A former emerging-markets trader goes looking for a different career and ends up asking where a jacket’s wool came from. The journey sounds like a sharp turn. For Vanessa Barboni Hallik, it has become a way of bringing several longstanding interests into the same room: business, design, technology, and the awkward question of what our purchases require of other people.
Another Tomorrow, the company she founded in 2018 and launched in January 2020, makes luxury clothing. Its founder would also like it to demonstrate a different way of operating a fashion business. A garment should have an intelligible beginning and a useful future. The sale sits somewhere in between. This gives a rather unassuming piece of tailoring quite a lot to accomplish before it reaches the dry cleaner.
Hallik’s proposition begins with a familiar financial idea: something well made can retain value. Apply that to a wardrobe and the questions change. How was the material produced? Can its history be checked? When its first owner moves on, what makes it possible for somebody else to wear it?
The promotion that prompted a pause
Her early life offered few obvious signs of a Wall Street career. She grew up around academics, art and technology in small college towns in the Midwest and Rust Belt. She first imagined architecture as a possible meeting place for those interests. Economics eventually became her degree at Cornell, where she graduated in 2004.
Finance arrived through an opening rather than a childhood campaign. A summer research internship led to a boss who thought she should trade. Foreign exchange and emerging markets offered international complexity, and she stayed at Morgan Stanley for fifteen years. She learned to build businesses amid uncertainty and to distinguish information that mattered from information that merely made noise.
Becoming a managing director supplied an occasion to reconsider the destination. The promotion came during a difficult period for her division. A professional milestone and a satisfying answer to what she wanted from work turned out to be separate achievements. She wanted the next stretch of her career to connect more closely with her values.
The eventual sabbatical was supposed to lead toward sustainable finance. Instead, studying industries through an environmental and social lens brought apparel into view. She kept investigating. Here was a field where the finished object could be exquisitely presented while the circumstances of its making remained frustratingly difficult to understand.
First, find the people who know
She entered fashion with little of the network normally associated with starting a label. The practical response was to ask questions and accept introductions. Jane Chung, whose background included DKNY, became the first creative director. Sustainability specialists were among the earliest hires. Before the company could decide what a finished wardrobe should contain, it needed to decide what it was prepared to make it from.
There is a personal echo in that order of operations. Hallik’s mother made clothes for the family, a fact she has remembered with the embarrassment of a child who would have preferred something less conspicuously homemade. Decades later, the child was running a business that wanted customers to know considerably more about the making. Fashion permits a person to change her mind.
The company’s framework brought human, animal and environmental welfare into the same set of decisions. The difficulty lay in finding materials that met its requirements while delivering the quality it wanted. Buying a ready-made ethical answer proved more complicated than expected. The team began working back through the chain, toward farms and raw materials.
A jacket begins a long way from a hanger
The wool supply chain became an early testing ground. Connections through Fibershed led to the ethical farming community in Tasmania. Buying wool at farm level offered a degree of specificity that broad assurances could not. The team could ask about an actual place, actual practices and the people responsible for them.
That experience informed work on cotton and other materials. Hallik has described certifications as an essential starting point while insisting that further questions still matter. The distinction is practical: a standard can establish a baseline, while a direct relationship can make it possible to understand the particulars and develop something together.
The approach also leaves room for material invention. Another Tomorrow has worked with textile partner Pyratex on fabric combining seaweed and cellulose. Hallik regards tailoring as central to a wardrobe, but the familiar outline of a jacket or T-shirt need not dictate a familiar route to making its cloth.
Her account of those choices keeps returning to the customer’s experience. The piece has to feel right and work as clothing. An account of the supply chain may reward curiosity; it cannot do the work of a good fit. A person buying a jacket still has to want to put it on tomorrow morning.
“Fashion needs to make less.”Vanessa Barboni Hallik
The small label with a long memory
Another Tomorrow gives garments digital identities, accessible through their care labels. Customers can look into provenance rather than having to accept an atmosphere of virtue. The object comes with a way of learning about the path that brought it into existence.
That infrastructure serves a second purpose. When a garment returns for resale, its identity can help authenticate it. Another Tomorrow launched its authenticated resale program in 2022. Information gathered for the beginning of a product’s life becomes useful again when the ownership changes.
Hallik has explained the ambition in terms of treating clothing as an asset. A jacket with continuing use should have a route back into circulation. The company can help provide that route, keeping a relationship with the piece beyond its first purchase. Resale belongs to the original business proposition.
The idea has an interesting relative in another industry. She has pointed to carmakers’ involvement in their pre-owned markets as an influence. Fashion may borrow many things, but a useful lesson from the used-car business is an especially pleasing acquisition: think about what makes the object valuable to its next owner.
Digital identity connects provenance with a garment’s next chapter.
The trader is still in the room
A fashion business built around these commitments still has to contend with ordinary commercial arithmetic. New fabrics involve development work. Suppliers have minimum orders. Inventory ties up money. At a 2025 industry discussion, Hallik described the challenges of constructing supply chains from scratch, including those minimum quantities and the constant adjustments required.
Her response includes an insistence on speaking a business language that colleagues and decision-makers understand. Environmental goals need to connect with operational measures and financial consequences. For a former trader, that is familiar territory. A worthy intention leaves plenty of work for the spreadsheet.
The same discipline appears in her thinking about distribution and capital. She has described spreading risk across materials and sales channels, and seeking investors who can support a longer horizon. The quality of a funding relationship matters when the company is making decisions whose value may take time to become visible.
Recognition has followed. She was included in Inc.’s 2025 Female Founders 500. The citation named Another Tomorrow’s retail presence and Angelina Jolie’s role as a strategic adviser. Those are visible markers of progress. Much of the underlying work remains less photogenic: the supplier conversation, the fabrication decision, the systems that make a later resale possible.
An introvert’s company of collaborators
For all the public-facing work of founding a label, Hallik has described herself as an introvert. In a lighter exchange, she named Kashmir as a dream destination and Florence Welch as the singing voice she would choose. Apparently even an executive interested in rigorous systems can appreciate a more extravagant vocal arrangement.
She has also become vocal about the limits of the lone-founder story. Her own account gives considerable space to the people who opened doors, shared knowledge and supported her. Friendships with other women in business are part of the story. So are farmers and textile specialists whose expertise makes the product possible.
That preference for collaboration extends beyond the company. Her work has included early-stage investing and advisory service at Harvard’s human rights center. In 2026 she has continued discussing digital product passports and regenerative and circular business models in public industry conversations. The questions she began asking on sabbatical have acquired more participants.
The ambition is for the idea to travel
Six years after the launch, expansion and the original purpose sit alongside each other. October 2026 coverage described a Galeries Lafayette pop-up developed with Patricia Urquiola and Cimento, using regenerated materials, as well as further retail locations planned internationally. The shop itself becomes another place to apply the material thinking.
Hallik also wants useful approaches to circulate beyond Another Tomorrow. She has discussed openness on sourcing and a reciprocal relationship with Kering. The ambition is to offer a working example other businesses can learn from, with regenerative sourcing and circularity central to the model.
That makes her career change less tidy than the usual escape-from-finance story. The earlier experience keeps doing useful work. Risk, value, durability and the next transaction all appear again, translated into clothing. A good jacket needs a future. Hallik is trying to arrange the circumstances in which it can have one.