Summer Rayne Oakes

Summer Rayne Oakes Speaking Topics

• Insights from Insects & Other Lesser-Known Stories from Below

  Entomology, or the study of insects, is a far cry away from the world of fashion, but that hasn't stopped model, activist, former entomologist, and speaker Summer Rayne Oakes from pursuing her love for bugs. An insect enthusiast from an early age, Oakes tells a delightful and charming tale of the insect underworld. From the busy bee to the fastidious orb weaver to the enterprising ant, Oakes shares how these often-overlooked creatures are integral indicators into how our world is changing and tells us what we might be able to learn from our creepy, crawly counterparts.

• Designing for Sustainability

  Model, author, entrepreneur, and speaker Summer Rayne Oakes shares how the biggest sustainable design innovations are being formed out of open-source collaboration. From the development of the Higg Index to the practice of collaborative production to the co-founding of her company Source4Style - a trends-driven marketplace reducing the boundaries to sustainable sourcing - Oakes effortlessly captures the current zeitgeist that is shaping the future of design and helping make sustainable design possible throughout the world.

• The Art & Science of Sustainable Design

  Though sometimes slighted for its frivolous and fickle nature, the textiles and clothing industry is undeniably one of the most important trades today. Serving as a linchpin for national economic development, cultural identity, and consumer engagement, the fashion industry has been and will continue to be an integral player on the world stage. Model, sustainable design activist, co-founder of Source4Style, and speaker Summer Rayne Oakes presents a provocative and engaging keynote that revisits the genesis of some of the practices - multi-season presentations and manufacturing - that we have come to take for granted and critically challenges the audience to re-imagine what a new world of fashion may look like. This speech includes Oakes's decade-long journey in sustainable design, a brief history of key developments within fashion over the past four centuries, a snapshot of sustainability advancements over the past three decades, and an evaluative inspection into the future of sustainable design.

• Bringing Up the Next 2 Billion: Why We Need to Change the Way We Live & Do Business

  Between now and 2050, the global population is expected to rise from 7 billion to 9 billion with nearly all the growth happening in the developing world. It's in these tides of growing population, shifting power, increased consumerism, and ever-shrinking resources that we begin to glimpse a predictive blueprint of what life may be like. In this multimedia keynote presentation, speaker Summer Rayne Oakes takes her audience on a visual journey through the rapidity of change while critically highlighting the challenges that lay ahead and ways for us to create opportunities for our communities. She also outlines a ten-part framework to address how business can thrive with new green developments.

  This speech can be tailored for a ten- to 20-minute talk or a 45- to 60-minute keynote and is ideal for university and corporate audiences.

• eXtinction: A Film Screening & Discussion

  In the summer of 2011, speaker Summer Rayne Oakes set out to tell a story on the love and loss of nature. Together with a small team of visual artists and her friend, cinematographer Clayton Haskell, she created eXtinction, a five-minute environmental art short. Oakes uses the film as a launching pad in this presentation to state that the environmental issues we face today are time sensitive, not abstractions likely to occur hundreds of years from now. The risks are real, measurable, current, and directly impact our lives today.

  Studio chairman Harvey Weinstein has said that "eXtinction is an important film that everyone should see. Clayton Haskell artfully captures the beauty of Planet Earth while Summer Rayne Oakes reminds us of the vital role we all have in keeping it that way."

  This 30-minute presentation includes a ten-minute talk and a ten- to 15-minute Q&A session. The film is available in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Dutch, Greek, Russian, Swahili, and Persian subtitles.