SELECTED PROJECT · 2025
Is This a Luxury Item?
A public campaign challenging luxury fashion’s reliance on fossil-fuel-derived synthetic materials—and asking who gets to define value, quality and aspiration.
No Kill: Project Planet
Campaign · Video · Public intervention · Microsite · Zine · Panel
Creative and art direction
Katya Moorman and KL Dunn
THE QUESTION
What is a luxury item—and who defines luxury?
Luxury is constructed through storytelling, context and desire. Yet many of fashion’s most powerful houses sell garments made from polyester and other fossil-fuel-derived synthetics at extraordinary prices, presenting them as symbols of quality, permanence and value.
Is This a Luxury Item? was designed to interrupt that contradiction. Rather than offer an easy answer, the campaign asked the public to look again: at the material, at the price tag and at the values luxury fashion asks us to accept.
01 · CAMPAIGN VIDEO
A visual provocation
Bright, bold and intentionally artificial, the campaign video uses generative AI to make high-fashion garments drip with oil. The deliberately “fake” imagery reflects the false promise at the center of synthetic luxury: fossil-fuel-derived materials marketed as rarity, permanence and prestige.
Rather than imitate the polished restraint of traditional luxury advertising, the video embraces exaggeration, repetition and instability—turning fashion’s visual seduction back on itself.
02 · PUBLIC INTERVENTION
Luxury advertising, turned back on itself
Across SoHo, Williamsburg and the Lower East Side, oversized wheat-pasted posters appeared in public space. Photographed and styled with the finish of conventional luxury campaigns, the images featured environmental advocates wearing luxury polyester garments.
Only on closer inspection did the interruption become clear: Who Defines Luxury? and What is Luxury?
03 · PARTICIPATORY ACTION
The smallest—and perhaps sharpest—gesture
QR-code stickers carrying the campaign question were distributed for public use. Designed to be placed directly on the price tags of luxury polyester garments, each sticker turned a private purchase decision into a public question.
Scanning the code led to the campaign video and then to the microsite, allowing anyone to bring the intervention into a store and confront the contradiction at the point of sale.
04 · DIGITAL EXPERIENCE
Who Defines Luxury?
The campaign microsite expands the question beyond critique. It examines the environmental cost of synthetic materials while highlighting designers, materials and companies demonstrating that luxury can be rooted in integrity, innovation and intelligent material choices.
The site introduces regenerative and traceable fibers, upcycled couture, bioplastics and next-generation alternatives to petroleum-based materials—showing what luxury could become.
VISIT THE CAMPAIGN WEBSITE ↗
05 · NYFW PUBLICATION
Putting the campaign directly into circulation
Created as a limited-edition fashion publication, the Is This a Luxury Item? zine was distributed free during New York Fashion Week—placing the campaign’s questions into the same circulation networks as traditional fashion-week media.
The publication paired campaign photography with essays and conversations featuring designers, scientists and activists working to move fashion beyond fossil-fuel-derived materials. Handed directly to the fashion community, it allowed the argument to travel beyond the poster, screen and event space.
06 · FROM CAMPAIGN TO CONVERSATION
Is This a Luxury Item? — Climate Week NYC
The campaign continued as a live panel during Climate Week NYC at Another Tomorrow in SoHo. The setting offered a meaningful counterpoint to the campaign’s critique: a fashion company demonstrating that material integrity, traceability and long-term thinking can be part of luxury.
From left, the conversation brought together Alden Wicker, Ross McBee, Christopher Griffin, Vanessa Barboni Hallik, Katya Moorman and moderator Jasmin Malik Chua to examine who defines luxury, which materials deserve that status and whether transparency can become a genuine marker of value.
Another Tomorrow, New York
September 26, 2025
Katya Moorman, panelist · Jasmin Malik Chua, moderator
WHY THIS CAMPAIGN MATTERED
Taking a critical question beyond the page
Is This a Luxury Item? marked the first public project from No Kill: Project Planet, the nonprofit initiative developed by No Kill Magazine. The campaign extended editorial critique into public space through video, print, street intervention and live conversation.
The project did not present luxury as a fixed idea. It showed that luxury is constructed—and therefore can be reconstructed around intelligence, circularity, material integrity and a more responsible relationship with the planet.
PROJECT CREDITS
Creative & Art Direction
KL Dunn and Katya Moorman
Talent
Patrick Duffy, Kristy Drutman, Christopher Griffin, Alden Wicker
Photographers
Nick Pflederer, Karla Tomanelli
Zine & Posters
Anmol Baliga, Chloe Lewis, Katya Moorman, KL Dunn
Video
Chloe Lewis, Katya Moorman
Hair & Makeup
Raheem B, Olga Tertyshna, Anthony Tulve
Stylist
Willfree Vasquez
Assistants
Zoe Arianna, Anmol Baliga, Youvani Boyd, Chloe Lewis, Sam Racine
With gratitude to
Splashlight Studio, Beatrice Dupire, Patrick Duffy, Caroline Zimbalist, Another Tomorrow, Alexis Bittar, Sajjad Hossain, Logan House and Stricof Family Foundation