Caring for Women: the Kering Foundation's fifth dinner raises over five million in New York

Shortly after seven, the first guests climbed the staircase of the Seagram Building on Park Avenue and made their way toward The Pool, where the water had given way to a meadow, with honeycombs, wildflowers, greenery spilling from the basin at the center of the room and banked high behind the stage. For the fifth September in a row, the evening that opens New York Fashion Week belonged to the Kering Foundation and its Caring for Women Dinner. By the time the last bid fell, the fifth dinner had raised over $5 million for the cause its founding co-hosts, Salma Hayek Pinault and François-Henri Pinault, set out to serve through the Kering Foundation: a world in which women and children can live free from violence. 

With this year's result, the total of funds raised stands at more than $20 million in five years. Behind the figures lies the room itself, the faces on the screen when the lights dim, and the work those millions raised have enabled, from a legal hotline answering survivors across the United States to lessons broadcast into homes in Afghanistan. As the dinner turns five, both stories deserve telling. 

The room fell silent for the moment at the heart of the evening: four short films, one for each of this year's beneficiaries, in which the women who run these organizations, and the women they serve, speak in their own words.  

A special performance by Rita Ora closed the dinner. Then the evening changed tempo: Paris Hilton took over the DJ booth for the after-party, and the room that had listened in silence an hour earlier was dancing. 

This year's proceeds go to four organizations, each holding a different part of the safety net that allows a survivor to start again.

Activating Change is the only U.S. nonprofit focused on ending violence against people with disabilities and Deaf people, survivors for whom too many doors remain closed. Through advocacy, prevention, and direct services, it works so that every survivor, whatever her disability, can reach the support she needs.

Fondo Semillas has spent 35 years funding, training, and supporting women's groups that advance gender equality in Mexico, one of the six countries where the Kering Foundation works alongside local partners.  

JBWS has been answering the phone in Morris and Passaic Counties (where the Kering Americas Operations Center is based in New Jersey) for half a century. Its continuum of care runs from a 24-hour helpline and emergency shelter to transitional housing, legal advocacy, counseling, children's programs, and services for people seeking alternatives to abusive behavior.

The New York Women's Foundation, through its Girls and Young Women Fund, backs young women and gender-expansive youth aged 15 to 26 in New York City's least-resourced communities, investing in direct services, leadership development, and advocacy so that they become agents of change in their own neighborhoods.

Every September, once the room has emptied, the work begins. The funds raised at the first dinners became grants for legal support, shelter in a crisis, prevention programs, and a way back to school.  

Among them, in September 2022, was the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV), whose WomensLaw.org gives survivors state-specific legal information in plain language so they can find their way through the courts. In a single year, 4.7 million people visited the site, and its email hotline, staffed by attorneys answering in English and Spanish, helped thousands of them one case at a time.

The following year, the dinner turned toward Afghanistan, where girls are barred from secondary school. The Malala Fund's grant supported seven organizations, unnamed for their own safety, that teach through radio, television, and digital platforms in Dari and Pashto, and in classes held quietly in teachers' homes. An estimated two million girls followed those lessons; some 4,000 studied with around 115 female teachers.

And the four organizations supported in 2025, Sanctuary for Families, FreeFrom, the Violence Intervention Program, and Equality Now, are already driving meaningful change with their grants, from job training for survivors in New York to legal advocacy across Latin America. 

The Houses' part in the evening began well before the first lot went under the hammer. It was there at the top of the staircase, in the gowns and tailoring that turned the arrivals into a small show of their own: guests in Gucci, Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, McQueen, and Brioni, with jewelry by Boucheron and Pomellato. 

The evening's theme, “Renewal in bloom,” runs through the work of every organization as it ran through the room. A survivor rebuilds her life when several things come together at once: care from people trained to give it, resources to pay for a lawyer, a bed, or a loan, a community that believes her, and action sustained long after the headlines have moved on. Each depends on the others. When they align, they create the safety and support a woman needs to move forward with agency, and hope.

Every guest on September 10 became part of that ecosystem of care, through presence, sense of community, and the bids they placed. So did every organization supported through the Caring For Women dinners, and through the partnerships Kering Foundation has forged in six countries for nearly two decades, reaching in total over 3 million women and children. One in three women in the world still experiences physical or sexual violence in her lifetime. That is why, next September, the Caring for Women Dinner will bring its community together again. 

Until then, the work continues, every day, with the Kering Foundation.