Natural Fabrics, Natural Style

Monday Magazine, a weekly from Victoria BC Canada, celebrated Earth Week with the headline “Green Chic – Natural fabrics, natural style“, and an article about sustainable fashion. Not Just Pretty is featured prominently in this week’s issue – on the cover, the lovely Moe Bell is wearing a beautiful green Myco Anna Cami Agave top. Her bag is a Red Flag Sail bag – made of recycled sails!

Here’s an excerpt from the article “Is Green My Colour?”:

Green is the most important fashion statement of 2008—and not on a colour wheel. From manufacturing practices to fibre sources, components of the apparel industry are spurring the next major shift in the market for an organic—or, at least, more carbon-neutral—lifestyle. New fabric choices, like bamboo and soy, are allowing apparel to become eco-friendly, while remaining stylish and modern

Salts Organic Hoodie

Ecoskin Copper dress featured in D~luxeList

The D~luxeList, a “chic guide to beautiful things”, have featured this chic and beautiful Eco-skin Copper dress in their fashion finds…

It’s so great to see eco-friendly fashions going beyond great basics by offering super-stylish dresses and tops that are every bit as fashionable as your favorite contemporary lines. The Copper is a super-soft fabrication comprised of 67% Bamboo, 28% Tencel, and 5% Spandex. The banded hem, soft gathers at the neckline and elbow-length sleeves are cute details that take this piece from basic to beautiful.

Understated, sensual and feminine in its approach, Ecoskin is inspired by the Italian Riviera and the women who live and play there. Her confidence is apparent to everyone around her. There is a freshness to the ease of this collection. Nothing is overwhelming or overdone. Always with the purity of nature in mind, colors are clean and rich in their approach.

“I wanted to give women a hip, sophisticated collection, as well as a sustainable product that would not leave a footprint on the environment,” says designer, Sandy Skinner. “My vision is to continually raise women’s awareness of their options. We can combine eco-friendly fabrics with a high design aesthetic and collectively we can take steps toward creating an environment where humans, nature and animals live in harmony.”

Nature Will Hate You For Not Wearing Not Just Pretty

Commercials from Change Advertising for Not Just Pretty…..

from Change Advertising :

Not Just Pretty

Not Just Pretty sells high fashion organic clothing. As such, they wanted the message to be fashion first, and sustainable second.

We addressed this with a simple strategy: Nature, as well as other people, will love you if you wear Not Just Pretty. And conversely, Nature will hate you if you don’t.

After that, all the creatives had to do was add a twisted twist, and we had a campaign with a fresh perspective on sustainable fashion.

here’s Bunny Lagerfeld:

heres the girl with goat”

Are you 50% sustainable? Ethical style from 50RX3

50RX3 is a fantastic photo-documentary that chronicles the outfits of Jill Danyelle every day for a year (!) and tallies the sustainability of the total -

“fiftyRX3 was a 365-day project documenting Jill’s goal to average fifty percent sustainability in the clothing she wore in 2006. Jill took daily photos of what she wore and classified them based on the environmental mantra, “reuse, reduce, recycle”.”

 

WOW – these ebaybes are gorgeous! They all seem to have a cute smirk that says “hey! buy this from my auction…”

eBaybes™ became a regular feature on the site. I found the pictures interesting for several reasons. The whole phenomenon of selling second-hand and vintage clothing on eBay seemed to begin circumventing traditional fashion media and advertising when the sellers became quite good at editorializing their wares. …However, the fact that most sellers are not professional models, but more likely the girl next store, lends an interesting self-portrait quality to the photos and provides a realness beyond most editorial spreads.

More ebaybes…

Jill Danyelle also started a great group on flickr for photos of sustainable style – there are over 2000 photos posted!

Makes a great slide show!

Eco-handbags : High-Fashion/Low Impact

Ashley Watson Murre Bag

Bags for a Green Planet

“Not so long ago the words “environmentally friendly bag” referred solely to sacks (usually brown) to carry organic groceries. Today, (these eco-friendly bags) are just one of the coveted fashion items that are planet-friendly.  In fact, they started the trend — or at least gave it a big boost.
…
Up-and-coming designers using environmental practices and products found themselves on the profitable edge of a major trend. Especially among those who design bags — a status staple item.
Vancouver’s Ashley Watson, 29, started making her coveted recycled leather bags by fluke a few years ago.
“I was at my parents’, and had this idea for a bag but was really impatient so I cut up one of my dad’s old leather jackets and made it,” says Watson. Her slouchy bright bags — made from leather jackets she finds at charity thrift stores — coincided with the boho and eco trends in fashion.
She started out visiting socially conscious boutiques in person — like Victoria’s Not Just Pretty on Fort Street, which still carries her bags and accessories.
Now her bag design business is a full-time job. Her edgy and fashionable bags — think bright 1980s leather, zippers and pockets — have been featured in Nylon, New York, Flare, Fashion, Lou Lou and Wish magazines, and the Today Show.
“We’ve had our store for four years now and even in that time we’ve seen so many more designers emerge using environmental materials,” says Pam Skelton, owner of Not Just Pretty. She carries several lines of eco-handbags, from those made with recycled materials like billboards and old posters to those made with organic fibres.

Sparrow Handbags Lola Bag

One of the latter is Sparrow Handbags by Victoria designer Marlena Maikranz-Bryce. The 28-year-old started her line last year after a break from the fashion design business to work for her family’s company, Victoria Signs. …” for the whole article, please see Times Colonist : Tuesday, April 22, 2008

It’s Earth Day, what NOT to do!

This list of What Not to Do on Earth Day is pretty funny and has great pictures!

for example:#7. Buy a polar bear fur coat.

Paper-free comics for Earth Day! From TheDailyGreen.

We so needed a laugh when contemplating global climate change and poisonous baby bottles !

The Daily Green teamed up with King Features Syndicate to assemble 40+ Earth Day-themed comics.

Enjoy! And remember: No trees were used in the delivery of these comics.

The Mansy – oh my!

oh that Mansy is too cute