Written by Staff Writer
Zoi Schoenmaker is a philosopher who isn’t afraid to take a stand, especially on her feelings toward the fashion industry and its female artists.
Here, CNN’s Andy Barrett sits down with the founder of ByEquality, an organization dedicated to making the fashion industry more inclusive and representative of the world in which it operates.
She grew up in Zurich and studied law in Paris, before heading to New York to get an MBA. After a stint at Bain and Roche, she decided to work on her own project — a Zen meditation meditation kit — that gave her ideas for how she could further her ideas for a more inclusive fashion industry.
In the autumn of 2016, she set up ByEquality , and the team then focused on gaining funding. By February 2017, she was finally able to launch her Project EPP.
Working on this project allowed Schoenmaker to appreciate how she could be a “badger” when it came to the fashion industry — a term used to describe a person who’ll aggressively go after something.
“I really admire women who write crazy outfits on their websites and their clothes are very cute and they’ll talk about their weekend but they really want to make a difference and they want to talk about a gender inequality. And I think, ‘Wow, they’re good at that,'” she says.
Zoi Schoenmaker’s Project EPP is comprised of at least six items. Credit: ByEquality
A “badger” may have a poor taste in clothes but her purpose in life is to change the industry, says Schoenmaker.
“We’re not going to change it with dresses,” she explains. “But we have this tool with our own lives: we can change a door, a community, an industry that is over-centralized — we can change that by turning up to a project or a store on a Saturday and showing up and putting our bodies in front of a camera or writing a protest.
“We should celebrate our fight so much more,” she adds.
“We should go straight to the source.”