Eco-Conscious "Couture"

Smart designers with designs on saving the planet

by Samantha Searles — March 12, 2007

Given the esthetics and economics of the high-end fashion industry, it seems unlikely that the big-name designers are going to take the plunge into environmentally conscious clothing any time soon. It's hard to imagine Karl Lagerfeld, say, touting the virtues of sustainable bamboo jersey and organic cotton....or to picture Miuccia Prada banning animal skins from bags and shoes. But a handful of younger designers--hip, sassy, smart, and deeply concerned about the future of the planet--are making the move toward producing duds that are both chic and sustainable. This is not your classic crunchy granola, sackcloth-and-ashes kind of fashion: the inventive garb produced by these designers is eagerly embraced by rock stars and movie icons, as well as ordinary mortals who want to feel good about how their apparel is made and where it comes from.

Deborah Lindquist For more than two decades—and long before it was considered hip—Deborah Lindquist has worked with recycled goods. After studying at New York’s Parsons School of Design, the Minnesota-born designer turned her talents to fashioning accessories, making belts from old leather jackets and a material known as Milanese mesh. A month-long trip to the Costa Rican jungle in the late 1980s sparked her interest in ecology and the natural world, and eventually prompted her to pick up stakes and settle in Topanga Canyon, a relatively rural patch of L.A. “I need trees and water and plants around me,” she admits.

Lindquist, whose grandmother first taught her how to sew, works with vintage fabrics she finds in antique clothing stores, romantic floral scarves, recycled cashmere knits and T-shirts, and even vintage kimonos (an outfit from her spring 2007 collection is shown above). The results are flirty, sexy, one-of-a-kind clothes: baby-doll dresses, bustiers with lingerie straps, bolero tops, and appliquéd capelets. She sells her clothes through better boutiques, such as Planet Blue in L.A., Blush in Scottsdale , and Jirisuda in New York.

Linda Loudermilk The fortyish Los Angeles transplant with the unusual name first got her start studying costume design and Shakespeare at Oxford University in England, but after debuting her creations at the prestigious Trocadero in Paris, Loudermilk realized she wanted to do something more meaningful in the fashion world. She started researching organic cotton in 2002, and discovered a brave new world of fabrics—things like EcoSpun, made from recycled soda battles, and sasawashi, manufactured from a Japanese leaf with supposed antibacterial properties. “I’m tapping into the excitement of what is really new in this industry,” she says.

Her designs for women are frankly sensuous and unabashedly feminine: fabrics flutter around the body, and saucy styling reveals as much skin as after-hours wear by the better-known couturiers. Loudermilk has always taken her inspiration from nature, and the names of the designs from her spring 2006 line reflect that fascination. A “Tree Dress” is made from bamboo matte jersey; the “Macaw Top,” from honeycomb bamboo (because it grows so quickly, bamboo is a favored element among eco-conscious designers for everything from fabrics to furniture); and a shimmering, backless “Waterfall Dress” incorporates sustainable cotton mesh. Her clothes have an ageless appeal, and have garnered her a celebrity clientele that includes Tori Amos, Jill Hennessy, and Jane Fonda.

Next on the agenda for the designer is a “luxury eco marketplace,” full-service stores that will carry top-of-the-line goods, from furniture to skin-care products to home décor. “We’re trying to educate consumers on why they should buy green,” she says, “even if it’s just an organic cotton T-shirt.”

Edun The brainchild of Ali Hewson, wife of U2 rocker Bono, this young enterprise focuses on using family-run factories in developing nations, particularly Africa and South America. Edun (“nude” spelled backwards, but also a play on the notion of a garden of Eden) is a partnership between Hewson, Bono, and New York designer Gregory Rogan. After noting that so many businesses are moving the manufacturing end to China and India, where labor is much cheaper, Hewson determined to do something to build a company based on fair-trade practices in underprivileged nations. “ Africa has lost six percent of the world trade since the 1970s,” Hewson notes. If the country could regain one percent of that, it could earn $70 billion a year—a far more significant figure than the $22 billion in aid it receives annually.

Hewson, who has been married to Bono for 23 years and is the mother of four, has long been involved in activist causes, including famine relief in Ethiopia and campaigns for Greenpeace. Launched in the spring of 2005, Edun bills itself as a force for “conscious consumerism, with a radical and crucially stylish twist.” The clothes, not surprisingly, have an understated rocker sensibility: skinny jeans, street-smart hoodies, punk T-shirts, and sweetly tailored tops and blouses for women. Major department stores—Barneys, Saks, and Nordstrom—have started retailing the Edun line, and an overview of the styles can be seen on the website (www.edun.com) .

Samantha Searles writes on style and fashion from Houston.