One of 2023’s Rolex Awards Laureates, Denica Riadini-Flesch uses economic knowledge to secure an ecological future
Rolex is a company with a global influence and long heritage, one that makes them particularly well placed to support innovation that seeks to impact our world in the long-term.
The Rolex Awards for Enterprise have run since 1976, and seek to support anyone, anywhere, with a project that could improve our world, further our knowledge, or help us look after each other. In recent years, the company has brought it under the Perpetual Planet initiative; focusing on projects that’ll help us understand or maintain our global ecological systems.
One of this year’s laureates is Denica Riadini-Flesch. An economist by trade, she left academia for SukkhaCitta, a company she founded to integrate long-standing rural craft traditions in Indonesia with a forward-looking approach to traceability and sustainability.
The fashion industry at large is looking for ways to make production more sustainable and traceable, and Riadini-Flesch does this by looking at what’s been done before – Ibus (older Indonesian women), know how to work with fabric, and local farmers know how to grow it in response to the seasons. By bringing these together, and to the market, SukkhaCitta, under Riadini-Flesch, are drafting a blueprint for a future where craftspeople are valued and the planet is cared for. Rolex’s Award can only help that future come sooner.
