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What better way to kick off fall quarter than with a weekend trip to Paris?
Phoebe Gates, the youngest daughter of Bill and Melinda Gates and a sophomore at Stanford University, has been interested in fashion for as long as she can remember. She remembers that while studying abroad in Johannesburg, South Africa, she met a student who was a fashion designer and was very surprised by the opportunity.
“Wait, can you do that at your age? And I remember being so happy.” Gates, speaking by phone from Palo Alto, Calif., is already back in the classroom. “I’ve always had an interest in drawing and designing, and I’m a big writer.”
She spent this past summer interning at British Vogue, rotating between the print, features and fashion teams, and it was there that she met the staff sustainability editor and traveled to Copenhagen for Fashion Week in August.
“It was really fun, and I was like, ‘Okay, I want to do a lot more things,’” she says.
Her passion for sustainable fashion then made her friendship with Stella McCartney a natural fit.
“She and my mom are good friends,” Gates said of McCartney and her mother, Melinda Gates. “Even when I was little, she would send me things and little notes and I would love it. I am forever asking my mother if I can meet her.
The two finally got together this summer when Phoebe was in London for an internship, and “we hit it off right away,” she says.
“I felt so connected to her, because she was able to use the platform that she had, who her father was, and then she took that and instead of being like, ‘Oh, people are going to define me with this.’ It’s about launching a brand that’s completely sustainable. So I think we’re very connected because a lot of things I think about are: ‘Okay, I’m my parents’ child, that gives me a lot of privilege, but it’s not what I’m defined by. I want to have my own identity, I want to be my own person. I want to branch out from there, but how do I do this in a way that makes a difference?’
She and McCartney have remained close by text since meeting this summer, and the designer invited Gates to attend her show in Paris, her first trip to Paris Fashion Week. For the event, Gates had a fitting in New York and chose a pair of white pants with a hummingbird print, a black bra and a black (faux) leather jacket.
“They had so many different options and they put the costumes together, but I was like, ‘I want to do something that stands out more va-va-vom,'” says Gates. “I went through the stuff and I was like, ‘I think it’s fun to breastfeed with the leather jacket.’ So I did that and I absolutely love hummingbird pants, they are so sexy and fun.
The rest of her fall quarter will be spent on campus, though she hopes to travel to Los Angeles for the occasional fashion event and stay in touch with British Vogue and the McCartney team, hoping for future collaborations.
“As soon as I got an internship in the fashion industry, I jumped right in, but I wanted to be careful and do it the right way, because fashion has so many different avenues you can go into,” Gates says. But there’s a certain toxicity in the industry and I’m also passionate about women’s health, so I wanted to work in a place where I didn’t feel like those were at odds with each other. So I fell in love with British Vogue because of Edward. [Enninful’s] Work and the magazine is very progressive, so it was a great choice for me.
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