Room with a hue: the Pantone Hotel is themed around every designer’s essential tool.

Cutting-edge design might not be the first thing that springs to mind when Brussels is mentioned. Maybe mussels, chocolate, lots of Euro-politics. As such, the Pantone Hotel is a much-needed blast of color in the midst of bureaucratic grey. If you’re a beige, greige or otherwise neutral palette person, then forget it. If you’re a designer, it’s hotel heaven.

Everything, from mugs and folding chairs to walls, is in a Pantone color showing its ID number or name. Even the bicycles (available for sale, though not for riding) are brightly colored.

Sixties moulded plastic chairs in zingy orange and Mediterranean turquoise, and stripey walls, are guaranteed to pep you up for a stroll round the city, but won’t look so great after too many brews.

Interiors are white canvases with splashes of color, each of the seven floors is themed by mood (earthy: brown; fiery: vermillion; vibrant: orange; fresh: aquamarine). The accents, used sparingly to dramatic effect, are provided by pantone panels on the walls showing each room’s palette along with tonally-coordinated original artwork. Block-color bedspreads abound in the bedroom; in the bathroom, cups, shampoo and toilet roll (yes, really).

The 61 guest rooms have LCD TVs and free WIFI; being a tall townhouse, the top ones offer great city views. If you’re a low-down, just pop up to the roof terrace to look out over this medieval city.

Rates from $143 including tax and every color in the rainbow and beyond, but not the Pantone products (cups, chairs, iPhone cases). The little colored sugar sachets are good to go, though.

The Treehotel in Sweden features unique, futuristic camp sites.

Imagine the scene: you’re walking through a forest in northern Sweden, when suddenly you come upon a collection of bizarre objects suspended from trees: a mirrored cube, a UFO, a giant bird’s nest. Have you been abducted into a Dadaistic art installation?

Relax, it’s n0t a flashback to a youthful overindulgence of banned substances, a sojourn through William S. Burroughs’ Interzone or even a Trekkie bootcamp. It’s a 21st century designer eco-hotel-camp called Treehotel.

Treehotel’s green credentials are exactly as you’d expect for a Swedish hotel set in a forest: renewable energy provided by hydroelectric power from the nearby river, LED lighting and water-efficient sinks, and combustion toilets. In most units, waste is heat-blasted at 600C; in the Mirrorcube, your poop gets frozen, while the heat from the freezer’s element is used to heat the room in winter. Dead smart, those Swedes.

The five ”treerooms,” designed by leading Scandinavian architects, are all different inside as well as out, with simple furnishings. The UFO, accessed by a ladder underneath has spacey print fabrics, while the ultra-realistic Bird’s Nest is circular with tiny round windows in its pale wood walls. The Cabin is much more conventional, but also larger - a rectangular box with huge windows and an outdoor deck, while the Blue Cone overlooks the river.

The Mirrorcube is like a live work of art. Its outer surfaces show constantly changing images of trees and sky, which you can appreciate from a roof terrace, a more zen alternative to watching TV. Another building houses a sauna and hot tub (this is Sweden, after all). The bad news: this is also where the showers are located, since none of the treehouses has its own tub or shower. This is the Swedish idea of glamping: fab interiors offset outdoor plumbing.

Meals are served, and guests greeted, in a guesthouse run by one of the owners named Britta.

Rates from $573, including tax, breakfast and unbeatable dinner table stories.

Photos: Peter Lundstrom, WDO; Frank Updates via Harper’s Bazaar

It has been a long distance sprint to the finish line. You know when you think a reprieve from the hard work is just around the corner, so you run your hardest thinking the finish line is coming up? Alas, it’s just a mirage and there are more hills to climb.

It has been a very difficult month, but today I woke up before my alarm clock which I haven’t done in weeks. I’m guessing it’s because this past week I actually finished my collection in the tiny home studio I like to call Armageddon (because that’s what it looks like in here). I made the deadline with six hours to spare.

I woke before dawn, packed my collection and hailed a cab into Manhattan. I was filled with fear that perhaps I had made a body of work that wasn’t me and wouldn’t work. Had I forged a new path with blinders on?

But I arrived to smiling faces who were eager to play dress up and cheer me on. The wonderful photographer made me feel like a “real designer.” The Green Beauty Team (of course, I used an ethical girls dream team) was ready to make my vision come to life on a model that was sweet and different than the “MothLove” girls of yesteryear.

Everything about this day was new. I had never worked in an environment with a professional team. It made me feel like Super Woman, but Super Woman after a long battle. At one point I almost cried. The model was dressed, her hair and make up finished. The lighting was ready and music played the anthem of the day. Then my concept came around the corner and looked better than I could have imagined. It was like a phoenix rising from the ashes. The new Gretchen Jones appeared.

And just like that it was over. You might think I’d be relieved, yet my to do list seems larger than ever. The next leg of this race involves branding and launching, with a turn-around-time that seems impossible to achieve. But again, impossibilities seem to knock on my door more often than a friend these days.

As I wrap up one project and move onto the next I wonder when it will hit me, just how far I’ve come.

The day after wrapping my shoots I was at New York Fashion Week (NYFW) presentations watching Bliss Lau’s artful show of ballerina dancers entangled in the most incredible leather and chain garments. A designer I’ve admired for so long, right there in front of me, pushing herself the way I hope to. Making me want more, never looking back except to appreciate where I’ve been.

This season I find myself submerged in the scene, rather than looking through the window. Fearing I still don’t speak the language, I have to jump in. This game isn’t for the light at heart.

My dance card is full this week and NYFW beckons me like a moth to a flame. I may be a whole new me, but I’m just learning how to spread my wings.

Image credit: Gretchen Jones

This is the sixth piece in a new series at EcoSalon with Project Runway winner and sustainable fashion designer Gretchen Jones. For Jones, her daily apprenticeship with the “school of life” has been her guiding teacher and we look forward to bearing witness to her weekly inspiration collages, featuring ideas and scenes from the streets and parties of New York City, where she recently located. As well as her innate sense of style she’ll be pulling from a world of patterns, textures and all the designers who have preceded her.

The price of fashion, at least the price of being a designer, costs a whole lot more than any dollar sign could ever quantify.

I’m exhausted mentally and physically. My brain cells need to be fully restored. Emotionally, I feel withered away. The last time any friendly interactions were had without that ever-present subconscious awareness of deadlines looming seems so far away.

To be honest, I cannot remember the last time my pace was slowed – perhaps it was as far away as the summer of 2009. Having the opportunity to smell the roses and truly relax, relate and replenish has taken a back seat to ambition, desperation (at times) and timing. Yes, I’m sure you think that with all my opportunities life would be nothing but cheery – but it’s actually the opposite. Added pressure, not enough time, new found stigmas attached to my personality, pressure, exhaustion in the idea realm – shall I go on?

The glamorous facade we all see in magazines and red carpets is truly the smoke in mirrors that barely reflects the realities of playing fashion hard ball. It’s a labor of love, nothing more. No one should work 18 hour days, six days a week while basically playing a risky game of roulette.

Did you know that the average start up cost for developing a single collection is over $30,000?

The estimated funding/backing needed to launch a label is 1.5-2 million, with a solid $250,000 in the bank ready to pay out for first collections – just to develop samples, shoot them and prepare for sales (all this with no guarantee of success). Plus, the time lines for developing and preparing collections are usually at least four months. I’m working on about two months and much less than $30,000. It’s as if the drug is the stress and the high is the finished body of work. It’s never finished until the deadline hits, when you go dark for a second and then pick yourself up by the (hopefully chic) boot straps and prepare to do it all over again.

So I find myself wondering, at the final hour with three garments to finish, two to edit and 23.5 hours to go – is it worth all this stress and sleep deprivation, lost relationships and risk of ending up broke?

Yes. Of course.

The least I can say is that I can’t get enough of it and it has always been that way. Fashion chose me, not the other way around. As I progress as a designer, I’m finding that I would like to refine the approach.

And I hope that in 24, excuse me, no, 23 hours, the cost of everything I’ve put myself through will come to fruition. It’s never good enough, I always wish I could do things better, I always walk away with a million ideas that didn’t get the time to be developed…but that’s what the next collection is for, right?

This completed collection – the one after I show you what I’ve created in a tiny room on the floor – will deliver some free time to embrace where it is I have come from. It will give me a momentary respite so I can take a long walk in the park, be proud and get back up again to try to one up myself next time.

The learning curve is just too fun to ride. I guess I’ll just stay buckled in.

This is the fifth piece in a new series at EcoSalon with Project Runway winner and sustainable fashion designer Gretchen Jones. For Jones, her daily apprenticeship with the “school of life” has been her guiding teacher and we look forward to bearing witness to her weekly inspiration collages, featuring ideas and scenes from the streets and parties of New York City, where she recently located. As well as her innate sense of style she’ll be pulling from a world of patterns, textures and all the designers who have preceded her.

Genius. Pure, simple, and genius. Haldane Martin has spread his creative genius all over his Cape Town, South Africa home. The foundation of Haldane’s alluring interiors is soft neutral color, using white and/or light grey paint to coat his walls, floors, and ceilings. Bold, vivid colors infuse pure drama into select vignettes; saturated colors directly adjacent to pristine white floors. Well done, Haldane. Well done.

The contrast of sleek, smooth wood lounging below feathery globes of light is almost as delightful as the tension of soalid shapes of considerable mass balancing on delicate spindles. The minimalism is beautifully accented by individually curated loveliness. Each piece has character and charisma.

Mr. Martin is an acclaimed furniture designer, which means you can spread a bit of his genius inside your own walls, too. If you need a little additional inspiration, even the words at Martin’s namesake company are alluring, “Haldane Martin offers a sense of belonging to our world and the spirit of the times, by creating contemporary furniture that integrates, man, nature, culture and technology, with the human qualities of wisdom, love, and beauty.” Plus, Martin has a manifesto – devour it (as you know, I love a great manifesto).

(This stunning home tour was spotted at Apartment Therapy, contributed by Liezel Strauss. Images via Apartment Therapy.)

Honestly, there are times when I too feel like taking a happy pill to get away from it all but the only way to be a part of it is to be educated. So don’t stop now.

These 15 books will take you down many interesting roads on your journey. Be open to it.

1. Eco Fashion

Eco Fashion by Sass Brown

“This book shows the range of companies making a difference in the area of sustainable design in fashion, exploding the myth that sustainable design is bad design, or at best basic design, by highlighting the range of companies producing desirable and well-designed apparel and accessories with a conscience. It not only demonstrates the range of products available around the globe, but explains the stories behind them and the communities they support, as well as showing how and where they make a difference.” – Laurence King Publishing

2. Future Fashion White Papers

Future Fashion White Papers by Earth Pledge

“A collection of 30 compelling essays by scientists, retailers, farmers, dyers, models and others in the industry, including Diane von Furstenberg, Julie Gilhart, and Shalom Harlow. FutureFashion White Papers take an in-depth look at the fashion industry and provides a thoughtful, wide-ranging analysis of how a transition to sustainability can be achieved. Diane von Furstenberg notes: ‘FutureFashion White Papers is an exploration that signifies movement towards a more sustainable fashion industry. It is an opportunity to think about and evaluate the fashion industry as it stands today’.” – Earth Pledge

3. The Eco-chick Guide to Life

The Eco-chick Guide To Life by Starre Vartan

“Every now and then, someone comes along who shows the rest of us how much we take for granted the freedoms of our daily lives. The eco-journalist, blogger and all-around green genie Starre Vartan is one such person. In The Eco Chick Guide to Life, her earth-first program for glamorous but environmentally conscious living, she mines new lodes of guilt, finding gems of awareness and providing detailed eco-wise shopping guides for the body, the closet, the home and the larder.” – The New York Times

4. DIY Fashion

DIY Fashion by Selena Francis-Bryden

“DIY Fashion is a cool, quirky, and creative guide to making and customizing your own clothes, bags, and accessories. It contains more than 40 thrifty, sustainable, and stylish projects, none of which require prior skill or a sewing machine. From customized hand-me-downs to elegant evening wear, the book is packed with ideas that the reader can adapt to their own taste.” – Amazon

5. Eco-Chic, The Fashion Paradox

Eco-Chic, The Fashion Paradox by Sandy Black

“Sandy Black has divided the book into four chapters: The Greening of the Fashion Industry, Re-Designing Fashion, Fibre to Fabric and Fabric to Fashion. In the first chapter she has profiled six of the most influential players in the UK ethical fashion industry: the inimitable Lynda Grose, the pioneering Fair Trade label People Tree, the mainstream advocates Marks and Spencer, the long-term campaigner Katharine Hamnett and the style leader Sarah Ratty of Ciel. By choosing these six profiles to feature at the beginning of the book Sandy Black has very quickly laid out the complex territory on which the battle for ethical fashion must be fought.” – Treehugger

6. Green Is The New Black

Green Is The New Black-How To Change The World With Style by Tamsin Blanchard

“Tamsin Blanchard is a journalist and writer. Since 2005, she has been the Telegraph Magazine’s style director. Before that she wrote about fashion and interiors for The Observer, and spent three years as The Independent‘s fashion editor. She is contributing fashion editor to the V&A Magazine, and a sometime contributing editor to 10 Magazine. She has also written for Vogue, Marie Claire, US Harper’s Bazaar, and The Daily Rubbish. In the late Nineties, she co-founded “˜it’ a luxury boxed magazine for fashion, art and design. She has taught fashion journalism at Central Saint Martins and University of Westminster and is currently an external assessor at London College of Fashion.”

With a foreword by Lily Cole, and lots of contributions from designers and eco experts, it is an entertaining, inspiring guide on how to be fashionably green. – www.tamsin blanchard.com

7. Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys

Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys by Kate Fletcher

“Kate Fletcher is a practitioner and academic who has been working in the field of sustainable fashion for the last 15 years: she has recently become Reader in Sustainable Fashion at London College of Fashion. Her consultancy within the fashion industry, coupled with her educational experience, makes her uniquely well qualified to write this much-needed text. Fletcher, who has helped to develop the concept of “˜slow fashion’, is at the center of research in this area and calls upon both established texts such as McDonough and Braungart’s Cradle to Cradle and recent research from a wide variety of sources, including her own, to support her writing. The quality of research is high.” – Oxford Art Journal

8. co Chic: The Savvy Shoppers Guide to Ethical Fashion

Eco Chic: The Savvy Shoppers Guide to Ethical Fashion by Matilda Lee

“The hottest trend on the catwalk is ethical clothing. Top fashion designers and spokes models including Katharine Hamnett, Stella McCartney and Bono’s wife Ali Hewson are all voicing the benefits of eco chic. But what is this new fad, and what difference can it make to the world? “Eco Chic” gives you the full story on this fashion phenomenon, from which fabrics are harmful to the environment, to how you can create your own eco-friendly fashions through recycling and savvy shopping. You will discover how to spot and avoid garments produced in sweatshops and why supermarket ‘fast clothes’ make both you and the planet sick. This book will allow you to look great but also feel good about your impact on other people and the planet as a whole.” – Amazon

9. Designers, Visionaries and Other Stories: A Collection of Sustainable Design Essays

Designers, Visionaries and Other Stories: A Collection of Sustainable Design Essays by Jonathan Chapman and Nick Gant

“Designers, Visionaries and Other Stories boldly presents alternative understandings of sustainable design, to curate a challenging, sometimes uncomfortable and always provocative, collection of essays by some of the world’s leading sustainable design thinkers. The result is an authoritative anthology that reinvigorates the culture of critique that in previous years has empowered design with the qualities of social, environmental and economic revolution.” – Earthscan

10. The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy

The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power and Politics of World Trade by Pietra Rivoli

-¦a readable and evenhanded treatment of the complexities of world trade”¦ As Rivoli repeatedly makes clear, there is absolutely nothing free about free trade except the slogan.” – San Francisco Chronicle

11. Threads of Labour

Threads of Labour: Garment Industry Supply Chains from the Worker’s Perspective by Angela Hale and Jane Wills

“This book gives valuable insights for decision-makers in international clothing brands. Read it and learn how garment workers worldwide are affected by the sub-contracted manufacturing that characterizes this industry.” – Dan Rees, Director of the Ethical Trading Initiative

12. Eco Colour: Botanical Dyes for Beautiful Textiles

Eco Colour: Botanical Dyes for Beautiful Textiles by India Flint

“The essence of plants bursts forth in magnificent hues and surprising palettes. Using dyes of the leaves, roots, and flowers to color your cloth and yarn can be an amazing journey into botanical alchemy. In Eco Colour, artistic dyer and colorist India Flint teaches you how to cull and use this gentle and ecologically sustainable alternative to synthetic dyes.

India explores the fascinating and infinitely variable world of plant color using a wide variety of techniques and recipes. From whole-dyed cloth and applied color to prints and layered dye techniques, India describes only ecologically sustainable plant-dye methods. She uses renewable resources and shows how to do the least possible harm to the dyer, the end user of the object, and the environment. Recipes include a number of entirely new processes developed by India, as well as guidelines for plant collection, directions for the distillation of nontoxic mordants, and methodologies for applying plant dyes.” – Amazon

13. Green Chic: Saving the Earth in Style

Green Chic: Saving the Earth in Style by Christie Matheson

“Matheson slyly steers us toward consumer goods and services that minimize our earth-stomping human footprint. She’s brave enough to say ‘buy less of everything,’ and even the politically fraught ‘buy nothing.’ Matheson’s genius is to make this seem not only doable, but fun.” – Elizabeth Royte, author of Garbage Land and Bottlemania

14. Sustainable Fashion: Why Now?

Sustainable Fashion: Why Now? A Conversation Exploring Issues, Practices and Possibilities by Janet Hethorn and Connie Ulasewicz

“Sustainable Fashion: Why Now? is a critical read for anyone with ties to the fashion industry: designers, marketers, product developers, retailers, teachers, students, and consumers that want to become involved with balancing the fashion desires of the individual with the need to be a steward of our environment.” – Fashion Practice

15. Fugitive Denim

Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade by Rachel Louise Snyder

“Smart and ambitious, cosmopolite journalist Snyder maps the global garment industry, beginning in a New York loft where designers plot a line of ultra-pricey, socially responsible jeans that would ensure a fair wage for workers and not cause excessive environmental degradation. From there she visits cotton growers in Azerbaijan, denim specialists in Italy and factories in Cambodia and China. An excellent reporter, Snyder talks comfortably to both sophisticated designers and factory workers, conveying their very different motives as she paints a picture of an industry far more tangled than most consumers imagine. She notes that economic and employment shifts are felt globally, describing Italy mourning the loss of manufacturing to cheaper factories in Asia, where low-paying jobs represent unprecedented opportunity to many workers. If the prose occasionally verges on cuteness, it’s preferable to the jargon of quotas and NGOs ubiquitous in most discussions of global trade. Snyder’s investigation is an essential read for those curious about fashion or the globe-spanning business that produces their clothes.” – Publisher’s Weekly

Photo credit: Book pages by Horia Varlan on Flickr, licensed for commercial use under Creative Commons.

While not exactly embarking on a grand plan to steal Mother Nature’s secret of photosynthesis (like those crazy Chinese guys we talked about yesterday who Shanghaied the leaf), French designer Vivien Muller is also looking at leaves of green for energy-generating design inspiration.

Muller’s Electree is an indoor “sculpture imitating a bonsai,” its leaves being 54 mini photovoltaic panels. The device/artwork stores solar energy in a battery hidden in the sculpture’s base which feeds a USB port where you can recharge your cellphones, cameras, iWhatevers and other devices.

While its initial release is a limited edition of 20 “specimens” (gotta love the French), Designboom reports a “small family-run company” now produces the product and is hoping to manufacture Electree in a bigger series and at a lower price point than its out-of-the-gate $6,000-plus.

Electree comes in magnetized modules than can be assembled pretty much any which way so you can produce “une infinité de forme différentes.” (Yes, please.) This also means you can aim your mini solar pick-ups right at the Sun to increase the device’s effectiveness.

Muller also sees major growth opportunity for Electree and posits the development of what it calls the Electree City, an even larger plant - really tree-sized this time - whose leaves are solar panels. A solar-paneled shade tree. Hmmm. Maybe one’s coming soon to a park near you. “Nature has selected for a million years the most effective structures to capture energy from the sun,” says the designer. “That is why the sculpture was inspired by the plant.”

Raccoon dogs are bred, tortured, smashed to the ground and skinned alive in China. The unspeakable methods used amount to animal abuse in the most inconceivable way possible and you might be unwittingly endorsing it by simply buying a so-called faux fur jacket at Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, Burlington Coat Factory and dozens of other stores that simply ignore the Federal Fur Products Labeling Act.

It seems it’s easy for retailers to slide by the labeling clauses of the act, despite the fact unsuspecting buyers might be opposed to the slaughter, not to mention allergic to animal fur.

This has prompted at least one California leader to take action to change the system. Assemblywoman Fiona Ma, D-San Francisco, has followed in the footsteps of New York and four other states by introducing a law requiring  “conspicuous” labeling of all garments that include real fur. Ma announced the measure at a news conference joined by  Pierre Grzybowski of the Human Society’s Fur-Free Campaign.

Grzybowski says China’s lax animal welfare laws allow raccoon dogs to be raised by the millions and skinned alive and the fur is rarely disclosed on labels. He also paraded jackets, boots and other items purchased at Bay Area stores that contained rabbit and raccoon dog fur not listed on the labels.

The Humane Society fights against loopholes in existing laws which allow jackets trimmed with $150 worth of fur to be sold without labels. Since animal fur is often sheared and dyed to resemble synthetic coats, consumers are essentially being tricked into buying the real thing.

The need for labeling is clear, since we have no idea what we are getting from even the ritziest stores. For example, last summer, Neiman Marcus was caught misrepresenting a pair of Manolo Blahnik $1,495 boots – which it had advertised as “natural ocelot fur” – an endangered wildcat. Turns out the boots were actually common goat fur patterned with ocelot markings. If it had been ocelot it would have been a crime. Was it a crime that it was goat? Not yet.

Labels on clothes are as valuable as labels on food, which help consumers make choices for themselves. And the campaigns and state laws are moving retailers to shun fur all together. Among them is Overstock.com, which boasts revenues exceeding $700 million. It became the 100th on the Fur Free list of retailers and designers to commit to a no-fur policy.

Image: Jeremy Barwick, All Creatures; Democrats.Assembly

Image by: mandydale

My partner in Sixties vintage couture crime, artist Joan Davis, called me the other day and said I had to check out Torso Vintages, an ultra cool used couture outlet in San Francisco’s Union Square.

In town just a few days to pedal her flower-powered paintings, Joan had immediately sensed where to dig up archaeological relics of Pucci and Gucci – the way my pug can sniff a German Shepherd or hamburger a mile away.

I jotted down the name to this source for  shifts and clutches. Sure, there are ample consignment shops around in  chic towns like ours, but few sell what connoisseurs consider three dimensional art, i.e. something Jacky O. or Lily Pulitzer would have worn to lunch at Harry’s Bar with the girls. You have to weed through lots of synthetic yardage and depleted, tired boas to find the real gems.

As it turns out, the source she told me about is among the vendors strutting their fabulous stuff on the hottest new online boutique for the real McCoys of vintage fashion style.

Yes, hopeless fashion romantics such as Joan and I are the types 1st Dibs is banking on to do for Geoffrey Beene A-line cloaks and YSL Jockey Hats (above)  what the Web site did for haute  furnishings: Gather the best offerings from dealers around the world to sell for a range of prices.

That range at 1st Dibs cuts a wide swath:

From the doable after a glass of wine with lunch: Whimsical Pierre Cardin sunglasses from the 1960s. $250.

To the the pretty pricey: 1960s Pucci shift, $400, and Ungaro dress, $650.

To the investment statement: M. Haskell 1940′s Multicolored Fringed Bib Necklace USA, 1940′s. $3,250.

To a taste of  Samantha Jones at Versailles: Hermes Birkin of Matte Black Porosus Crocodile. $65,000.

John Hadeed, owner of Torso Vintages, finds 1st Dibs is helping to put him and others in his stylish field on the map in a big way.

“We’ve had calls and emails from all over the country and the world,” the collector told SF Gate.  “We’re dealing with people who really love clothes.”

Michael Bruno, the clever founder of 1st Dibs, hired vintage couture expert Clair Watson (above) to supervise the fashion site and locate the first dealers. They include seasoned second-hand harvesters with a penchant for Hermes, such as Createurs de Luxe, and the owner of the Way We Wore in Los Angeles, a dealer named Doris Watson who is offering her most precious and rare works of art to the website.

The good news is vintage is on a roll because of the recession and our renewed appreciation for classics over buying new junk made abroad.

Check out the site and see if there is anything you can afford (that’s bigger than a size 2 or 4) to add to your wardrobe. All you do is click on the era that suits you (from Deco to Contemporary).

What’s the best deal you can score on the site? Perhaps an undesirable Chado Ralph Rucci evening bag for $175. This is not the place to pluck the deal of the century.

Main Image: 1st Dibs

Image two: Vintage Shopping Guide

There’s “penny pinching” and “getting your money’s worth”, but what happened to “more for your money”? Where went the possibility of making a true investment and feeling secure and confident that yes, you spent your money well?

In these trying, financially frenzied times, the possibility of more of anything is very rare indeed. That’s why UK-based Vintage Academe is so significant. It’s much, much more than a fancy internet shop.

It all began last November 24th when the website launched with little more than a vintage frock or two in stock. Two British fashionistas, with business minds to boot, joined forces and closets to offer the everyday style savvy woman a chance at quality vintage clothing.

Vintage Academe “sources from the most important names in fashion and couture history: Balenciaga, Balmain, Dior, Lanvin and Yves St Laurent, to name a few, as well as a carefully selected collection of unlabelled pieces, chosen for their beauty, historical significance or wearability (and often all three).”

The focus is on quality – the goal is a glamorous selection of beautiful, timeless pieces that will never go out of style. Personally, I’d much rather put my hard-earned money towards a fabulous classic than the latest fast-fading trend.

But the fabulousness doesn’t stop there. Peruse Vintage Academe and you’ll find clothing care tips and The Journal, a blog-like stadium offering the latest fashion news. And of course, there are the Academes or special events held locally to gather like-minded vintage vixens for sharing, exploring and enlightening themselves about all things vintage and couture.

If you live in London and consider yourself a suitable student of vintage, sign up here for the opportunity to apply for an invitation to these exclusive affairs. Do it because I can’t (living in L.A. does have a few disadvantages), and then report back to me all the delicious details.