I COULD HAVE BEEN

THE KERING FOUNDATION launches website to raise awareness on gender violence

by TEAM PARIS SOCIAL DIARY, photography by Courtesy | 3 December, 2017

The KERING FOUNDATION is raising awareness through the website ICouldHaveBeen.org, where they will ask men to imagine who they could have been as a woman by entering on the website the female given name that their parents would have given them – or that of a sister, mother, girlfriend or other feminine given name. Similarly, girls and women will be invited to Demonstrate female solidarity with survivors by adopting the HER female English pronoun as a given name to encourage men around them to participate in the campaign. Then, the users will discover the violence that they could have been victims and will be able to share this information on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and WeChat.

Through the expression I Could Have Been, the Kering Foundation seeks to draw attention to the higher violence risk to which girls and women are confronted simply because of their sex.

Official ambassadors of this year’s campaign, Alessandro Michele, Christopher Kane, Joseph Altuzarra and Dennis Chan will launch the Kering Foundation’s call to action by revealing the first name their parents would have given them had they been a girl. Stella McCartney and Salma Hayek Pinault, board members of the Kering Foundation, will also lead the campaign by calling on all girls and women to follow their example by putting themselves in the place of a victim (HER).

François-Henri Pinault, CEO of Kering and Chairman of the Kering Foundation, commented on the launch of the campaign: “Being a girl should not involve a higher risk of exposure to violence. Unfortunately, this is now the case all over the world. We could all have been born a girl, so we all have to fight this fight. I am proud to lead it alongside the Kering Foundation, our Houses and their fashion designers through our sixth annual White Ribbon For Women campaign.”