Learn to Talk to Trees With Mara Hoffman, the CFDA’s 2023 Environmental Sustainability Award Winner

If Mara Hoffman’s business were a tree, it would be marked with 23 rings, one for every year it has existed. In 2015, the designer—who has always had a strong bond with nature—doubled down on sustainability, hoping to leave a lighter footprint on the earth by working with organic and certified materials, and producing in smaller quantities. On Monday at the CFDA Fashion Awards, she’ll receive the 2023 Environmental Sustainability Award for these efforts.

For Hoffman, life is a creative act, and she sees her job as listening and translating what she absorbs from the world around her. She takes a holistic approach to her work, and has said that she sees her “company as a living, breathing entity,” one that “grows, gets hurt, heals, nourishes, and is nourished”—not unlike saplings, flowers, or blades of grass. Tree talking is part of Hoffman’s practice, and here she gives a five-step tutorial on this art of connection and love.