Supermodel Arizona Muse Found Purpose When She Found Her Voice

After taking a long, hard look at the clothes at the center of her career, Arizona Muse pivoted to dedicate her life to activism, seeking to turn our industry into a climate solution. We link up with Muse in Copenhagen to capture this sustainability superhero in climate-conscious clothing.

It’s 8am on day one of Copenhagen Fashion Week when Arizona Muse — right on time — strolls into our hotel’s restaurant to meet me for breakfast, her hair still wet from the shower. Though I’ve seen her image a thousand times–walking Prada runways (she kicked off her career by opening and closing the Italian house’s Spring/Summer 2011 show), starring in Chanel campaigns and on the cover of over 40 issues of Vogue–meeting one of our generation’s most iconic supermodels in the flesh, all five-foot-ten of her, is something else entirely.

But just because someone is genetically predisposed to modelling at the highest level doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to enjoy doing it. Actually, that’s a bit of an understatement. “I was struggling to enjoy my life as a model,” says Muse, referring to a moment about a decade ago when her career was at its peak. “Despite having all these great opportunities on paper, the reality of this career path affected my mental health and my relationship with my body.”

Luckily, Muse found her salvation when she took a long hard look at the clothes she was being paid unfathomable amounts to wear. “I was desperate for something to make me feel OK again,” she says. It was then, at her lowest point, that she made a core-shaking discovery: that garments come not from factories, but farms. “My moment came from realizing that the things I’d learned as a child about a healthy planet and healthy food are also applied to fashion,” she says. “We eat our food and we say thank you to the earth, thank you farmer, but we don’t say that when we get dressed in the morning. And we need to, because those farmers have grown everything that we wear.” (Unless, she adds, the garment is chemical-based, in which case it isn’t worth wearing. But even so, it finds its origins in the ground.) As if on cue, the ceiling above us splits open, the roof retracting to reveal a clear blue sky.

Muse immersed herself in research, learning all there was to know about biodiversity, sustainable materials, supply chains and everything in between. “My brain turned on and I felt so much better,” she says, noting that the “healing” happened not all at once, but incrementally. “I felt like I was coming out of the water from drowning.” (It’s worth noting that modelling wasn’t all bad–she recalls falling in love with Prada’s iconic flame heels when she walked the spring/summer 2012 show.)

It all culminated in the founding of her very own charity, DIRT, which focuses on the intersection of biodynamic farming (a holistic approach to farming that regenerates its own soil) and fashion. Namely, encouraging the production of clothes that can eventually return directly to the earth from which they’re sprung. “We need to consider farms and farming as a climate solution in fashion,” she says. “If we were to grow all of our natural, raw materials on biodynamic farms, oh my gosh, this whole industry would start to become a climate solution.” That extends to the dye, which would have to be natural. 

This has become Muse’s life work. In fact, she’s come to Copenhagen Fashion Week as its very first Sustainability Ambassador (a few hours after our breakfast, she’ll deliver a keynote speech at the opening ceremony). It’s just the latest in a long line of speaking engagements, board appointments and ambassadorships. She knows that her greatest asset is her celebrity and she uses it wisely, walking the walk and encouraging everyone she encounters along the way (particularly power players with big wallets and political decision-makers) to get involved. So what is the easiest way to get involved? “You can donate to DIRT Charity, or if you want to get even more involved, you can enquire about our ambassadorship program,” she says.

“You can also start in your own home, in your own life,” she says. Start composting, she says, or seek to buy your groceries from a local farm share. Buy second-hand. “We can lead by example in order to help change the mindsets of those around us.”

Though Muse’s a-ha moment came well into her modelling career, the groundwork for her single-minded obsession with sustainability was laid in her childhood. Born in London and raised in Tucson, Arizona (yes, she was named for her home state), Muse was brought up in a British-American household with sometimes hippie-ish, planet-conscious leanings. “I grew up without plastic toys,” she says, noting that instead she played with “wooden toys and things outside.” Her parents allowed a TV but no cable, just VHS tapes of National Geographic documentaries. It’s an upbringing she’s grateful for. “I think the more we can do to raise our kids outdoors and the more we can do to have boundaries around what is healthy both for what we put into our bodies and what we expose ourselves to, it does help. It really does.” Still, she notes, one can care about the environment regardless of if they were raised by planet-conscious parents. As for her own kids–15-year-old Nikko and five-year-old Cy–they are allowed plastic toys. Second-hand only, of course.

Though she had the height and the face, Muse wasn’t like the other models. For starters, she broke through at 21 years old, which, at that time, was considered “older.” But most notably, she was balancing her budding career with motherhood–when she got her start, Nikko was an infant. “For the first two years, I tried to run home [after work] and just be a mum, but that actually made me very lonely and sad because I didn’t have any friends. And then I tried the other way, which was to go out and have friends and I got totally exhausted because I was coming home after a late night to wake up with my baby,” she says. “Neither route worked so great.” She did her best, but through it all her relationship with her son suffered along with her mental health (a term which wasn’t around at the time. She just knew she felt “bad”). “I worked really hard to heal our relationship,” she says. “It was really hard for him to be the child of a very young parent whose friends didn’t have kids.”

These days, however, along with the joy she finds in her activism, Muse has cultivated a lovely life in London, one that includes a tight circle of young families. “All the kids are playing in the garden all together or they’re in a park,” she says. “We often talk about mental and physical health, but social health is integral to our overall wellbeing. We humans need to nurture our connectedness with each other.” She practices what she preaches, buying mostly second-hand clothing (“Second-hand is the cheat,” she says, touching her plastic statement earrings picked up at a thrift store) or pieces made with the highest sustainability standards (like those she wears in a Vogue Scandinavia photo shoot). She’s also found the joy in modelling, only accepting jobs that align with her sustainability values (like this one, which finds Muse in sustainable fashion in eco-friendly locations around Copenhagen). “The last shot was amazing,” she says of our photograph. “We walked into Christiana—I’d never been there. We stood by the lake and took a picture—it was amazing to see and feel what Christiana is like.”

Life is good, but Muse sees a third act in her future. “My whole life is headed towards me being a farmer—not on my own, but in a community,” she says. It will be an “intentional” community, she tells me, with a conference centre and a think tank and several businesses connected to the farm (a brewery, a distillery, a bakery). There will be a “wellness lab” and a fashion center, growing “wool and hemp, probably, and linen” (she’s given this a lot of thought). “If it’s in a wet climate, which I imagine it would be, those would be the right things to be growing,” she says. “That’s my dream.”