The trend for corset cuts and waist flattering peplums highlights a return to the hourglass shape. Is it a sign of curvier times to come?

Save for the ladies of Mad Men, it’s been a while since the hourglass figure had a fashion moment. Recent runways were loaded with corset cuts and elegant peplum flaring at the waist – so when it comes to tips on spring’s chicest silhouette, it seems it’s all in the hips.

The 1980s were the last time peplum and corset fashion styles were popular, then they were accompanied by exaggerated shoulders, leg of mutton sleeves and most regrettably, giant bows (fortunately 2012’s designers have modernized the waisted looks, pairing them with sleek pencil skirts and skinny pants to maximize their midrift-minimizing magic).

Vivienne Westwood’s Portrait Collection A/W 90-91 corsets were a catwalk expression of punk sexuality.

Before becoming a mass fashion trend, Vivienne Westwood was the first designer of the twentieth century to reinvent the corset in the mid-1970s. One of her most important fashion ideas, they quickly become a signature theme in her work. Modeled from those of the eighteenth century, her corsets flattened and raised the bosom, giving women a unique sense of power and glamor.

Madonna famously wore Gaultier’s corsets during her world-tour in 1990.

Jean Paul Gaultier followed in Westwood’s footsteps designing 1950s inspired corsets in homage to those his beloved grandmother wore. Gaultier’s fetishtistic corsets became iconic when Madonna wore them during her Blond Ambition world-tour in 1990. According to fashion historian Valerie Steele, “No longer the symbol of women’s oppression, the corset had become the symbol of sexual empowerment.”

Dolce & Gabanna’s romantic A/W 2012 collection cemented the trend for corset detailing to continue into the Fall.

Now & Then: The History of Lace

Now & Then: The History of the Platform Shoe

Now & Then: The History of Fitness Wear

Now & Then: The History of the Paisley Print

Now & Then: The History of the Pencil Skirt

Now & Then: The History of the Cocktail Dress

Now & Then: The History of the Trench Coat

Now & Then: The History of the Bold Brow

Now & Then: The History of the Cuff

Now & Then: The History of Turtlenecks

Now & Then: The History of Tights

Now & Then: The History of Skinny Jeans

Now & Then: The History of the Chevron Stripe

Now & Then: The History of Penny Loafers

Now & Then: The History of Go-Go Boots

Now & Then: The History of the Poet Blouse

The post Now & Then: The History of the Fashion Corset appeared first on EcoSalon.

Kick start that spring feeling with fashion’s best new films.

Fashion lovers are generally a visual lot. As the growing interest in Pinterest, Tumblr and other image-based social tools demonstrates, more and more of us like to absorb information visually. So if you’re thinking its time to turn your winter wardrobe into spring style, take a look at fashion’s best new films for color trends, silhouettes and fabrications to look out for as the warmer months slowly approach.

Above. In the captivating 16mm film entitled, “She Builds Domes in Air,”  by acclaimed artist Catherine Sullivan, Kristen McMenamy stalks the intricate inner and sensory worlds of the Alexander McQueen spring/summer collection – designer Sarah Burton’s third and most celebrated yet.

Burton tells AnOther Magazine: “The McQueen woman doesn’t want to feel casual. It’s not that kind of world. When you put on the clothes, they make you stand differently, feel differently. It was about how to do that but make it feel light. I’ve always been part of Lee’s romantic side, that’s what I love. Although there are elements of this collection that are quite dark, even sinister, there’s always a romance to it, a delicacy. Empowerment and protection: Working here, you always have to bring it back to Alexander.”

Geren Ford Spring 2012 Fashion Film from Geren Ford

For those dreaming of clothing suitable for a springtime spent outdoors, check out the first in a series of fashion videos featuring the spring 2012 collection of lifestyle brand, Geren Ford.

Ford describes the film to Racked : “Echoing the line’s wanderlust for life and as-chic-at-noon-as-at-midnight ethos, the film is a visual recap of ‘the night before,’ a peek into late-night mischief of a get together where decorum and good manners went home hours ago and with each step unfolds epic house party lore, mischief and chaos, and the blossoming of young love.”

Lane Crawford: High Style on Nowness.com

A meditation on the ephemeral qualities of fashion, luxury store Lane Crawford’s “The Pinnacle of Style,” takes us behind the scenes of its spring 2012 campaign. Shot by powerhouse photographic duo Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott and starring China’s biggest stars Li Bing Bing and Chen Ran, the animated short presents the store’s latest collections from the likes of Azzedine Alaïa, Céline, Givenchy, and Yves Saint Laurent.

Lane Crawford Fashion Director Sarah Rutson explains to Nowness: “The power of fashion to help an individual express themselves is central to the store’s ideology. As Mark Twain said, ‘Clothes make the man, naked people have little or no influence on society’. Clothing is an outward expression for someone to show their individuality, as the essence of who they are.”

The post Fashion Feeling: Spring’s Best Fashion Films appeared first on EcoSalon.

We want more fashion and jewelry in museums. Whether it’s because interest in fashion designers is more a part of mainstream culture now or because clothing seems more accessible to us than a Picasso or a Julian Schnabel. Either way, our appetites were whetted by the MET’s game-changing Alexander McQueen show and museum programming committees across the country have taken note.

With some fantastic new and ongoing exhibitions on view, and some exciting ones slated for 2012, a visit makes for a great low impact fashion experience. And here’s another green idea – let the creativity you see inspire yours. With thrift stores teaming with clothing and old sewing machines headed for landfill, interpret an idea that inspires you and recreate it to quell that need we all have for newness in our wardrobes. Here are four don’t-miss exhibitions to check out.

While she may not be eating much for a while, style icon and Guinness heiress Daphne Guinness has had the energy to put together the new exhibition Daphne Guinness at the museum at FIT, which opened last Friday and will run through January 7. If you enjoyed the MET exhibit, head over to see her extraordinary wardrobe that features plenty more McQueen’s. As a close friend of the late designer and as the owner of McQueen muse Isabella Blow’s entire clothing collection, the exhibition will include more than two dozen McQueen garments which have never been displayed. An unlikely voice against copious consumption, she famously said, “We need better things, not more. We should not pollute the world with meaningless, unused things when we can make and support things of rare and precious beauty.”

In every clothing collector’s paragon of rare finds is an original Giorgio di Sant Angelo. The enigmatic designer’s first fashion retrospective opened over the weekend at Arizona’s Phoenix Art Museum. Running through Feb, 12, the long-overdue show features more than 40 ensembles and accessories, along with sketches and collection books that span the designer’s career from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. Known for his ability to drape a unique look on the spot, his signature kaleidoscope prints, flowing fabrics, Native American touches, fringing and piled-on color and clashing textures are influences recently seen in Rodarte, Proenza Schouler and Isabel Marant’s collections. Underscoring the way the industry reinvents and revisits its history as well as the thrill of costume history, the show could not be more timely.

Don’t miss the last week of Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts exhibit Helmut Newton: White Women, Sleepless Nights, Big Nudes. The first large-scale U.S. exhibition of Newton’s work, it features the entire contents from his first three groundbreaking books: White Women (1976), Sleepless Nights (1978), and Big Nudes (1981). Whether you agree or not about his highly-charged, sexual take on modern female identity, his influence on the fashion industry is undisputed with designer Karl Lagerfeld and Vogue editor Anna Wintour contributing to the new exhibition catalogue.

For those that enjoy the pure fantasy escape from everyday lives that fashion can offer, put the October 22^nd opening of Charles James: Genius Deconstructed at the Chicago History Museum on your calendars. The museum boasts the second largest collection of James pieces in the world among its 50,000-piece costume collection. The show explores the history of couture fashion designer Charles James and why nearly 40 years after his death, the engineered perfection of his complex and unique constructions still inspire today’s designers and fashion lovers.

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What kind of clothing will our children be looking at in museums in the future?

When I’m in London, my first stop is always the Victoria and Albert museum in Kensington. It houses the world’s best costume collection. Over the years I’ve collectively spent weeks in there, my nose quite literally pressed up against the glass, eyes hungering over panniers, whalebones and crinolettes.

Dress history is the best kind of history to me. Imagining a fellow human, the living breathing body beneath the layers, provides a very direct link from the past to the present. Visiting the First Ladies inaugural dress exhibit at the Smithsonian last month, Jacqueline Kennedy seemed bigger than I’d imagined, Hillary Clinton smaller. Small details for sure, but nonetheless they are details our minds like to inexplicably linger upon.

First Ladies Inaugural Dress Exhibit at the Smithsonian, Washington, D.C.

With the world-class Balenciaga exhibit at San Francisco’s De Young museum wrapping up last weekend, the Jean Paul Gaultier retrospective opening at Montreal’s Museum of Fine Arts and the decision to extend the Met’s simply stunning Alexander McQueen “Savage Beauty” show due to record breaking numbers of attendees—clearly the passion for past fashion is striking a chord.

“Fashion exhibitions are thus the height of fashion,” wrote Suzy Menkes for the New York Times earlier this week on the growing trend of high production, money-spinning fashion exhibits. “The explosion of museum exhibitions is only a mirror image of what has happened to fashion itself this millennium. With the force of technology, instant images and global participation, fashion has developed from being a passion for a few to a fascination — and an entertainment — for everybody.”

Alexander McQueen’s “Oyster” Dress at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City

Has the availability of mass-market fashion made us look at and appreciate fashion beyond the immediate trends to analyze changing style in a social context? Or perhaps the values of creativity, custom design and hand production that we so admire in the work of the great designers, deliver greater rewards than our desire for cheap clothing?

You’d think that the kind of clothing, bourgeois and haute couture, shown in museums would be alienating for the majority of us t-shirt and jean wearers. And yet the growing popularity of clothing exhibitions is testament to interest beyond our need simply for clothes.

The great Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer once said that nothing is design until ordinary people use it. People around the world want to enjoy an aesthetic quality in their everyday lives. The worry is whether our desire for an aesthetic translates to design that is meaningful beyond an act of consumption.

Cristóbal Balenciaga at the de Young Museum in San Francisco

I guess the big question is what kind of clothing will our children be looking at in museums in the future?  When I see clothing at fashion exhibits like the Balenciaga show I saw recently, I’m reminded of the ethical couture created by the green designers I cover. Like “the Picasso of fashion,” Cristóbal Balenciaga, they are personally invested in their designs, committed to supporting local craftsmanship and the production of handmade materials. It’s fashion that’s not created from fickle top-down design trends but rather from the visionary spirits of designers who claim the earth’s future through clothing.

The post Exhibiting The New Fashion appeared first on EcoSalon.

Wool and the Gang’s DIY knit kits allow you to be the designer.

In October 2007, Wool and the Gang Co-Founder Lisa Sabrier became fed up with mass consumption and decided “to transmit traditional values to her children and grandchildren,” figuring that it was important to have a conscience while still living life to its fullest. As an avid scuba diver, windsurfer, and skier, another way she knew she could channel her love for exploring environment was through a a fashion lens where she could explore her affection for proportion and shape.

Around the same time, Co-founder Carolyn Main was tapping into her own passion for the thread while knitting in front of a fire in the Swiss Alps. Forever an adventurer with a penchant for travel and the need to witness other cultures first-hand, Main says she still sees travel “as a way for people to discover, or re-discover, the skill of hand-knitting,” based on the strength of the craft.

Joining forces, the two created Wool and the Gang, featuring seasonal capsule collections that fit with ease into any wardrobe based on how one wears them. In addition to buying the pieces straight out, you can also opt to buy a kit which includes knitting needles, soft Peruvian yarns and easy to understand patterns to create your own design. Never picked up a pair of knitting needles in your life? The gang also offers video tutorials on different stitches as well as in-store knitting classes. Take the easy way out and buy the completed designs here.

There are the women that drive business and then there are the artists behind it. WATG’s creative design team hails from the houses of Balmain, Colette, and Alexander McQueen, and collectively encapsulate everything that is industry cool from experience not only in reputable design houses but from the music and textile industry. Here are some styles they’ve recently designed you can pick up at either Wool and the Gang or at Kaight.

Tala Tank, $100

The Diana Sweater, $179

Sexy Back Sweater, $189

Mary Sweater, $179

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Why polarized opposites in fashion might be just the thing we desire.

The recently opened Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute is a darkly romantic celebration of an increasingly taxidermied world and the subversive tailoring of our lives, showcased in a manner that is unsettling but wondrous to behold. How do we process the current excitement circulating around Savage Beauty’s display of sadomasochistically-corseted mannequins, Swarovski feathered creations, or sculpted shoes in the shape of mutated spines or iridescent armadillos? Does the brilliance of this deceased designer and the assembling of close to one hundred of his looks, and seventy of his accessories illustrate a vast wilderness mired in outlandish fantasy, or do we dare to look at and maybe even adopt them as personal costume? “Savage Beauty” lures us into this paradoxical lair, and pillages our politically correct assumptions about what might be “sustainable,” and essentially rule breaking in contemporary fashion.

‘Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty’ on view in the Met’s Cantor Galleries

Whether or not you are an ardent fan of the late Alexander McQueen’s designs is really not the issue up for debate, as this exhibition is such a marvel of art, fashion, and design innovation that it is a mind-blowing success simply as a museum installation feat. Like the designer’s runway shows or multi-media presentations, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute team really went the distance to create a visual feast of romanticism on overdrive, and in such a short period after McQueen’s death. The extremes of modern nature and the depths of the designer’s savage styling techniques are brought to life using digital technology, a fashion hologram, dramatically lit mannequins, and dioramas of the imagination that seem otherworldly but anchored in tactile materials.

Ivory silk “Oyster” Dress from Irere, Spring/Summer 2003

Andrew Bolton,  the curator of the exhibit, describes in a video transcript how “Savage Beauty very much epitomizes the contrasting opposites in McQueen’s work. As you enter the exhibition, you’re faced with two mannequins—the two mannequins that I think represent many of the themes and ideas that McQueen revisited throughout his career: polarized opposites, whether it’s to do with life or death, lightness or darkness, predator/prey, man/machine.” Continuing with this theme of polarity, the five collections on view explore McQueen’s engagement with the romantic sublime and the dialectics of beauty and horror: Dante (autumn/winter 1996-97), Number 13 (spring/summer 1999), Voss (spring/summer 2001), Irere (spring/summer 2003), and Plato’s Atlantis (spring/summer 2010).

“Jellyfish” Ensemble, Plato’s Atlantis, Spring/Summer 2010

The poetic references and the extreme craft involved are all about the dream that this immensely talented designer embarked upon, and in this case, ventures far beyond the concerns of conventional season-to-season output and retail concerns. The untimely death of McQueen in February 2010 threw into question the unbearable pressures of the fashion industry and the houses that set unrealistic delivery expectations and bottom line goals. It is no wonder that McQueen set out to push our buttons, challenge us like never before, and drape us in the very shrouds of life and death that we rotate through as consumers.

I am not going to pluck apart this exhibit by highlighting certain pieces or favorites, as this would be like dismembering a multi-headed organism that is so much more than the sum of its parts. We all know what the showman McQueen artfully and cleverly served up upon graduation from Central Saint Martins in London and his time at Givenchy. He shook the fashion world then, and he continues to now, even with Sarah Burton at the helm.

Widows of Culloden, Autumn/Winter 2006–2007

What I took away from my initial visit to “Savage Beauty” was just how much we need to address those fashion conventions that genuinely stifle our creativity and ideas about self in relation to the environment. Not everyone will relate to McQueen’s tartan-infused Highlander designs or condone the use of exotic (animal) references in gowns that mimic wild creatures or repressed beings contorted into exaggerated silhouettes. What one can marvel at though, is just how apt the “polarized opposites” are for the dialogue that we need to have with our psyches as “Rulers, keepers, or stewards” of  the natural world.

Spray-painted cotton muslin, No. 13, Spring/Summer 1999

It is not very sustainable to live in a tidy state that revolves around only one part of the equation. We need to look the other half in the face and try it on, feel its threads, and reweave “it” into something of an unprecedented, rule-breaking design. Savage beauty is not safe; it might not even be beautiful as we have come to tame it. But we are definitely at a crossroad where sustainability and fashion should not be safe either, to the degree that we isolate ourselves from unprecedented change and repeatedly deny that the grotesque is actually part of true desire and an even deeper connection with the natural realm.

Images: Metropolitan Museum of Art blog (photographed by Sølve Sundsbø)

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A fashion industry insider reports.

Charles Frederick Worth was one of the world’s first noted fashion designers (See his Court Dress, above). In 1845, a fashion designer was an artist, highly regarded and sought after by the society of the royal court to advise on their wardrobe choices. Worth’s main concern, as a designer, was to design and handmake one of a kind haute couture that would distinguish each of his customers. Associated with class, distinction, style, and influence, people like Worth have been labeled taste-makers for well over a century. Relics aside, today, the role of a fashion designer is far more complicated, competitive, and multifaceted than ever before.

Well known designers, such as Stella McCartney, have been known to express a desire to run away from the industry after a season. When she received harsh criticism after her debut collection from the press in 2001, McCartney told NY Magazine, “People think I’m strong, but actually I wanted to crawl away. I thought, I’m going to live in the country with my horse and I’ll get a nine-to-five; I don’t need this.”

However, with hundreds of new designers emerging to show at fashion weeks around the world each season, even negative press is better than the alternative of no press. Minor complaints aside, in the past few years, incidents suggest that there are more serious issues afoot plaguing designers than insults from the press. From John Galliano’s drunken Nazi rantings, to Marc Jacob’s repeated drug problems, and the most tragic being Alexander McQueen’s suicide last year, designers seem to be experiencing something beyond the usual industry stress. With all of these melt downs, one has to ask: Might these outbreaks just be symptoms of a larger system failure?

To understand the current circumstances, one must first understand the role of a designer. Today, the designer actually functions as a Creative Director, overseeing many different pieces of the company’s product design, execution, brand imaging and positioning, and much of the marketing and press. Another key part of the role is being accountable to the Financial Officer, also known as the “Money” of the business. Which means a designer really has to understand every step, cost and stage of their business to be able to make well informed decisions on how to steer the business. Below is a diagram to illustrate everything that must be managed and considered in order to produce and sell fashion on a mass market level. The arrows describe the tiers of power throughout the system.

In a cascade system, such as in a fashion house, each part of the system is dependent on the other. Therefore, if one part of the system fails, the entire system collapses. And yet, somehow, up until recently, this system has been quite efficient across the board for most well known fashion houses. This system has been able to maintain because the least powerful and the lowest paid group within the system, the laborers, farmers, and factory workers, make up the largest part of the system’s labor pool, keeping the costs and product prices low. Ironically, these links just happen to be what keeps the whole system going.

The other factor that the fashion system relies heavily upon, but also pays little for, are materials. However, if the costs of labor go up because, for instance, a country like China decides to enforce and increase their labor standards (which is currently happening), the standards raise across the board in other countries. Over time, the price of the product must go up as well. If cotton crops fail repeatedly due to climate changes, the cost of materials increase across the board due to shortages, and the price of the product goes up again. If the price offered to customers goes up dramatically, amidst all the cheep and cheerful overstock product flooding the market from last year, customers simply won’t buy it. After all, most people already have enough stuff. The brand will only sell items on sale, which results in job instability of everyone in the cascade system.

The Designer and the “Money” must take the issue seriously and find a solution before the system can continue on a healthy level. However, limited resources and rising labor costs are not an easy problems to solve, especially when you have an extremely competitive market and are running a complex system already set up to work only one way. Unfortunately, there are only a few options within the fashion industry to stay afloat:

The Iron Fist Solution, á la H&M: Make the customers temporarily happy by making and selling enormous amounts of low price-tag products of cheap quality. In this case, the cost of business operations is covered through the slivers of profit on each item sold, and multiplied by the tens and hundreds of thousands of items that are produced. With this solution, the brand needs to be able to sell directly through their own stores and the designer must have some kind of monopoly over materials and labor to keep the prices of the goods exceptionally low. This technique will destroy the competition, as long as the designer can continue running the business on minimum costs. However in the current environment, this is not a long term solution. The costs of materials and labor will go up as resources continue to run low, which is caused by the mass production of poor quality goods in the first place. At this point, the company is chasing its own tail, and even if  the company using the Iron Fist Strategy can hold out long enough to put the competition out of business, eventually they’ll put themselves out of business if they don’t innovate their process at some point so that they find a solution to materials shortages.

The Velvet Glove Solution a.k.a. the Luxury Market Method: Invest in maintaining the appearance and allure of a “luxury brand” while selling a lot (although maybe not as much as an H&M) of lower cost product at “luxury” prices. Examples of this would be the Diors and Chanels of the world. This is the Iron Fist Solution seasoned with a little better quality and taste, and disguised by marketing that allows the brand to make a much higher mark-up on the sale of each item. Therefore, even if the brand is selling less items across the board, they make more for the operations budget on each item. So while we, the customers, equate Chanel with haute couture dresses and iconic tweed jackets, they’re making their money on selling patent leather (a.k.a. vinyl) shoes, handbags and perfume at exorbitant prices. This also destroys the competition, who can’t compete with the marketed “luxury” brand allure and history. While this solution may last for some time, provided consumers don’t get wise to the marketing schemes or lose their taste for “luxury,”  it again does not address the materials and labor cost increase issue, which eventually will cut into the marketing budget and over time might cause detriment to the brand.

The Performance Solution: They keep the costs of products proportionate to the costs of materials and labor. This solution invests in manufacturing technology, textile engineering, and science to keep ahead of the curb. This would be the Patagonia’s of the world. In this solution, there is almost no competition, you create your own niche market, and through innovations, you gain customer loyalty. Be the only one to know where to get materials that are made of recycled or renewable resources, thus removing the dependency on natural materials costs and you have created a more sustainable future for your company.

The Innovator’s Solution: There are always new designers and businesses springing up with a new way to do things. Whether it’s tackling marketing, design, or materials in new ways, this group of oddball fashion designers and indie-houses are thinking outside the box to drive consumer culture and the market out of the old ways. With the current media and market focusing on all things “green” and “socially responsible,” this new crop of innovative businesses are popping up to fill the hole in the market through the use of unthinkable techniques, collaborations, and technologies. Examples of these designers might be BioCouture, who creates leather jackets from tea film, Christopher Raeburn, who’s been known to use left over parachute material from the military to make windbreakers, or perhaps, Bright Young Things, whose marketing tactics appear to aim to convince people to buy less. While this growing “innovator” circle has not fully matured into well known designers in the mainstream, perhaps the mass market is not an innovative place to be if a designer is trying to plan for a future with fewer resources and fairly paid labor. However, these designers might just be the ones who ultimately find long term solutions to the current fashion crisis.

With all that is going on in the world’s environment, markets, and economies, it is easy to despair. From the standpoint of a designer, who oversees enough of the business to understand how things work (or how things don’t work), it’s like watching the ship going down in slow motion.

From their mast heads, some of the biggest designers of our times seem to be doing just that. Perhaps they’re just on their way to becoming relics themselves, without enough knowledge to change the way that their industry works altogether. Well, not all of them.

Karl Lagerfeld

Karl Lagerfeld is living in his ivory tower which he’s built so high that he might be the only one left with his head just above the water in the end. Recently he was quoted by Vogue as saying, “I have a lot more sympathy for people who have to take the train to work every day. What a load of nonsense.”

Sympathy, eh? “Designers are artisans who are extremely privileged to have a poetic profession. They are not artists. We have to stop saying that they are,”  Lagerfeld adds.

He makes the job look easy. Meanwhile those designers who feel all of the responsibilities behind the job, have panic attacks or worse. But let us remember back in 1975, in the thick of building his career to the empire he now owns, he mentioned to The Observer Magazine his philosophy on his own work practices, “I am a sort of vampire, taking the blood of other people.” With this work ethic he has gone very far, leading some of the most powerful and influential fashion houses in the industry, producing billions of dollars worth of product, and making people on all corners of the planet thirst for a wide range of products on an unprecedented level. Perhaps he actually is the bug that bites.  But then again, according to him, he doesn’t even take himself seriously. It’s a wonder that the rest of the world considers him a fashion guru.

Editor’s Note: Due to sensitive circumstances, the author has asked us to use a pseudonym. We have honored the request in this case.

Image: Joe Paczkowski

The post Is the Fabled Fashion Ship Sinking? appeared first on EcoSalon.

I’ve watched eco-fashion’s sizzling new designer Christopher Raeburn‘s film for his Spring/Summer Dazzle collection of jackets made from redeployed parachute silk, over and over again. It’s a nebulous fashion moment that I can’t quite put my finger on.

There are fashion moments we’ve all connected to. When I first saw Alexander McQueen’s amazing hologram of Kate Moss, fat tears heaved out of me. And Jackie Kennedy’s decision to keep on her blood-splattered pink Chanel suit for Lyndon Johnson’s swearing in, affects me even as a Brit. Then there are personal fashion moments. The first time I laid eyes on an Ossie Clark dress, for instance. The genius in its bias-cut intuitively understood how to flatter my shape before even I had it figured out.

I went down to San Joaquin Valley to look at California’s cotton farms last week. My neighbor on the bus and I were talking about our emotional connections to our clothes. At first, she’d insisted her clothes were just a uniform. Then, she remembered a special piece that had some significance. Would she ever throw it away, I asked? Her eyes delighted me, as they fixed onto a far away gaze.

Back to the point, and there is one – although I’ve warned you this is pretty nebulous stuff. Another memorable personal fashion moment occurred this year, when I opened up Vogue’s August issue to see Blake Lively wearing Christopher Raeburn’s battledress wool inuit parka (shown below). Not only was it my first introduction to the talented designer. I realized that the eco-fashion movement had produced something that stood on its own design merits, a lone eco note among conventional fashions in the industry’s bible. That parka was really cool. And, I really, really wanted one.

Three months later – I still really, really want one, by the way – and Vogue is seemingly foaming green at the mouth with articles on Marni’s recycled drinking bottle necklace, a locally-made skin care line and Stella McCartney’s enchanting country estate. I think it’s really great. I noted the somewhat flimsy eco-provenance of some of the looks in the “Naturally Refined” layout, shot by Patrick Demarchelier, but I’ve decided that undermining ‘baby steps’ is not the point either.

Ironically enough, the environment isn’t the only victim to fashion’s mass market appetite. The industry’s creative talent suffers too. The “mega-corporations are making creativity more difficult every season. The struggle between the demands of marketing and the freedom and needs of the creative process, the pressure to constantly sell more and to keep upping the ante on the shows with more celebrities and always more press coverage, these are the things that are literally killing fashion” – someone else’s point, by the way.

There are lots of great ideas about what sustainable fashion needs to be defining and some inspired critical thinking – like this – about how to maneuver the luxury goods market.  If we want to produce  “heirlooms-in-waiting” as “an antidote to throwaway fashion,” we’ve go to embrace our emotional connection to clothes, and celebrate the industry’s creativity and aspirational fashion editorial – and the enduring desire it induces. It all matters. It’s all the point.

Back to Christopher Raeburn‘s cute little fashion moment – what do you think? I still haven’t really figured out why, but it makes me happy every time I watch it. And maybe, that’s the point too?

The post Happiness Is Fashion: What’s the Point? appeared first on EcoSalon.