Organic Girly

Forging a new fashion trail with Suzanne Rae’s Fall/Winter 2012 collection.

There’s a new frontier in fashion – a glamorous harkening back to the simply beautiful and designer Suzanne Rae is the perfect pioneer. She’s personable, a true philosophizer, a family girl and constantly evolving toward what she calls a “higher consciousness.”

It’s this clear consciousness that came through her Fall/Winter 2012 collection showcased at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in collaboration with the W Hotels Fashion Next Showcase. In her fourth season showing here, she’s no stranger to hard and high fashion.  And, it shows.

The impeccable detail to pieces like her fur print bias gown with “Suzanimal,” as Rae affectionately calls it, (see below), is silk screened to look like real animal fur yet she assures, it’s entirely fur free.  The “Suzanimal,” a wolf pelt stole, follows the same silk screened printing process and is then layered on a bed of wool – all sketched out pre-production by biologist-turned-artist Sam Dakota.

For Rae it’s each little element that makes a piece, which is why we couldn’t stop staring at her cowl backs, fringe backs and cotton tails, nearly more riveting than their front-facing counterparts.

Titania Inglis, winner of this year’s Ecco Domani Fashion Foundation Award in Sustainable Design, gets street cred with her first New York Fashion Week show.

The show started early for Titania Inglis. Bedecked in black – lots of stylized black – guests waited upbeat, mingling behind black curtains. It was Inglis’ inaugural New York Fashion Week show, made possible by her recently announced 2012 win of the Ecco Domani Fashion Foundation Award in Sustainable Design. It was clear that something award winning was about to take place. And, it felt as if we were part of Inglis’ cheerfully somber production. So, like good cast members we waited in the entryway of the Eyebeam Art & Technology Center, a non-profit enterprise and one of the country’s leading media art centers. 

The stage was set for Inglis’ own shade of black, uplifted and far from bleak – a seamless blend of preppy plaid and gothic darkness. It was as if two, vastly separate, high school cliques instantly merged into one, very cool and non-cliquey band of fashion mavens. So, it came as no surprise when I overhead Inglis characterize her collection as “My So Called Life all grown up.”

Street-tough models bedecked in vegetable tanned leather from a farm in France, (where they guarantee the entire cow has been used, from food to fashion), in herringbone, recycled cotton plaids, asymmetrical skirts and soft fabrics like raw Japanese silk and Cupro glided by effortlessly.

For the complete article and snapshots from the show, please visit my post on Ecosalon…

(Photos by Jennifer Barckley of Organic Girly.)

Sustainable Fashion has come so far.  Case in point, today’ presentation of The Green Shows at New York’s Mercedes Benz fashion week.  A line reminiscent of last year’s Alexander McQueen exhibit at the MET snaked around the corridor—camera crews and curious fashion mavens awaiting the show, all aglow with the green buzz. 

And buzz-worthy it was, not just for it’s “greenness” but equally for its fashion.  Julia Ragolia, Ready to Wear stylist for the show, told me, “To me it was about showing that eco fashion is fashionable.  It’s like mainstream fashion.”  Just what our fashion hungry and eco-needing world has been craving.    

Here are a few of my favorite looks, from some of my favorite eco fashion designers:

(In future posts, we’ll share the stories behind the pieces and the designers themselves—exploring their approach to sustainable design and the craft they call their own).  

Study New York: Cream combo sweater tee made of Fair Trade, artisanal Peruvian alpaca and 100% dead stock wool pants

H. Fredriksson: 100% organic alpaca cable knit sweater and digitally printed cupro lava print dress

Ajna: organic wool hand knit turtleneck and organic wool draped skirt

Luis Valenzuela: Hand woven, hand dyed organic silk dress

(All photos by Organic Girly.)

Soccer-style kicks. Little hops on sidewalks. The resounding sound of “Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.” For many of us, this is our experience with the broken fragments of glass that oft line our curbs, our parks and our natural homes. And for most of us, these pieces of green, brown, blue, amber and more, are castaways—swept up by a street cleaner or slowly buried under a pile of leaves. 

Connecting the Past to the Future

Yet, it’s the little things that can go far—in sharing beauty, in being of use, in telling a story of something larger than itself. For Laura Bergman, a reclaim artist and Founder of Bottled Up Designs, these abandoned remnants are gems for the rescue. Earrings. Necklaces. Artifacts of beauty. As much of a historian as she is a designer, Bergman crafts her eco friendly jewelry with a deep love and appreciation for the story behind it. “It’s a truly unique way to preserve the past while helping the future,” says Bergman. 

For the complete article, please visit my column on EcoPlum…

(Photos courtesy of Sybren A. Stüvel—thank you!)

It’s all how you spin it.  As someone who’s worked in marketing and PR for a decade, it’s the blush in the face industry joke.  And, there’s truth to it.  Of course, some things are simple, authentic, truly beautiful.  No spinning required.  For other things, it gets a little dicer.  Take vinyl. 

Last week, I literally laughed out loud on an airplane, when my lovely friend Mia left me a voicemail asking if I’d ever heard of “organic vinyl”.  Organic vinyl?  Sounds like an oxymoron to me.  True to self, I dug deeper.  And, you won’t believe it.  Organic vinyl DOES exist.  That’s right.  Certified by the United States Department of Agriculture and denoted with a little green and white label, just like you’ll find on your apple of your box of cereal. 

Vinyl will be the first non-agricultural product to earn the coveted designation, taking advantage of a little known loophole in the law that apparently does not restrict the label to agricultural products, but makes it available to all “products” made from at least 95% organic “ingredients.”

Vinyl Association President Don B. Fulde welcomed the decision: “Our member companies have long maintained that ours is essentially a natural product – common salt combined with natural gas, which is essentially a series of carbon and hydrogen atoms, in other words, decomposed plant matter. Now we have a label that confirms this.”

If salt and natural gas make our world certifiably organic, then the future ahead may be more interesting than we thought.  As for me, I’m sticking to the roots.  From the ground.  Organic.  Good.  And, tasty too.

(Photo compliments of Blunder.  Thank you!)

I’m often accused of being peppy, positive and even worst, optimistic.  And, I wouldn’t have it any other way.  But today, I’m sorry to say, I fell into a place of deep sadness.  I literally screamed something like, “Are we crazy?!  Are we desperately trying to kill all species, including our own?”  All that after opening my box of eco cleaning products.  Who would have thought that a delivery that should have been met with a saving-the-planet-one-squirt-of-dish-soap at a time squeal of enthusiasm would be met with utter dismay. 

Living a busy life in New York City often leads to last minute, almost-out-of-toilet-paper like crises.  When all else fails (and since I’m not willing to sacrifice my don’t-destroy-mother-nature standards for an impulse buy) I shop online for such essentials.  I couldn’t have been happier last night when I logged on to soap.com to buy my favorite Seventh Generation toilet paper, Ecos laundry detergent and Ecover dish soap. 

However, when the boxes greeted me at home this evening, I was immediately suspicious.  I could barely wrap my arms around one of them, and by the time I wrestled it up the stairs and tore it open, all I found was a package of Seventh Generation recycled paper towels surrounded by twice its volume of inflatable plastic protectant. Now what, I must ask, is going to bludgeon my paper towels to oblivion that so much plastic protectant is needed?  But what really hit my heart was a note on the edge of the blow up packaging that told me to visit a website, fillair.com, for information on how to recycle.  Curious and die hard in my quest to recycle, I did.  I was welcomed with this:

To recycle Fill-Air®, Fill-Air® RF and Rapid Fill® material, please do the following:

Deflate (by poking a hole in the bag) and flatten the bags.

Fold the flattened material and place it inside an appropriate sized envelope or small carton.

Affix the appropriate postage to the shipping envelope or carton.

Address the envelope or carton to:

Ameri-Pak, In

Sealed Air Recycle Center 477 South Woods Dr. Fountain Inn, South Carolina 29644 Tel: +1-800-982-6197 

Upon receipt of the material, it will be ground up and re-pelletized, so it can be used to make a variety of products from trash bags to automotive parts, which can also be recycled.

I’m truly happy this company has put recycling on its radar.  Yet, I’m still befuddled as to why a company serious about recycling wouldn’t make it just a little bit easier.  No one I know would seriously deflate the packaging, buy a large envelope, pay the postage and ship some plastic bags off to a company in Fountain Inn, South Carolina.

Instead, dear soap.com, biodegradable peanuts abound.  Old packaging material from vendors can be reused once again.  And easiest of all, you can simply use less packaging.  I didn’t order packaging, so I’d like to return it.  Landfill- and hassle- free. 

(Photos, compliments of  SeaOtter22 (top and bottom) and Journ (center).