GRIP, Internships Abroad Sustainable Fashion in Buenos Aires

Social Impact in Buenos Aires, Argentina

This summer, I am working with Hecho x Nosotros, a sustainable fashion NGO with consultative status in the United Nations, as well as Animaná, a luxury sustainable fashion boutique in Buenos Aires. Throughout my first few days of working in Buenos Aires, I found myself adapting to the relatively free-flowing and self-guided working style of the companies; at first, I found it difficult to work without concrete deadlines or tasks, but I quickly came to realize that this freedom simply allowed me to work creatively in a way that I had not previously worked and to truly utilize all of the knowledge that I have acquired through my years of schooling. 

While my day-to-day life in the office is never quite the same, I have come to appreciate the diversity of my responsibilities with HxN and Animaná. However, the project that I am most excited to execute throughout the duration of my time in Buenos Aires involves consumer research in Latinamerica with the ultimate goal of developing a strategy to curate and target an audience/consumership for sustainable fashion in the Latinamerican region of the world that is teeming with potential. This project is broken into both quantitative and qualitative phases—i.e., desk/secondary research on consumer demographics of Latinamerica and focus groups and interviews of Latinamerican consumers, etc.—which will help me greatly to refine my research skills as I enter  into my senior honors thesis in sociology this fall at Penn. Furthermore, as the topic for my thesis relates to the second-hand shopping industry in Philadelphia, the projects that I am working on here regarding sustainable fashion in Buenos Aires are incredibly aligned with my field of study and interests at the University of Pennsylvania which only serves to excite me even more about the work that I am partaking in while abroad!

Finally, a part that I truly love about my internship is the global connections that I have been able to make as I complete projects. I have worked with investors and industry experts in Argentina, consumer researchers in Ecuador, sustainability students in the Netherlands, and numerous other individuals from around the world—all sharing a common goal: a global sustainable fashion industry that prioritizes the planet and its people. This global network truly has served as a fantastic reminder that we are all in this together, we all share one planet, and we must protect our collective home. That is the mission of Hecho x Nosotros and of the sustainable fashion industry at large, and it has been a pleasure to be exposed to this field of work that I can absolutely see myself entering after university. I cannot wait for what the rest of this experience has in store for me!