Denise Fócil makes sustainable leather fashion for Latinas who want to stand out

Stylish, sensual and second skin-like are all ways you might describe leather, but sustainable isn’t necessarily one of them. 

Animal-derived tanned leather has been a prominent aspect of the fashion industry for centuries, and has been used to craft various well-loved garments such as shoes, jackets, pants and purses. However, the effect it has on the environment is harmful, as 10,000 square meters of biodiverse land must be cleared or kept cleared to make fewer than nine Brazilian leather jackets. Producing one cow skin leather tote bag requires the amount of water someone would drink over almost 24 years of their life, according to CIRCUMFAUNA. 

15 years ago, when she first decided to pursue a career in design, Denise Fócil had only one goal in mind: to create the perfect sustainable leather jacket. Today, the Ecuador-born Latina designer has succeeded in more ways than one, by not only creating her very own fashion brand, AS by DF but by solely using recycled and upcycled leather to craft her pieces. 

The impact leather has on biodiversity, along with its water footprint and direct connection with climate change and pollution, is a severe one according to Fócil, but there are alternatives that, while not completely fixing the problem, are alleviating it. Some alternatives include mycelium leather alternatives, plant-based and other bio-based leather alternatives, as well as upcycled and recycled leather—two different ways of bringing scrap leather back to life — and through these, some brands and their designers are looking to change this natural material’s reputation.

“I decided I wanted to create the best leather jacket that there is,” Fócil said. “I love this kind of material to work with, and I knew that I could do something that the world hadn’t seen yet.”

Fócil’s passion for the medium stems back to when she was a four-year-old girl in Ecuador playing dress-up in her grandmother’s closet, trying on everything from jewelry to clothes, which she’d use to put outfits together. Although it would take a few years and a move to the United States for her destined path to clear, this was the beginning. 

“It's what I was meant to do,” Fócil said. “I have been very interested, since I was a small child, in working on beautiful things in general, everything from head to toe. Making a person feel better and like the best version of themselves is something that is a part of me.”

When Fócil was six years old, she moved, along with her parents and four brothers to sunny Los Angeles, until she returned to Ecuador halfway through high school to finish her education. After graduating, she returned to the U.S. to attend Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, where she studied economics for a few years before realizing the subject wasn’t for her. 

Moving back to LA, Fócil attended the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM) and, almost immediately after graduating, was offered a job opportunity in Italy to design women’s motorcycle jackets for Alpinestars, the world-leading manufacturer of professional racing products, motorcycling airbag protection, high-performance apparel and technical footwear, at the age of 21. 

There, she cultivated her design process, her attention to detail and artistic standards, as well as her true passion: women’s contemporary fashion, which pushed her to create her very own brand, AS by DF, a slow fashion, high-end women’s fashion label that consists of leather and suede styles.

 “At that point, I had already been designing leather jackets. And for some reason, when I got out of fashion school, all of my jobs led me to leather,” Fócil said. “It just sort of happened and I think it was meant to be. I fell in love with that medium. I found my thing. It was handed to me; it just happened. I didn't have to look for my thing, it just came into my path.”

AS by DF seamlessly blends sustainability with fierce and sexy pieces that are meant to empower and strengthen the women who wear them, which was immensely crucial to Fócil, as conservation and taking care of the environment are important to her. But this merge isn’t the easiest to do in a wasteful industry, especially with leather, a medium she is most passionate about. 

“When I got into fashion, which happens to be my creative passion, it wasn't an industry that was particularly crazy about conservation,” Fócil said. In the beginning, Focil was aware of the ways the fashion industry could be very wasteful, and this was something she had on top of her mind when she began building her business. “I wanted to make a difference and meld these two passions together in a space that's been very challenging to do so, very challenging. And I like challenges, but I've wanted to make those two things work together,” she said.

Since its birth in 2009, the Latina designer has been successful in her goal of making the perfect sustainable leather jacket with her recycled leather collection, which includes jackets, shirts, dresses, bustiers and more. Her brand also houses beautiful flowy and skin-tight blouses, sweaters and bottoms, as well as her newly launched curve collection, making AS by DF all that much more innovative, inclusive and earth-conscious. 

Although AS by DF is not 100% sustainable, Fócil is working her way there as the majority of materials used in her clothing and packaging, such as recycled leather, upcycled leather, Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) cotton and FSC viscose, are sustainable. 

Another step Fócil has taken to further reach complete sustainability is the zero use of plastic in the entirety of AS by DF to lessen their carbon footprint. Instead, recycled, biodegradable materials are used for packaging, along with hangtags that are 100% recycled paper embedded with poppy seeds that give back to the earth once their journey ends. 

“What I like about Denise and her collection is her commitment to being sustainable,” Omar Cunningham, Fócil’s publicist, told CALÓ NEWS. “The fact that she has seeds in her hangtags that you can bury in your garden. Things like that are neat about her collection. And the types of people that she shoots for her campaign are people who have an interest in sustainability and correlate with what she's trying to do. It's a nice little tie-in. You look cool and do your part in saving the planet.” 

As she stands at the intersection between sustainability and fashion, Fócil represents a vast community of young Latinos who are being reflected through her career, passion and accomplishments. And though there are many Latino designers out there, the mainstream media’s lack of lens on this community makes it nearly impossible to know about them and for the youth to see themselves reflected, which is something the designer is proud to be actively changing. 

“For our future generations and our youth, it's always nice to have a role model,” Fócil said. “It's always nice to be able to look up to somebody and say, ‘Oh, wow, people like me did it, so I can do it.’ It does mean a lot that I can represent our community in this space. I'm also doing something positive for the environment while making beautiful clothes. I'm very proud of it.”

CALÓ NEWS sat down with Fócil to discuss her love of leather and sustainability, her design process and the underrepresentation of Latinas in the fashion industry. 

It seems you have always had one goal in mind: To make the perfect sustainable leather jacket. Why has this always been an interest of yours and why leather?

Leather specifically because, for me, it's a very sensual, beautiful and natural medium and it lends itself to mold itself to the body. It's a material that I enjoy working with because I can mold it in any way, almost as if it were sculpture. And why sustainable? For me, sustainability has been a part of who I am as a person much before I became a designer. As a child, as a teenager growing up, I was part of recycling clubs, part of environmental clubs. At every school I was at, it was something that was always very important to me. And this was a long time ago when it wasn't even a hot topic of conversation. But it was something that made me think, ‘This is the world we live in, right? This is our home.’ To me, it was like, ‘Why aren’t we taking care of our home? This earth houses us.’ It's hosting us, so it didn't make sense to me. I was always very into conservation. 

What truly goes into formulating the perfect, sustainable leather jacket? 

In my case, I'm using recycled leather, which is a relatively new technology; it's been out for about three years now. We take lambskin scraps and waste from factory floors and we bond them back together using new technology that uses 90% less water than traditional leather tanning and zero emissions to create new leather. I have two different types of programs for leather, we have recycled and then I have upcycled, which is a challenging program. We search through tanneries, mills and factories for leather that's been sitting there for over five years that nobody wants. It's rejected because it's got blemishes, it's the wrong color, or for whatever reason nobody wants it. We search for the best of it and we get really creative about cutting around the blemishes and get creative to be able to use it and create beautiful garments. Without putting more things into the world, we try to use the stuff and the waste that's already sitting around. 

Can you take our readers through your design process when it comes to any of your pieces? 

Explaining the creative process is hard because I've been asked this question before; it just comes to me. It's almost like I vibrate at a different frequency. I'm paying attention and I'm seeing and catching on to things that I think the average person around me doesn't. I sense trends before the people around me do, so I'm able to, in a way, myself and other designers predict what people are going to want a year in advance. Sometimes a year and a half in advance. It's sort of this click that happens and that's how the idea comes to me. From there, I draw the design and we start to work with my pattern team in my atelier in Italy, where I make all of my patterns. Then, we work on the fit. So, we start to create this concept that is on paper into a garment and that can take many rounds of samples to achieve the right effect or the right fit. Sometimes it's very complicated and sometimes it's less complicated, but when we get it to the point where it's perfect, we send it to our factories to start making our samples in the correct colors. That little process takes about three months. From there, it takes another two months to get it to be perfect and then get it to a photo shoot to shoot it on a model and execute the vision. Then we go to market with it.

I also think that there are a lot of different processes. In fast fashion, the process is much faster. It’s called fast fashion for a reason. They see it on a runway and they're sending photos to a factory, they're knocking it off as best can be and they're turning it around quick and cheap. It's not what I do. We're creating something new from scratch. 

Where do you draw inspiration from your designs? 

I draw a lot of inspiration from traveling and from music. For my job, I travel a lot, and even when I'm not working and I have time off, I love to travel. I love traveling and paying attention to a lot of different cultures. I’m traveling all over the world, people inspire me everywhere, globally. I think that being Latina has made me a much better designer and has given me something that other Latina and Latino designers could agree gives us something particular that's different. And other cultures have other things that I don't have. But something unique to [being Latina] is that I'm really obsessed with fit. My garments have to fit well and they have to make a person look their absolute best. For example, if I wanted to do something oversized, which I do sometimes, and baggy and loose, I still want the oversized cool look while also looking flattering on the person that wears that. I don't want it to make them look much bigger than they are, so I'm always thinking about how to flatter a woman's curves, how to make her look even better. That's been challenging. I think about all of the things that I wish were in all my garments. I'm obsessed with fit and I don't necessarily think all cultures are, but, as a Latina, Latinas like to look good. That's been ingrained in me since I was born. It doesn't matter their shape or size; that girl is always looking good. That kind of flavor is something that I'm obsessed with so I go through a ton of samples of fit. 

Also, I think that, as Latina women, we’re very powerful. We stand our ground; we've had to go through a lot of different things in history and the women in our culture have been the leaders of their homes, of their families and their town. Women have had a huge influence in our countries and they're strong. We've had to go through a lot. In having that kind of power, my clothing is not for wallflowers. My clothing is not for the woman who doesn't want to stand out. My clothing is for a woman that's powerful and proud of it and she wants to stand out. There's a lot of pride in that and I'm not afraid of making people that I dress stand out.

Sustainability is a foundational pillar of AS by DF and has been since you created the brand. In what ways have you lessened the brand's carbon footprint? 

We're always improving on this; this is an ongoing thing. I'm never satisfied and I'm always trying to lessen our footprint even more. Besides changing our leather, we use as many sustainable materials as we possibly can. That they're made sustainably and that they're also biodegradable. That's not 100%, but we do our very best. I want to say that about 70% of my line is used with sustainable materials. We don't use plastic at all. None of our packaging has plastic and neither do our trims. That lessened our footprint a lot because packaging, in general, is extremely wasteful. It gets thrown away, it's on every single thing. Everything you eat, you unwrap and you throw away, so there's so much waste. That alone, just being able to use recycled, biodegradable materials for all our packaging. We also donate $10 of every single leather garment that we sell to a nonprofit organization called Ocean Conservancy. They've been around for 50 or 60 years and are based out of Washington, DC. They focus on ocean cleanup and also lobbying for law changes to protect the future of our oceans. For example, making sure that commercial fishing boats don't leave their nests behind, which is one of the biggest causes of pollution in the ocean. They're very actively trying to save the future of our oceans and clean up the mess we've already made. Last year, we donated more than $50,000 to them, so we're actively giving back. 

There is a lack of Latina representation in the fashion industry. As a Latina founder and designer standing at the intersection between fashion and sustainability, what advice do you have for any young Latinas who might be interested in fashion or design, but feel as though it isn't the space for them? In what ways have you tried to be more inclusive?  

First of all, every dream can be achieved if you want it. Second of all, I’d tell them to come intern for me. I opened up a program a while ago, not just for Latinos but for anyone who comes into this country as an immigrant, to make sure that they had opportunities to intern for me and come and learn. There's nothing like interning. Not just for me, but for any fashion company, to be able to intern for someone and learn is invaluable. A lot of designers, some of the best designers in the world, did not even go to fashion school, so I don't think that that's an end all be all. Some of the best didn't. People say, ‘Well, I can't because I can’t afford it.’ As I said, no dream is unachievable. You can go in and you can start learning. Fashion, because it's an art and it's a craft and it's a skill, it can be learned. I would say that to our community. Fashion school is very expensive because it's a trade school, so people said, ‘Well, I can't do that.’ But you can. Some of the best people on my team didn't go to fashion school. They got a job and learned and they worked their way up. I'm a big believer that if you want it and you work hard for it, you can have it. Nothing can get in your way. I'd love to help the community. That's something that I would love to do.

AS by DF is only growing with time and Hollywood celebrities such as Jenna Ortega, Becky G, Megan Good, Lake Bell and Shania Twain have been seen in your designs. How does it feel to see your creation blossom and what are some future goals you have planned for the brand?  

It feels amazing. Those milestone moments are amazing because these celebrities have the entire world at their fingertips and that they chose my piece to wear is the ultimate compliment. Those are some beautiful moments. In the future, for starters, I really want Jennifer Lopez to wear one of my pieces. J Lo is high on my list – I hope she sees this article! I admire her and talk about a role model for the Latina community! She’s a big role model, so I would love to dress her and many other people, but I really would love to dress her.