Gabriela Hearst on designing the FIFA World Cup uniforms for her native Uruguay
When the Uruguay national football team arrives in the U.S. for the FIFA World Cup, it will be in bespoke suiting by Gabriela Hearst. Scarlett Conlon meets the designer.
Earning the mantle of high-fashion’s modern-day disruptor is nothing if not a maverick’s game. No surprise then, that when Gabriela Hearst set her sights on designing the suits for her native Uruguay for the FIFA World Cup this summer, she did what most people wouldn’t even think of doing: She slid into the President of Uruguay’s DMs. “We are, like, three and a half million people [in Uruguay], so everyone’s pretty close. Who is not your friend is your cousin, so you know,” she smiles wryly, “not many places can have that approach.”
Her Insta pitch to then-President Luis Lacalle Pou? “Good afternoon, Mr President, I wanted to send you an email to make the suits for the Uruguay national team, especially because they’re going to be [playing] in the U.S… is there any chance…?” Now, less than a year after her message was met with an enthusiastic voice-note reply from Pou, I’m meeting Hearst over Zoom. She and her small team are fresh from a 48-hour fitting with the Uruguayan football team, a snatched moment before the squad’s pre-tournament friendly with England at Wembley Stadium.
This, less than a fortnight after Hearst dressed the Best Director nominee Chloe Zhao in sepulchral black for the Oscars. And only days before that, took her bow at Paris fashion week for another acclaimed presentation. If you want something done, give it to a busy person, as the saying goes, but even by the most ambitious standards, not many would take on such a major series of commitments back-to-back. But then, standby isn’t a setting on Hearst’s energy board; turbo-charged entrepreneurialism has always been her MO. “We get shit done.” she says. “When you’re a small company, you have to.”
Beaming over the screen from Boston, she’s wearing the pale blue Uruguayan football jersey gifted to her by the players with her name on the back. “It’s an honor, I’m just so proud to be Uruguayan and I’m so proud of this, and of the quality that my country puts out in the world.” She wastes no time relaying the whirlwind of strict timings and her own team’s tactics it took to get the squad of 28 star players — including Real Madrid midfielder Federico Valverde, former Liverpool forward Darwin Núñez, and FC Barcelona defender, Ronald Araújo — kitted out. “It was a real operation. They were all arriving at different times and we were warned we needed to be the least obstructive as possible. I was like, we’ve got this. We’re used to deadlines,” she laughs. “We were like a machine.”
Landing on slim-cut, single-breasted, navy-blue suits and no tie, the ensembles needed to hit multiple marks. In keeping with Hearst’s career-defining advocacy of sustainability, each suit has been crafted from wool sourced from the north of Uruguay close to Hearst’s family ranch, and later spun in Italian mills. “It’s effectively dead stock, as the wool was already in existence,” she says. Inside each blazer, on the left-hand side, will be an embroidered jacquard shield of Uruguay, the name of the player, and the year of the World Cup: because “they’ll want to keep it forever”, she says. They’ll be worn with polo shirts crafted from the thinnest 13-micron Merino wool to help regulate temperatures — “as it is going to be hot” — and teamed with Hearst’s Ohio sneakers, non-branded in beautiful white with recycled rubber soles.
“They’re athletes who are extremely aware of their bodies and they have a very defined sense of style,” she says. “They wanted to look cool: formal but not contrived. We had to really win them over.” It helped that Hearst and her team rocked up with their native mate cups in hand. “You’ll never see a Uruguayan without a mate cup and so there was an immediate connection with the players of the way we were born. They would start hanging out with us, pulling up a chair.” No doubt gifting each of their wives one of her Soft Demi handbags “as a way into [the players’] hearts”, also went down well. “Their wives are a huge part of the equation and how well [the players] perform — so it was all a beautiful experience.”
They’re athletes who are extremely aware of their bodies and they have a very defined sense of styles. They wanted to look cool: formal but not contrived
Gabriela Hearst
Hearst is particularly delighted to namecheck Victoria Díaz, executive director of the Uruguayan Football Association, as central to her winning the gig. Unbeknown to Hearst, Díaz had followed her career, “every single step of the way”, from the early days of Hearst’s first brand, Candela, in 2004 through to headlining New York and Paris fashion weeks some 20 years later. “She convinced all these executives who don’t follow fashion and had no idea,” says Hearst. “They were like, ‘Who?’ [Díaz] said, ‘We have to do the suits with her!’ She was a huge advocate for us.”
Being a female powerhouse in a male-dominated industry is an area in which Hearst excels. Long before she took on the highest profile role of her career as creative director of Richemont-owned Chloé in 2020, she was already an industry force for sustainability with her eponymous brand, proving that a company of its non- compromising culture can authentically exist in a luxury realm. Shortly after launch, in 2016, she won the International Woolmark Prize; in 2018, she received Pratt Institute’s Fashion Visionary Award for her commitment to sustainability; in September 2019, she staged the first-ever carbon-neutral fashion show; and in 2020, she won the Environmental Award at the BFAs and the Womenswear Designer of the Year Award at the CFDAs. All while raising hundreds of thousands of pounds through philanthropic projects for Save The Children where she served on its board of trustees and is now an ambassador.
Her subsequent three-year stint at Chloé proved exactly why appointing someone brave enough to tackle fashion’s sustainability crisis head-on pays dividends. During her tenure, it became the first European luxury fashion house to receive B Corp Certification. “We had a very concrete mission for my three years at Chloé, which was to transform the company, to show that you could bring economic success with ecological values of sustainability,” she says. “For me, that’s not a trend, it’s how we conduct ourselves.”
Back to exclusively helming her own brand and based in New York with her husband, Austin, their 11-year-old son Jack, and Hearst’s 17-year-old twins Mia and Olivia when they’re home from school, her business is booming. “It’s not a genius move, but if you stick to quality, guess what happens? It works in the long run.” Hearst reluctantly accepts the suggestion that she is a role model, using her answer to spotlight the founder of Save The Children, Eglantyne Jebb, to whom she dedicated her fall/winter 2026 collection. “To do the show about a humanitarian for me is a no-brainer, and [Jebb] was this badass British trailblazer who fought convention [by] advocating for German children after the First World War who were dying of starvation — and she was tried for treason,” she explains.
COURTESY OF GABRIELA HEARST
“She convinced everyone that the enemy’s children were our children, and the judge gave her a nominal fine and was the first donor to the Save The Children fund. I look up to these women who are lighthouses of courage and of bravery that have demanded a different status quo.” For Hearst, who turns 50 in November, her collaboration with the UFA is something of a timely culmination of all the things that have driven her to the milestone celebration: A celebration of Uruguay, putting sustainability on an international stage, and — like the athletes she has outfitted — maintaining consistent levels of physical and psychological discipline to deliver an exceptional performance underpinned by gifted ability.
“My friend is a professional athlete and she always says to me that [I treat myself] like an athlete because I take time to meditate every day, to exercise, [and] most nights I go to bed very early,” says Hearst. “In order to communiate, you have to be able to be the best vessel you can. There’s this culture now where you just have to deplete yourself in order to show that you’re doing a good job, but that’s not the way. If you want to have a long job, you have to know how to pace yourself.”
True to form, she’s prepared for what’s next. “I’ve been working towards this milestone for five years. My 50s are going to be sexy,” she laughs, wryly adding, “sexy 50s is a medical goal.” Before then, she’ll see the fruits of her football era come to life in more ways than one. “You know, we have some of the players saying that they want to walk our shows, so we will see them at our next one,” she smiles. Gabriela Hearst as your fashion captain? Life goals.
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