The Eco-Fashion Revolution: You Are What You Wear

By Brita Belli, E Magazine. Posted September 17, 2007.

Today's eco designers don't talk about being inspired by leaves falling or icecaps melting; they're starry-eyed for futuristic-looking chairs, towering skyscrapers and folding bicycles. They're thinking like architects, leading with design and textile as opposed to an activist agenda.

"The way a chair breaks up space or a building cuts into the sky with so many different views is how I feel a garment relates to the body," says Brooklyn designer Nina Valenti, who launched the sustainable line naturevsfuture in 2002. "I design pieces that have a strong line, form and texture." Her clothing has severe pleats and soft gathers, military stiffness and feminine slits, the yin and yang of organic and technological forces. Her fabrics range from the expected organic cottons, wools, hemps and soys to fabrics made from recycled soda bottles.

Form and Function

A folding bicycle provided the inspiration for Los Angeles designer Carol Young's spring collection. Specifically, it was the Dahon folding bicycle made by a company founded to encourage environmentally sustainable forms of transport. "What I loved about the Dahon Ciao," says Young, "was not just its functionality, but its aesthetics, individuality and its 'morph-ability.'"

Young's label, undesigned, is a study in wearable sustainable fashion that is decidedly modern in its ability to transcend season and move between office, bicycle, subway and sidewalk. There are skinny jeans layered with dotted, form-fitting dresses topped with demure shrugs. Bold pockets and soft hoodies and bubbled edges.

"Rather than sketching traditional fashion figures, I prefer making paper models, and then samples to 'test drive' in the real world," Young says. "Clothing design is in a sense architecture miniaturized, made on a more intimate level. Both are experiential, functional design; both transform 2-D to 3-D and are shaped by the materials they're made from. The way that the green movement is changing the building industry is similar to how it's shaping the apparel industry."

As a former architecture student and an avid cyclist, Young gives recycled clothing and organic fabrics new life as fashionable dresses, skirts, jackets and pants that stretch and move according to the needs of the "urban nomad." These are people who live in cities -- Paris, New York, London, San Francisco -- who use mass transit, and who need clothing that's flexible enough to take them from day to night. She mentions, among this clientele, "artistic/eclectic professionals" as well as "academics, architects, curators, graphic designers and film makers." She does not mention hippies among the lot.

In fact, in undesigned's shape-hugging black, white and gray pieces, there is nothing that might be paired with Birkenstocks and a Mexican poncho. More and more, sustainable clothing reflects the future not the past. Online, it is serious connoisseurs of art, architecture and fashion who follow the movements of sustainable design, debating similarities between scrap wood coffee tables on Inhabitat.com or the ethics of using recycled leather in shoes on FiftyRX3.blogspot.com. And then there are the dedicated crafters who detail how to knit shopping totes from cut-up plastic bags or weave purses from old seatbelts.

Refashion has taken the idea of vintage to a new level. Mass-produced clothing is uniformly cheap and trendy, and each season another line of expendable merchandise joins the landfill heaps. But extending the lifecycle of clothing has progressed beyond bedazzling the back pockets of a pair of Levis. From amateur how-to sites like Ohmystars.net teaching "T-shirt surgery" to one-of-a-kind silk-screened bamboo tank tops on craft site Etsy.com to boutiques like Hairy Mary's on New York's Lower East Side selling reconstructed vintage dresses, refashioning is pushing the idea that each item of clothing tells a story.

Admitted "fashion nerd and art freak" Jill Danyelle started the blog FiftyRX3 to document a personal project, but evolved the site into a place to discuss emerging green designers.

"Green fashion has definitely expanded outward from its 'hippie' connotations of the past," says Danyelle, who is also the fashion editor for inhabitat.com. "We have seen expansion all the way into high-end designer looks down to Wal-Mart. This is what I see as true growth. Yet the percentage of the marketplace is still so miniscule that I believe eco-friendly design in the fashion industry is far from established."

Ethics and Anti-Fashion

While many eco designers seem engaged in their own personal Project Runway competition -- finding stylish ways to rework vintage neckties and discarded tires -- others have come to this new fashion frontier led by ethical concerns first. Irish label Edun ("nude" spelled backwards), founded by U2 singer Bono and wife Ali Hewson in conjunction with New York designer Rogan Gregory, is upfront about its mission. The designers want their customers to think about the cotton in their clothing and how it was produced. Behind Edun's image of pale, punk-looking models in pricey tees and skinny jeans is the motto "trade not aid," a focus on raising Africa's share of the global cotton market.

African cotton farmers are "using expired pesticides and ... are subject to grave negative health effects," says Bridget Russo, an Edun spokesperson. These farmers "often make a loss every year," she says, "and some ... sleep 10 to 20 people in a hut with one pair of shoes among them all."

See more stories tagged with: designers, clothing, environment, green shopping, green buying, eco-fashion

Brita Belli is managing editor of E Magazine.

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