distance. You have to be a very strong person to go through that constantly, to see things sort of constantly degrading and falling away or slipping or dying. There are lots of things you can do, but they’re such large, sweeping concepts, and it’s just really overwhelming.

At the same time, I’d always really been interested in fashion, and I became more and more aware of the fact that it was going to be more effective as a person working in an industry affecting larger change than being a research assistant. I couldn’t really deal with the idea of just watching and not being able to act, so I went into fashion, which is probably the furthest anyone would really think about being conscious or mindful of things—especially when you’re producing more, consuming more, using more. But when you’re working in fashion, you can make decisions for people without them even knowing about how things are made, or employing people in really great parts of the world and just make clothes in considerate and careful ways. And that’s kind of—I mean, I like clothes! And I guess that’s sort of it. It kind of makes sense. I mean, when I’m saying it out loud, I’m like, “This is kind of stupid, I sound like an idiot.”

I didn’t know what to do, so I went to a county college for a while. Like most people, I took a lot of classes that I probably would have had to take at a lot of schools, so I got that out of the way and could figure out what I actually wanted to do. I was always very pragmatic: go to a county college, save money, and transfer your credits. And it’s great, too, if you just don’t know what you wanna do. Just chill out and figure it out and don’t pay ungodly sums of cash. I was taking art class, and they had a couple of brochures from different art schools, and one was the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. I saw that Eduardo Kac was teaching there, and I liked his work a lot. I got really excited about that, and I decided I’m just going to go here. When I saw they had a fashion department, I was like, I’m going to do this. I was still holding up the idea that somehow I would stay in some sort of biology kind of thing, an environmental science-y sort of thing, but when I got there and I was accepted into the fashion department.

My uncle is a conservationist, and he has this organic farm where I was working for all of high school. He was really upset. People felt a little bit—not betrayed, but they felt like I was bailing on caring about these things, but I can carefully do a lot more this way, than any other way. ’Cause you can affect things on larger scales. You can support industry in places where a small cottage industry has been for 300 years in France. You can support entire families [working] by hand in India, in a beautiful space where everyone’s taken care of. You’re able to bring industry to places in really dire economic situations. That you can do that can really be good for people.

That’s the thing: It’s hard to convince people of actual good intention. And I think people believe so much of fashion is about waste and excess and consumption and destroying things, but the way [Creatures of the Wind] thinks about our collections, and the way we talk about our clothing, is that everything should be timeless. You don’t need a ton of stuff all the time. You just need some things that are really good and really beautiful and that you care about. Those are the things you should have, and the things you should have should last you for years—not a couple months. They should be on your body, and in your life to a degree that you’re really using them. That’s something that I want to do as well—to be able to affect people’s perceptions on ways to consume.

My mom worked in fashion, in textiles design. She was probably one of my biggest supports, but also the most vocal person in terms of me not going into fashion because she knows it’s one of the most difficult and horrendous and most emotionally debilitating industries you can go into. And she’s right. You’re constantly sacrificing your own life and your time and all your money, and you’re definitely super-broke all of the time, until you become a sustainable company or you get a financial partner or whatever. It’s an industry that doesn’t always promise success. It generally leads to ruin and destruction, but you know, we’ve managed.

I think you really have to convince yourself, and make yourself believe that this is what you want to do, ’cause at the end of the day, you have to take action on your own. I really just decided. I got a flight to Chicago—they had a one-day thing where they review your portfolio and you get accepted on the spot. I did that, I got financial aid as well, and I came back home and told my parents that I got into the school and the school was giving me money, and that was it. And I think that’s what you have to do. If you want to make a larger life for yourself, you have to do it on your own terms. You can’t really rely on other people to support you all the time. It’s fun to make these larger decisions when you’re younger because you don’t end up making them so much when you’re older because more and more people depend on you. Then your ability to make huge life changes are kind of destructive to your world, so…when you’re young, do whatever you want!

One thing that I’ve gained from having such a varied life to this point is that I am aware of the larger world that exists. And I’m constantly reminded of that once something seems to be overwhelming. Like, “This is not all of reality, there’s a whole world outside of the fashion one.” It’s so important to have perspective, and having a different life experience definitely helps. You have a little bit more clarity, in terms of the weight of things. Especially when things suck, it’s like, “Well, there’s always Hawaii!” I feel like those aren’t wise words to end on—“Go live in Hawaii!”