The standard way of thinking about fashion and philanthropy treats them as adjacent but separate. One is about how you look. The other is about what you give.

Vanessa Getty has spent two decades demonstrating that the separation is false.

Getty’s appearance on Vanity Fair’s International Best-Dressed List in 2014 is a biographical fact. So is the mobile veterinary clinic operating in Bay Area communities, delivering free spay-neuter surgeries to pet owners who couldn’t pay $400 for a procedure. Those two facts are more connected than they appear. The visibility and relationships that come with genuine standing in the fashion world—access to designers, credibility with brands, a social network that overlaps significantly with people most likely to donate meaningful things—are what made the clinic possible.

The network that powered the PURR events wasn’t assembled overnight. Getty grew up in San Francisco surrounded by cultural life and spent decades building genuine relationships with designers and fashion figures—not relationships of convenience, but the kind that develop over years of shared events, real conversation, and mutual interests. When she called in favors to stock the PURR sale, she was drawing on a reservoir built across two decades of presence in that world.

The first PURR sale, in 2008, pulled together donations from Donna Karan, Michael Kors, Jimmy Choo, Judith Leiber, Oscar de la Renta, and a wide field of socially connected San Franciscans. Everything was priced at 30 to 70 percent below retail. One hundred percent of proceeds went to the Peninsula Humane Society’s mobile outreach program. Nicole Kidman donated pieces. The event raised approximately $150,000 in an hour.

By the second event, in 2015, the model had been refined: 68 celebrities and designers contributed, the guest list expanded to more than 100 buyers, and the final total reached $350,000.

Beyond PURR, Getty has deployed her fashion connections in other directions: modeling in the Judith Leiber campaign specifically to benefit SF Bay Humane Friends; hosting trunk shows and brand events for Michael Kors, Ralph Lauren, Louis Vuitton, and Mulberry with charitable proceeds; chairing amfAR fundraisers alongside fashion-world figures.

Her inclusion on the Vanity Fair list was not an end point. It was a platform—one that expanded her network and placed her causes in rooms and publications they might not otherwise have entered.

“The most stylish people I consider best dressed,” she has said, “are never driven by trends. Personal style rises above that—knowing what works for you and sticking to it.”

The same principle applies to her approach to giving. She has found what works—a network, a model, a consistent set of causes—and she has stuck with it. The mobile clinic has now performed more than 9,500 free surgeries. Fashion paid for that. The fact that it doesn’t look like philanthropy from the outside is probably the point.