Every two minutes, a woman in the United States is diagnosed with breast cancer. To help raise awareness about the importance of prevention, detection, and equal access to care, designer Stella McCartney has created a limited-edition Ophelia Whistling lingerie set to celebrate what she calls “femininity in the face of severity,” along with a corresponding ad campaign featuring Grammy Award–winning singer Alicia Keys. A portion of the proceeds from sales of the lingerie will benefit both the Linda McCartney Centre, a breast-cancer treatment facility in Liverpool, England, and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Breast Examination Center of Harlem, an outreach program that offers the local community free screenings, including mammograms, ultrasounds, and MRIs. (The American Cancer Society recommends that women ages 40 to 44 should have the choice to start annual breast cancer screening with mammograms if they wish to do so—i.e., insurance should pay for it—while women ages 45 to 54 should get mammograms every year. Women 55 and older can switch to mammograms every two years or continue with yearly screenings. Speak to your doctor about what’s right for you.) Keys and McCartney sat down to discuss the campaign and their mutual passion to help women find the care they need.

STELLA McCARTNEY: Did you know that every 19 seconds, somewhere around the world, a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer? We can’t ignore this.

ALICIA KEYS: Wow, that is crazy. I’m showing my support by wearing your Ophelia Whistling lingerie set, where a percentage of the proceeds are donated to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Breast Examination Center of Harlem. This is really important to me because I grew up in Harlem, and obviously New York is my town, and also my mother is a breast cancer survivor. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten to share that story.

SM: It’s amazing for women to be able to know that about you. I don’t think enough women do. Thank you for sharing, because it’s not an easy thing to talk about. There’s so much shame attached to breast cancer, and I think that’s one of the problems. Sadly, I lost my mother to breast cancer 19 years ago. She didn’t get to meet my children. This campaign is really about trying to raise awareness so that everyone out there knows they can get great care and support.

AK: That’s right. We want to break the taboos because every woman—no matter who you are, where you live, what you look like, or what you believe in—deserves access to a strong support network and highly skilled breast cancer care. It’s important to encourage everybody to go and get checked. I just recently learned that African-American women have a 42 percent higher rate of mortality from breast cancer than Caucasian women in part because we don’t always have the opportunity to get an early diagnosis or the right kind of treatment. So increasing that awareness is another reason this project is extremely important.

SM: Exactly. And it doesn’t matter where you’re from or what your race is. You really just need to have early detection. You need to prevent this disease from getting to the stage where it’s too expensive or too hard to get rid of. You know it’s great that we’re able to get together today as two women, to spread the word and get people aware; we need to remove the shame from this disease. That is one part of why I designed this lingerie set.

AK: I’m so proud of you for doing this. And thank you for including me so I can share my story too.

SM: It’s about bringing back the pride in being a woman and knowing your body and the message of early detection, and also how the fashion and music industries can be huge supporters of this campaign.

AK: Yeah, for all women it’s just like, let’s get rid of this thing. I feel that art and activism always belong together. And we absolutely all deserve to live!

SM: You know, if we can do a tiny little thing like this together from a place of love, and sadly from a place of knowledge, to save some lives, then it’s the least we can do. We’ve had some firsthand experience with this disease; we know it can affect anyone.

The Stella McCartney Ophelia Whistling bralette ($160) and bikini brief ($90) in Poppy Pink are available starting October 1 at StellaMcCartney.com.