Fashion: Recycled and Wow

Kenzie Burchell

While Giorgio Armani dabbles in hemp jeans and Stella McCartney showcases sustainable ecofriendly fashion on the catwalk, some hot new designers are focusing their entire lines around being green. This spring London Fashion Week hosted a crop of designers wholly committed to fair trade, ecologically friendly production and recycled materials.

Denmark-based Noir’s latest cotton line mixes sexy with ethical. Women’s tops made from treated organic cotton feel like silk, and coated cotton gives leatherette trench coats a dangerous look. Following in the footsteps of labels like Edun—Bono and wife Ali Hewson’s high-end fashion line—Noir also adheres to fair-trade practices, producing its cotton in accordance with international labor safety, human-rights and environmental laws, and provides essential medicine and micro-loans to African cotton workers and farmers (noir-illuminati2.com). Ciel, which offers a range of chiffon, silks and Peruvian alpaca fleece, partners with Save the Amazon Rainforest to offset the label’s carbon footprint (ciel.ltd.uk).

Other ecolabels recycle fabrics. The Italian label From Somewhere—soon opening a boutique in London— recycles unused materials like cashmere, jersey and tweed directly from Italian luxury textile manufacturers like Lanificia di Pray and Tessitura Monti. Davina Hawthorne designs form-fitting pieces from recovered industrial wools (davinahaw-thorne.com). And the London niche label Junky Styling recovers materials from damaged or used garments and factory scraps, refashioning men’s pinstripe shirts and suits into semi-couture skirts, dresses and experimental accessories like capes and corsets (junky styling.co.uk).

The trend extends to footwear. American shoe label Terra Plana uses hand-stitched local leather, natural latex and recycled Indian silks to give each pair an original look. It gives new meaning to the concept of secondhand clothes. Source: Newsweek International

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