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