Future Icons

At Vitsœ, Mark Adams has long argued that the most modern luxury is buying less, but better. After rescuing the company from bankruptcy in 1995, he rebuilt UK production and a customer base in 90 countries around longevity, repair and restraint – proving a business can thrive by persuading people not to over-consume. A zoologist by training, steeped in Darwin, Dawkins and Attenborough, he frames design within ecology: humans are a wholly-owned subsidiary of nature. His provocation on pace is bracing – we should move slower and better, toward fulfilled lives not tethered to GDP and extraction. His 2050 looks precarious, with tipping points accelerating unless we change course. Still, he remains stubbornly constructive.

Eco-guilty pleasure? ‘Dark chocolate.’

A visionary hotelier weaving heritage, culture and sustainability into contemporary hospitality, Jennica Arazi is shaping the Marbella Club Hotel – a family-founded icon of Mediterranean hospitality – as both guardian of heritage and a platform for the future. Part of Luxury Hotel Partners and the Small Luxury Hotels of the World community, her work champions design and craftsmanship as tools for meaningful connection. She has revived the spirit of generational hospitality – where guests feel like family across decades, reimagined spaces through sustainable design, and launched La Concha Conversations – a stage for ideas at the intersection of culture, wellbeing and sustainability. She would accelerate the shift from hospitality as consumption to hospitality as stewardship, grounding innovation in heritage so change feels like evolution. For her, 2050 should be a time when luxury is defined by regeneration – with hotels that produce more energy than they consume, gardens that feed communities, and culture thriving.

Eco-guilty pleasure? ‘Fresh flowers – locally and seasonally where possible, but I can’t resist filling a space with living colour.’

Claire Bergkamp is CEO of Textile Exchange, a global nonprofit working to transform how we produce, choose, and reuse materials to benefit people and places at the source. She believes the biggest opportunity for change starts at the very beginning of the supply chain, in raw materials, with work grounded in systems thinking and the conviction that – ‘with courage, flexibility, and persistence’ – real transformation is possible at scale. Earlier in her career on the brand side, she helped pioneer fully traceable supply chains, introduced regenerative and innovative materials into luxury fashion, and contributed to developing natural capital accounting for textiles. She urges that there should be more space to listen to farmers, growers, and recyclers, and notes that scale and complexity slow down change – yet she thinks momentum is building. Her vision for 2050 sees a world where materials are valued and never wasted and producers are fairly rewarded. 

Executive Director of Conservation Collective, Jade Brudenell has built a global network connecting people who care passionately about their place to boost support for dedicated local environmental champions working tirelessly to protect and restore nature. Since launching Conservation Collective in 2020, over £20 million has been raised across a network of over 20 Foundations. She is proud of launching, incubating and supporting more than 20 locally focused environmental funding organisations where support was ‘scarce, difficult to access, or completely absent’. Impact speaks volumes – turtle monitors in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, farmers in Devon training for nature-friendly practices, leopard corridors in Sri Lanka, strengthened marine protection in Greece and across the Mediterranean – plus wow moments securing funding from Coldplay, Depeche Mode, easyJet holidays and Scott Dunn. On what she’d change: ‘our addiction to phones’. On why we’re going too slowly: ‘Egos.’ On her vision for 2050: ‘either Armageddon or Heaven’.

Eco-guilty pleasure? ‘Daily contact lenses (recycled at Boots).’

Since co-founding the Groundswell Agriculture Festival with his family in 2016, Alex Cherry has helped turn it into the UK’s leading forum for regenerative farming, where practical know-how travels fast. From reduced tillage and cover cropping to integrating livestock and restorative herbal leys, Groundswell has inspired thousands of farmers to rebuild soil health and biodiversity. Cherry’s fix for policy drift is simple: send every agricultural decision-maker on a week’s placement at a regenerative farm to see the system, not just the spreadsheets. He admits progress can be slow when you’re stuck in the weeds, yet his 2050 is hopeful: harmonious societies living alongside thriving ecosystems. He also keeps a sense of play – he was once an unofficial under-nine tree-climbing champion.

Eco-guilty pleasure? ‘Dental floss sticks.’

Mya-Rose Craig – Birdgirl – pairs scientific focus with social justice, becoming the youngest person to see half of the world’s bird species while founding Black2Nature to open the outdoors to young people from Visible Minority Ethnic backgrounds. Now in its tenth year, the charity has built access, confidence and community through camps and campaigning. Craig wants us to transform our relationship with nature itself; real progress, she says, means slowing down and consuming less despite vested interests pushing the opposite. Her 2050 fork is stark – biodiversity collapse and climate displacement if we fail – but she insists every act of mitigation counts. For all the dawn starts of birding, she loathes early mornings, which makes her persistence all the more endearing.

Eco-guilty pleasure? ‘Cheese (local, organic, free-range where possible).’

A multi-disciplinary sustainability thought leader, Mary Fellowes founded B Corp sustainable fashion consultancy, Greenwith Studio. She quietly precipitated £75 million of public sector funding for sustainable and circular fashion innovation, and co-authored the ‘Empowering Citizens’ white paper for the British Fashion Council. In addition to pro bono advisory for NGOs and purpose-driven start-ups, she actions youth empowerment with the UK Children’s Parliament as their sustainability ambassador, and as a King’s College Executive Fellow, mentors Gen Z change-makers. Building on her role as Contributing Producer on Let Them Be Naked, the  multi-award winning documentary on textile toxicity backed by James Cameron, she’s working behind the scenes on technology and initiatives for mandatory disclosure to consumers for products containing any of the 10,000 or so synthetic chemicals and hazardous substances in all textiles. On why we’re not winning the climate battle, she is adamant that, ‘We can’t sell lentils to anyone seeking luxury’, or put another way: sustainability gets engagement with cleverly crafted positive and visually led new narratives, ones that trigger dopamine and endorphins over fear and duty.

As founding director of Walk Free, an international human rights organisation, Forrest leads global efforts to eradicate modern slavery, forging critical links between the climate crisis, global supply chains and broader human rights abuses. In 2024, she became the first Australian woman to receive the Roosevelt Freedom from Fear Award. She serves on the Global Commission on Modern Slavery & Human Trafficking, is a UN Goodwill Ambassador for Australia and was Young West Australian of the Year (2021). Walk Free produces the Global Slavery Index, the world’s most comprehensive dataset on measuring modern slavery. For her, progress looks like a world where business is no longer built on the exploitation of people and planet.

Eco-guilty pleasure? ‘Travel, undoubtedly. My work requires it, but we leave a footprint wherever we go.’

As founder of Climate Live, a global youth-led charity that organises concerts and festival stages to engage new audiences in the climate movement through music – and is supported by the likes of Billie Eilish, Ellie Goulding and Greta Thunberg, Frances Fox has coordinated simultaneous shows in over 30 countries. She’s also organised Climate Live’s inaugural pavilion at COP28, and runs the solar-powered bus stage at major UK festivals. Her activism began with Fridays For Future youth climate strikes. She’s most proud of the bus stage community – proving that ‘activism can be fun, engaging and accessible to all’. Since 2022, she has platformed 577 artists and activists, prioritising providing opportunities to young people from marginalised communities who often face barriers to accessing these. She also provides paid shadowing opportunities for aspiring sound engineers, photographers and videographers with their partners Access Creative College. Fox wants events to stop granting social licences to sponsors funding climate collapse and to build ethical alternatives. By 2050, she hopes to attend a festival purely for the music.

Eco-guilty pleasure? ‘My much loved 10- strong vinyl collection!’

Activist-entrepreneur Livia Giuggioli mixes agitation with build-outs: co-founding biomimic farm Quintosapore, co-founding The Circle, producing The True Cost after Rana Plaza, and pushing the first EU Parliament proposal for a garment-sector living wage in 2017. Her campaigning has earned the Rainforest Alliance Award for Outstanding Achievement in Sustainability, among multiple accolades. She calls herself a ‘Chief Agitator Officer’, convinced change now begins locally – reweaving community, co-dependence and solidarity. Why are we so slow to change? ‘We have been pacified by social media, we have been kept distracted by instant gratification with cheap consumption, and we have been lobotomised by populism so that we live in fear of “the other”. This machine is very well oiled and functioning to perfection.’ Her 2050 looks like a post-disaster film unless we course-correct – but she keeps pushing. Karaoke and pyjama Sundays help.

Eco-guilty pleasure? ‘Flying. I take fewer flights now, but it’s not always easy with a big extended family like mine.’

Patrick McDowell is reshaping fashion through circular design – building a luxury brand for the future. Winner of The Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design and named in Forbes 30 under 30, he creates clothing on the principles of beauty and responsibility. His work partners with world-leading innovators and heritage mills to champion repair, redesign and longevity as a new standard for luxury. His most significant impact, he says, is ‘moving the needle around circular and sustainable fashion to create beautiful design first with better principles built in’. If he could change one thing, it would be a shift in mindset: to explore clothes as an experience over a purchase. ‘The best part about that is that it’s already happening,’ he says, ‘sometimes it’s as simple as buying or renting a more conscious dress.’ Looking to 2050, he is pleasantly surprised by the speed at which innovation has come to transform how we all live for the better.

Eco-guilty pleasure? ‘Chocolate.’

Co-founded in 2007 by Thomasina Miers, Wahaca now has 14 restaurants and continues to trailblaze with multiple awards for its food and sustainability credentials. Over half the menu is vegetarian – converting into 45 percent of sales – with regen beef and free-range pork, food waste recycled into compost, plastic-free and compostable packaging, and suppliers including Hodmedod’s, Bold Bean, Riverford Organics and Blanco Niño. Wahaca has been carbon neutral status since 2015. Beyond the restaurants, Miers launched the award-winning ‘The Pig Idea’ initiative and helped set up Chefs in Schools – serving ‘minimally processed, delicious tasting whole foods’ in over 140 schools. Industry-wise, she’d separate out the positive-impact food businesses from those who are selling ‘cheap, unhealthy, toxic foods that are destroying nature and biodiversity’ and slap taxes on them. Ever the optimist, her 2050 vision is towns of greengrocers and local canteens.

Eco-guilty pleasure? ‘I live by the 80/20 rule – do the right thing most of the time and don’t sweat the rest.’

Motivational speaker and podcaster Jaz O’Hara is the founder of Asylum Speakers, a platform amplifying voices on those impacted by displacement. A writer for The Huffington Post, winner of Marie Claire’s Future Shaper award and member of Amnesty International’s Collective, she has spoken everywhere from TEDx to the United Nations in NYC. Her proudest moments are receiving messages from people whose viewpoints or judgements have been challenged, especially when this leads people to take actions such as volunteering with asylum seekers in Calais, or even, most amazingly, fostering unaccompanied minors themselves having heard the stories of her four foster brothers from Eritrea, Sudan, Afghanistan and Libya. O’Hara wants to change the perception of immigration and to see it celebrated in the same way that travel is – ‘a beautiful way of expanding our minds, perceptions and horizons’. For her, 2050 looks like ‘a world where every passport comes with equal opportunity and freedom’.

Eco-guilty pleasure? ‘Eating avocados.’

A ‘climate and nature nerd for hire’ with investigative roots and an obsession with resource use and supply chains, Lucy Siegle makes environmental issues mainstream ‘by explaining stuff’, believing that ‘sustainability is just a fancy word for change’ (informed by an understanding of how the biosphere works). A serial starter of awards, projects and programmes, she helped bring the documentary The True Cost (from her book To Die For: Is fashion wearing out the world?) to life; it continues to have impact still. She’s worked with Ellie Goulding supporting young people in climate advocacy. What would she change? ‘Stop fetishising the politics of rage and hate’. And she believes change is slow because ‘the men-of-death are at the wheel’ and system hierarchies persist. 2050 holds two visions for her – a charcoaled BC forest carpeted in fireweed, and COP 50 at a reforested UN where ‘the world is now at zero emissions’.

Eco-guilty pleasure? ‘I do have an addiction to hot baths, ideally a massive roll top or very deep.’

Co-founder of the Leuser Ecosystem Action Fund, dedicated to preserving and protecting the extraordinary biodiversity of Sumatra’s Leuser Ecosystem. Woodhead Bacon serves on the boards of Space for Giants, One Earth and the Bacon Foundation, as well as being ambassador for Journeys with Purpose and Panama Wildlife Conservation. Her career has been most notable in its diversity of background having had companies operating in music, film, fashion, clubs and travel. She creates impact by bringing high profile people and organisations together, often raising funds without corporate scaffolding. She wants to see more cooperation between non profits and less corporate capture. Her vision for 2050 replaces industrial farming with regenerative farming, tech to protect landscapes and wildlife with less tech for socialising and kids.

Eco-guilty pleasure? ‘Travel – often with my German Shepherd, Billy Bob.’