Seeing GREEN on the Runway

High Fashion doesn't always have to mean fur coats, crocodile-skin shoes and leather bags. Check a small clip of Velvet Leaf's sustainable fashion show from San Francisco Fashion Week 2007.


Velvet Leaf is a sustainable clothing line with designer status that was started by 18-year-old and 20-year-old sisters Laura and Beckey Carter in 2006. Velvet Leaf provides creative, artistic styles with 100% eco-friendly materials. What's great about Velvet Leaf is that yes, they use organic cotton in all of their designs, but they are also 100% ECO SKAL Certified. This means that they use certified fair trade factories for manufacturing purposes. There are many guidelines for becoming SKAL Certified and Velvet Leaf covers them all.

Velvet Leaf has been featured in magazines like Teen Vogue and Nylon, which means that eco-friendly styles are beginning to reach not only the high-fashion crown, but the trendy teen crowd as well.

The Velvet Leaf Web site already shows the spring and summer '08 designs and many of them are very fashion forward but yet wearable at the same time. Think crisp, white dresses with billowy sleeves and a short length, tattered sleeveless tops with hoods, and clean, black overalls (without the farmer factor) layering a white blouse.

Velvet Leaf is not the only designer-status clothing company going green. Both Giorgio Armani and Philip Lim have specified green pieces as well. Philip Lim's white organic cocktail dress is lined in sustainable silk and uses untreated and undyed cotton. This dress is the debut for what will soon be the Philip Lim "Go Green Go" collection, sold exclusively at Barneys New York. The dress sells for $595.

Armani, the king of evening wear and glam has been green for some time. According to the Sustainable Cotton Project, the Armani Jeans Ecology Project began in 1995 for the purpose of recycling old jeans and making new ones while eliminating the chemical additives. This idea was so ahead of its time in the mid-90s that in 1996, a year after the first pair of ecology jeans was created, they were placed on display in the Innovations Exhibition at the Science and Technology Museum of Milan. Armani even created a line for men and women of designer pieces made out of hemp. Over the years, the Armani Jeans Ecology Project has continued to expand and develop especially as the green movement has become increasingly popular in the past couple years.

Also, environmentally-concerned Brazilian designer Carlos Miele designed an entire collection of t-shirts that will debut this month ($40 each, sold at Carlos Miele boutiques). As seen in the November issue of W Magazine, 20 percent of the sales from each top will go toward the Rainforest Foundation. The money that is earned from the profits will be used to educate native peoples how to protect and save their rainforests. Actresses Scarlett Johansson and Camilla Belle as well as model Caroline Trentini lent a helping hand in the rainforest t-shirt design project.

Once you see a page dedicated strictly eco-friendly living and environmental style in top fashion magazines like Allure (October '07 issue), In Style (November '07 issue) and Cosmopolitan (November '07 issue), you know green is here to stay. As we all know, Cosmopolitan, the best-selling women's magazine in the world, is a high-style, high-beauty and highly-sexified mag. This month's issue portrays beautiful Sienna Miller wearing a t-shirt that says "The People Versus Global Warming", for Globalcool.org, as well as pages of green and organic beauty treatments and tips. As someone who would rather devour the latest Vogue or W than eat or sleep, it seems to me that the green theme is by far the best 'trend' I've ever seen splashed across those precious pages.

Amy

Good for the Earth Gems and Jewelry

Finish off eco-friendly outfits with elegant, fair-trade jewelry

So far I have covered organic and fair-trade beauty products and skin care lines, vegan and environment-friendly bags as well as all types and styles of organic clothing. All very stylish, earth-friendly items, but what about the ultimate accessory: JEWELRY? This week I am focusing on two green jewelry lines called Lucina Eco-Friendly Jewelry and Moonrise Jewelry, neither of which make you think of 'hippie chic', in that hemp jewelry paired with a crochet hat and Birkenstocks kind of way.

Moonrise Jewelry, founded by Meredith Restein and Liz Watson is based out of Virginia and uses fair-trade, semi-precious gemstone beads, said Restein. The gems are eventually transported to the Moonrise studio, being closely tracked along the way to ensure environmental practices. The gemstones are originally found in mines in Latin America as well as the United States. Some of the gemstone beads that Moonrise uses include Black Jasper from Oregon, Brazilian Amethyst and Mexican Fire Opal. "They have all been extracted from the earth using the most environmentally-sensitive practices (most by hand), and cut in their model Chinese factory which protects workers' rights, safety, and health while providing exceptional compensation and benefits to workers," said Restein.

Other fair-trade and eco-friendly materials used by Moonrise include bamboo, seeds, orchid blossoms (one of the more popular materials in the company), recycled glass and Tiger Ebony Wood Beads. Also, the metal components of the Moonrise pieces are made by members of the Fair Trade Association, frequently using recycling silver, added Restein.

Restein and Watson work in Eastville, VA. and live in Northhampton County, an area known for its abundant natural environment. "In our small community, this is an entirely new way of doing business and we are among a handful of small businesses in the area who are demonstrating to others that people, planet, and profits aren't mutually exclusive," said Restein.

The necklaces made with real orchid blossoms are always a crowd favorite for Moonrise, specifically the Kona and Molakai necklaces (see right). Restein said that her favorites come from the Eco-Jewelry collection, including the Ely Necklace, Manila Earrings and Bengal Necklace (above).

Moonrise Jewelry's pieces were also shown at the Mercedes-Benz L.A. Fashion Week on October 15 in attempt to promote a greener lifestyle.

"Buy a necklace, save the rainforest", founder and owner of Lucina Eco-Friendly Jewelry Shauna Alexander Mohr says. Lucina is another fair-trade, eco-jewelry line that I really love, and was featured on a "Going Green" segment of the Today Show (Midnight Blue Tagua Silver Layer Bracelet, left).

Lucina is creatively and originally named after a Roman goddess. "Lucina" is the Roman goddess of childbirth, and Mohr was inspired to name her company after such a goddess because of the connotation and relation it had to the company's particular mission and jewelry pieces: "classic, feminine and inspiring," Mohr said. "Roman mythology is definitely classic, nothing is more feminine than childbirth...," she added.

Prior to creating eco-jewelry, Mohr was a fair-trade coffee buyer for ten years, working closely with people in environmentally sound regions of the world. After the birth of her daughter in 2004, Mohr had a desire to continue her work with the people in these regions, specifically focusing on the women. "Women make about 80% of handcrafted products in the world, so when you buy Fair Trade handcrafted products, you're supporting women and families. I thought if we could get these products to U.S. designers, they could combine these exquisite influences from around the world and create jewelry with a distinctly upscale and modern feel," Mohr said.

Some of the gemstones used by Lucina are bought from Women for Women International programs in Afghanistan. In addition to Women for Women International, Lucina is involved in other philanthropic organizations as well and donate a percentage of their sales to Hands to Hearts International and Women's Edge Coalition.

According to Mohr, Lucina likes using materials that have a positive impact on the environment, such as Taqua, or "vegetable ivory". The material "is one of our favorites because it is a rainforest nut, sustainably harvested, hand-carved and dyed by Fair Trade artisans in Ecuador. The gentle harvest of tagua literally keeps biologically diverse and critically imperiled tropical rainforests intact," said Mohr.

Whether you are out to save the rainforest or simply look green-chic, Moonrise Jewelry and Lucina can help you accomplish your goal.

Amy

Good-bye Plastic Bags!

What used to be known as an environmentally-sound way to carry your groceries has turned into a full-blown fashion trend. Anya Hindmarch's famous, limited edition "I'm Not a Plastic Bag" bag is sold out everywhere. According to the Anya Hindmarch Web site, you can no longer purchase one of these bags in the United States, and it is also sold out in the UK. Its anticipated launch in South East Asia was cancelled due to concern for customer safety. And at $6.75 a pop, the bag is very inexpensive when compared to the Anya Hindmarch collection handbags, which run in the mid-hundreds.

If you don't already have the most popular canvas shopping bag around, don't fret! As the canvas bag craze becomes trendier by the minute, there are lots of options for eco-friendly bag lovers.

If you are interested in carrying a designer status eco-bag, Hindmarch's is not the only option. Stella McCartney, known for creating vegan designer wear, has a new canvas bag coming this spring. According to the Bag Snob Web site, the Stella, $495, is due out in June and is made out of organic cotton.

If you are looking for stylish canvas bags to carry your groceries in instead of (gasp!) plastic bags that are provided at the supermarket, try Reusable Bags (my favorite are the "Modern Totes"). Reusable Bags is a Web site that specializes in providing customers all types of reusable bags for carrying food items, baby supplies, etc. The Web site also includes a great amount of news and information about the environment and the harm that plastic bags cause to our environment. My favorite feature is the constantly moving count of how many plastic bags have been consumed this year (at the top of the home page). Right now we are at 430,851,469,272...I can't keep track of all the bags, the count moves so quickly!

Now if you are looking for a bag that you can carry around at night or make a statement with, check out Hardwear by Renee. These are some of the most unusually-made, runway-worthy bags I have ever seen. Each bag has its own style, with clean and modern lines. Owned and operated out of Oregon by Renee Christopher, the recycled bags are made out of inner-tube tires, scraps of wood and reclaimed water hose. When asked how she came up with idea of creating such a bag, Christopher said that she has "always loved the idea of recycling, it just made sense to me! The inner tube handbags were a spin off from the Runway style. Inner tubes just seemed like the perfect material to use sense there's a surplus of blown inner tubes. The recycle wooden base comes from wood scraps off fish planks from a factory in the North West."

Christopher said that despite the process being challenging at first, the creation of the recycled bags, better known as "Highway Bags" becomes easier. "The most labor intensive part is the cleaning process. Each tube goes through three different cleaning cycles. Because of the natural curve of the inner tube, designing the bags to include the curve can be a challenge. The material can also dull a sharp pair of shears very fast," Christopher said.

Christopher has always been an artist at heart. She won a scholarship for ceramics in college and her hobbies have included pottery and jewelry making. After she got married and did not have a lot of money, Christopher sold her wedding dress to buy a sewing machine. "Being freshly married and poor, I didn't have the luxury to splurge on handbags, so I made my own...and Hardwear was born," Christopher said.

Not only does Hardwear by Renee sell unique recycled bags made out of tires, but her collection includes jewelry as well. Christopher said that the most popular recycled item are the recycled cuffs, as well as the Highway Bags with writing on them or with the nozzles on the handles. According to the Web site, the recycled tire bags run for $65 and tire cleaner should be used for cleaning.

Christopher has a new line of recycled jewelry as well, and the pieces are made out of a sign material called Perspex. Both pieces to the left are from Christopher's Perspex line.

I was surprised and excited to find out that some pieces are even sold here in Tucson, at the Tucson Botanical Gardens, 2150 N. Alvernon Way.

Whether you are looking for a trendsetting recycled bag that is sure to turn heads, or simply a stylish and cute bag to carry your groceries in, the green trend continues to grow and you are sure not to run out of choices. So have fun, save the earth and take your pick!

Amy

Biodynamics are a Step-Up from Organic


Today I am talking about a new organic beauty trend that I just learned about myself. It is called Biodynamic and I read about it in the November 2007 issue of Shape magazine (on news stands now). Red Flower, a popular organic skin care line, as well as an all-natural skin care online store, Saffron Rouge, both carry biodynamic products. According to Jill, a Saffron Rouge beauty advisor I spoke with, "Biodynamic means that they practice organic planting and cultivation and there are no herbicides or pesticides involved in the growing of the plants. The plants are then harvested based on the solar system, as it is believed that when the planets are aligned a certain way, the plants are most potent, which is why they are harvested at this time." As described in Shape magazine, "if you consider yourself to be a true purist" you should be using biodynamics. Instead of simply avoiding pesticides and chemicals in creating the products, biodynamics actually nourish and feed the soil in a healthy way.


According to a Red Flower representative, their mission is "to create a 100% pure and sustainably sourced body wash and body lotion that exceeds every expectation of scent, moisturization and performance. By 9 am the average American puts more than 1,000 chemicals on their skin. Red flower sees a better way to start and end the day. We have created a nutrient for the skin and earth."


Red Flower takes a unique approach to organic skin care. The skin of 100% organic flowers is used to create body washes, lotions and scents. Red Flower has always created pure, organic skin care. However, biodynamic products raise the standards for those who crave an even more holistic approach to skin care. Not only are the actual products as pure as they come, but the packaging is eco-friendly as well. "Flower skin is packaged in p.e.t. plastic, the same plastic that is used for water bottles which makes it the most recycled and recyclable type of plastic," said the Red Flower representative.

The representative told also told me a few ingredients they regularly use and why:

• Biodynamic Honey***: This is a flower nectar that includes "hygroscopic properties that actually attract moisture from the air", while still thoroughly cleansing the skin.


• Wild Blue Green Algae: Contains "chlorophyll, B vitamins, beta carotene, pro vitamin A, lipids, active enzymes, essential amino acids."


• Spirulina: An organic hydrating mechanism.


• Laurel: Soothes skin and fights bacteria.

***According to the representative, "the bio-dynamic honey used as a key ingredient is produced in its natural habitat. Honey from this family of flowers is known for its rich, gingery tone and flavor." This honey is free of any dyes, perabins, sulfates, petrochemicals and preservatives, the representative said.


Red Flower has been featured in many publications and magazines for their unique approach to creating good-for-the-earth products. Check it out!


As I mentioned earlier, Saffron Rouge is a great place to find organic skin care and beauty products. According to Jill, "We carry organic products yes, and include all ingredients for every product, so if there are some that are considered to be 'yellow flagged' we make our clients aware, so they can make the choice for themselves". Their biodynamic page includes products like:

• Organic/Biodynamic Peppermint Oil--Helps fight nausea, tiredness, weakness and fevers.


• Organic/Biodynamic Lavandin Oil 'Super'--Fights muscle pain and infections, but can also be added to water for cleaning uses and protects against moths in the house.


• Organic/Biodynamic Floral Water--Clears up blemishes on skin.


• Wild Rose Deodorant--Includes all-natural herbal extracts as well as biodynamic lemons to fight bacteria.


• Calendula Cream Bath--Uses almond oil and biodynamic calendula flower extract. Can be used for both babies and adults!

According to the article in Shape Magazine, two other biodynamic brands to try are Jurlique and Dr. Hauschka. Enjoy!



Amy

Greenloop: A Fashionably-Green Virtual World

"Out to Change the World – One Organic Tee, Vegan Slide, Soy Wrap Dress and Recycled Rubber Handbag at a Time". This is a quote from the press release of a earth-friendly online shopping experience called Greenloop that I recently discovered, provided by Nikki Gersten, PR specialist.

According to owner and founder of Greenloop, Aysia Wright, "For many, what we wear is a key element of personal expression. The goal at Greenloop is to be a solid resource for people looking to live a more planet friendly lifestyle without feeling as though they have to sacrifice their sense of style in doing so" (quote provided by Nikki Gersten)

Wright is right. If you shop at Greenloop's Web site, you definitely won't be sacrificing your style. The Greenloop site sells a plethora of organic and earth-friendly clothing, footwear and jewelry pieces. Some of the brands I really enjoyed taking a look at were:

Green Label (men's and women's t-shirts mainly, with fun, green-worthy sayings like "Re-Think" and "Organic Revolution")
Perfectly Imperfect (men's and women's pieces, including organic leggings and great long-sleeve shirts for women)
Loomstate (I also mentioned in a previous blog how Loomstate provided a line especially for Barneys--however the selection of the brand on Greenloop is more extensive with lots of printed tees, jeans, skirts, and zip-up hoodies available)
Deity Akon (only three pieces, but if you are looking for organic undies or boxers, here's your place)
Loyale (a great off-white blazer)

Edun (A really comfy-looking knee-length sweater for winter, and I actually liked the guy's Edun tees more than the girls, especially the long-sleeved, striped ones)

Positive Energy +E (simple, white, ribbed tank tops with one-word saying like "Wild", "Dangerous" and "Beautiful")

Charmone' Shoes (these are definitely the most stylish and elegant earth-friendly heels I have ever seen--very architectural-looking too)

Also, be sure to check out the accessories page, where you can find everything from beer-bottle cap belts, to recycled tire watches!

The online company opened its virtual doors in February 2005, but the store itself had already been in existence for about a year. According to the Greenloop press release, "Opened in 2004 on the outskirts of Portland, OR, Greenloop was one of the first eco-fashion boutiques to kick off the burlap-and-Birkenstock stereotype, opting instead for hip, sustainable styles by fresh young talent with something to say". The Greenloop boutique has been featured in national magazines such as Elle, Vanity Fair, Glamour and Nylon, just to name a few.

According to the biography of Wright provided by Gersten, Wright was not brought up in a completely environmentally-concerned family (although she did have 23 cats, 9 dogs and a conglomeration of different types of birds). Her love of animals brought her naturally into an environmental awareness by the time she was in high school. Wright earned a B.A. in Environmental Science at San Diego State University, and afterwards she went on to graduate from the University of Virginia School of Law. After some time working as an estate attorney (not in any way using her 'green' degree from SDSU), she opened the Greenloop boutique, which, according to Wright's biography, was "one of the nation’s first fashion retailers to place equal emphasis on ethics and style". Wright now lives in West Linn, OR. with her husband and two children and works to ensure the success of both Greenloop stores: boutique and online.

One aspect of the Greenloop Web site that I found especially interesting are the "project green" items. Particular items on the site are labeled as "project green" pieces, and when you purchase one of these items, $10 of the sale goes directly to various Environmental groups such as Global Green, Healthy Child Healthy World, Earth Share, and many others! This is a great way to feel good about giving back to our planet.

The great thing about shopping with Greenloop is you can get everything you need to outfit yourself in one virtual stop. According to Wright, "Greenloop is a one-stop shopping experience for those seeking sustainable apparel and accessories. The site is user friendly, has good product information and detailed photography to help make the online shopping experience as easy as possible" (quote provided by Gersten).

Also, another great feature I found available on Greenloop was the ability to download thumbnail pics and links to their limited edition reduced price pieces. Check it out just to the right of my posting!

I'm sure right now you are ready to check out Greenloop and all the stylish, eco-friendly fashions they have to offer, so go ahead and click away!

Amy