A sustainable fashion reporter looks for new ways to keep readers abreast of fast fashion issues like the recent Bangladesh garment factory disasters. 

The media moves stunningly fast these days, and the consequence is that stories like the recent Rana Plaza garment factory disaster in Bangladesh and the impact of breakneck production of fast fashion, are often relegated as old news within hours. As a busy reporter and editor at the heart of the eco news scene, Amy DuFault is all too familiar with the pace of today’s media machine and the cost of not paying full attention. “It will happen again and again,” she said. “Until we start realizing that consuming at the pace we are currently cannot support human rights or the environment.”

DuFault decided to take matters into her own hands by creating and promoting a run of limited-edition t-shirts emblazoned with the names of the four garment factories at the center of the garment factory crisis: Spectrum, Ali, Tazreen and Rana. According to DuFault, “Each of the four garment factories listed on the t-shirt have contributed to roughly 1,618 deaths, an equal amount of injuries and serial maiming that goes beyond human recognition.”

Beyond drawing attention to the crisis, the t-shirts were made to show that, as DuFault says, “fashion can be done right.” Inspired by Experimental Jetset’s “John & Paul & Ringo & George” design, the t-shirts use non-toxic water-based inks and are made from an entirely traceable supply chain by TS Designs in Burlington, North Carolina. 100 percent of the proceeds will go to the Clean Clothes Campaign to support their continued coverage and monitoring of working conditions in the global garment industry.

We caught up with Amy DuFault as she got set to launch the initiative, here’s what she had to say:

Rowena Ritchie: Why is it so vital we keep the Bangladesh disasters fresh in people’s minds?

Amy DuFault: The New York Times wrote recently that Bangladesh was the deadliest disaster in the history of the garment industry, but the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh was just one of many garment factory disasters. There are deaths daily in garment factories from faulty old machinery maiming people, to blocked fire access routes during suffocating fires. In the case of Bangladesh, I feel like we hit an all new low when a factory could illegally retro-fit extra floors to accommodate bargain chains so that the managers could fulfill even bigger orders, faster. All this constant shopping to fulfill some aching need for meaning… our need to buy cannot ever come at the expense of another human being no matter how deep our addiction.

RR: Why did you feel personally motivated to launch this initiative?

AD: My original thought with all this was to just get money together from all my colleagues who were tweeting and Facebook posting their hearts out. Many of us felt we might need to start a support group from how depressed we all were hearing the daily death tolls, seeing those horrible images of young women sticking out of rubble and labels from fast fashion houses all over the place.

Speaking on a personal level, I went to a very dark place feeling powerless and that having been a part of the sustainable fashion industry for more than 8 years now–how could it have only gotten worse?

But through it all, I saw new leaders emerge and groups like the Clean Clothes Campaign, who are really taking action by reporting, protesting, and getting people to sign petitions that legally bind companies to fair labor rights. I wanted to support their efforts by helping to keep the story fresh in people’s minds.

RR: What’s the significance of making a t-shirt – don’t people have plenty of them already?

AD: It’s true, we do have tons of t-shirts in our drawers… I recently met Eric Henry from TS Designs when I was in Manhattan and I was wooed by his story of “dirt to shirt” manufacturing in Burlington, North Carolina. His story seemed to me a perfect fit with what I wanted to do–create awareness of basic human rights in garment factories, but show how fashion can be done right on a human as well as environmental level from “dirt to shirt.” Every t-shirt we made has a number on it that you can track and see who made your shirt. Everything is made and produced within 100 miles of Eric’s facility and there is little he doesn’t know about his business.

That there could be some slight possibility that a shirt made sustainably from beginning to end in this country could help remember the plight of garment workers thousands of miles away–and potentially start a conversation that starts a bigger dialog–is such a powerful thing.

Top Image:  Dan Cutrona

The post Can Another T-shirt Stop Fast Fashion? appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

I recently got a direct message on Facebook from a high school friend I haven’t talked to in many years.

“Do you still have that picture of you and the ghost in Africa?” He wrote.

I sat there staring at the screen, thinking it funny that after so many years, this friend would still remember and even want to see proof once again that I had in fact, a run-in with the dead.

I hadn’t seen the picture in many years myself so accepted the challenge and dove into the closet that I knew it would be in-the one containing my dogeared travel trunk from when I was 19.

In this trunk is anything a human being would want to intimately know about me from the ages of 12-26: Kodak envelopes filled with negatives and blurry pictures of travel and boyfriends, shells and rocks from a beach in Cinque Terra, Italy, bits of the Berlin Wall, my silver monogrammed cigarette case, a blood red turban from that weekend in the Sahara, my memere’s vintage National Geographic maps and stacks of private journals documenting daily experiences from coffee shops, bows of ships, southwestern desert ruins and deep in the dark woods of the Pacific Northwest.

If you’re anything like me, once you open a portal that big, you have to just dive in. Flipping open my very first journal, messy handwriting chronicles sleepovers, dreams of kissing boys and whole pages where I just wrote “Fuck you mom and dad!!” as if it would help being a tween in 1982 with the world on fire and a Marlboro clenched between my teeth.

Leaps forward to high school and college prove the most lethargic with Kate Chopinesque awakenings that pushed me off the island of Cape Cod for the first time and onto a plane bound for Florence, Italy and school and new friends who knew nothing about me, except that I had a foul mouth, was a “writer” and proved to be an exceptional candidate for painting and sketching countless pictures of.

Flipping the pages, dried flowers from mountainsides, locks of hair and train tickets fell out on my legs. History.

It was during this time living in Europe that the ghost picture came to be. It was spring break, in the outskirts of the Sahara, and we’d just pulled our Jeep up to a cave inhabited by an Arabic woman tattooed with a lizard from her lip onward down her neck. The story itself is strange and long – how we got to be in this woman’s cave home – but we suddenly were and the woman never left my side, looping her arm within mine, staring into my face for the tour and appearing downtrodden as we left.

We figured she was just lonely, I mean, she lived there alone. This was verified by my travel mates who will vouch there was never a little girl there. Much less a girl in a burial gown that showed up months later back home in the famous picture.

But back to that old friend.

When I began searching in the trunk for the picture, I thought of why my friend would want to see it again. Had it altered his life somehow? Did he need to believe there was life after death? It certainly altered mine and the group I ran with at the time. It became an image we all came back to over coffee to ask “Why?” and “How could it be?” as it was perpetually side-lit with sandlewood candles and surrounded with bits of broken shells and sand.

I’m so sorry to say I did not find it, but have hopes it will one day tumble out from a book or be in my hand one sunny morning reaching for a pair of socks from the back of a drawer.

One thing I do need to point out is that this friend, who I wrote of at the beginning of the column still has not heard back from me about this picture. I came to the selfish conclusion that this was my history and I could write it however I wanted and he could write his own until just very recently, reading Joan Didion’s “On Keeping a Notebook.”

Didion writes: “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise, they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”

I wonder if this is how it was for my friend. Lying in bed with his wife, reflecting back on that lost time post-high school where he learned something he could never plainly label. Being a man of substance – a firefighter and a Sunday church goer, he opens his eyes in the twilight with a sigh and remembers that one piece of the puzzle that never made sense. That made him question and question and question “what if?”

Perhaps it is only our histories that in the end keep as a sounding board – our biographies that tell a billion histories from different perspectives. One, no more correct or truthful than the other. Each and every one part of life’s amazing puzzle.

Between the Lines is a weekly column by EcoSalon’s Editor-in-Chief on navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of conscious life and culture between city and country, between inner worlds and outer.

Image: Moyan Brenn

The post Between the Lines: Our Biographies as History appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

I have just returned back home from running around Manhattan and New York Fashion Week. As you might imagine, an intense week full of long legged runway models, moody designer presentations, and the deep bass beats of stylish music gives New York City the air of theater, sex, and retail desire. It’s also a week-long voyeuristic sneak peak at what we all hope to be wearing next spring and summer when emerging from our winter cocoons.

Fashion is sexy. It serves as both a transformative power pill and a retreat for the world-weary. It’s a place we can go to to become stronger by the very clothes we wear and in lieu of the fact that our inner strength isn’t enough. Power is sexy. If you think I am wrong, point me to the runway show you’ve been to recently that shows women hunched over in house dresses looking down at the ground from nerves.

Fashion is all about power and I couldn’t help thinking about it this past week. There were even times when photographing shows I put the camera down a little in order to see the model walking at me with my own eyes instead of through a lens. Some of them reeked of this confidence so much that I laughed out loud. It’s their job to trick us into believing that a certain look is all we need to get by in this world. It is their job to act as a visual representation of a designer’s ideal, a paper doll with folded tabs that takes off and puts on outfits that when our own, will help in terms of better jobs, business deals, romance and getting the job done.

While I am lucky to be covering sustainable fashion 99% of the time, where designer’s “About Us” pages tout social responsibility, closed loop technologies and organically grown fabrics, most of the fashion industry is just not there. Nor does it really care to be.

Case in point, waking to a story this morning on the Pakistan garment factory fire that has left (as of the writing of this column) 289 dead. In this, the biggest industrial accident in the country’s history, we are left to scratch our heads and wonder how this could be or maybe we don’t want to look at it too closely at the risk that it will tell us something about ourselves.

The “Inspection of industrial units by the provincial labor department was mandatory under the rules until 1997 when it was banned after demands by influential industrialists in the Sindh and Punjab provinces,” Shujah-ud-Din, a senior research associate at the Pakistan Institute of Labour, Education and Research, told Bloomberg by phone from Karachi. Factory accidents also claimed 419 lives in 2008.

The Karachi garment factory itself had locked fire exits, barred windows and there wasn’t a sprinkler in site. A single staircase connecting four floors became kindling for a boiler in the factory that burst into flames, engulfing all floors that were connected to it. Workers chopped away at the bars with tools to jump from 4th story windows – pregnant women, old men, nephews, aunts. People trying to make a living so that society could wear something new.

I recently interviewed Elizabeth Cline, author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion. Cline told me, “To our credit, it took consumers several decades to be convinced that they no longer wanted to own beautifully made clothing and to make them forget that $20 does not in any way buy a well-crafted garment.”

In a fast fashion crazed society, where we want more, faster, cheaper, we will always have stories like this in the headlines. Hard-working people who will accept being modern day slaves to put food on the table and a roof over their heads.

You will read all the headlines on this factory fire story and it will stay with you for a bit, until you need a new shirt, a pair of boots or a party dress. You might even consider the tragedy when you walk through the front doors of your favorite fast fashion chain. But you probably won’t be able to stop yourself once you hear the deep bass beat from the well-positioned speakers, the beads and bold colors merchandised like candy, the other women around you, arms laden with pretty dresses at $19.99, and how could you?

You were conditioned to shop this way. But let me tell you something, I think you can start walking past these stores, in fact, I think you can stay out of the mall entirely. I think you can plan ahead and look for the right designers who don’t have factories like this – who pay their workers fairly, who let them work from home who don’t treat them like animals.

People often tell me I can shop responsibly because I know so many designers, I just “know how to do it.”

But knowing how to “do it,” and realizing one has a responsibility to “do it,” are two completely different things. One requires making a call to the eco-boutique or hitting the local consignment shop and the other? Well, that requires lowering the camera and looking at life with a real-life lens.

It requires considering not just yourself, but the lives of many others.

Between the Lines is a weekly column by EcoSalon’s Editor-in-Chief on navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of conscious life and culture between city and country, between inner worlds and outer.

The post Between the Lines: From NYFW to the Garment Factories of Pakistan appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

Each day we wake up with hope. You may not realize it, but every morning when you brush your teeth, make a part in your hair, swipe your metro card or open the front door, you are subconsciously convinced that today will be a new, hopefully better day. If you were not, you would stay in bed, your teeth would rot, your door would be covered in spider webs from lack of use. Any opportunity you thought you might one day see? Gone.

Opportunity can knock more than once but it gets tired too.

But consider that you are that person putting coffee in a to-go cup and hustling out the door – what is your potential and what will you do today?

A few weeks ago, I was in Plattsburgh, New York, walking down the sidewalk with my 8-year-old niece. It was very quiet and still when she said plainly into the midday heat: “There are so many different ways we could live.”

Her statement made me smile. Yes of course.

“You have the mind of a writer,” I told her to which she walked a little taller suddenly.

But there’s only so much thoughtful information you can tell a child before they shut you off.  Only so much I can tell her about how I think about that exact same thing every time I see a tired mother driving and smoking with her kid in the passenger seat, when I see a bent old man feeding pigeons in a park, or when I see two friends saying goodbye at the train station. Where are we all going? Where have we all been? We have all walked so many miles.

Pointing at a spooky old Victorian up for sale I asked: “What if you lived there? What would your life be like?”

She squinted in the midday sun looking at the house. Its drooping front wrap porch, its stained glass windows covered in ivy, a cat jumping out of a nearby bush…

She shrugged and said “Probably pretty scary.” If I was 8, I might say that too.

But flip that idea and imagine the loving family that could have once lived there, mothers knitting with their daughters on the well cared for porch, the brothers sitting on the stoop talking to them, the father pulling in the driveway to a hot supper. At one time that house could have been filled with all the warmth and love any of us could ever dream of.

Could it be that one day, it was too hard to manage the house? The children grew older and went away, the husband passed, the wife, a widow, went to live in a smaller space so as not to have to tend so much? Alone the house sat until the very moment where we stood there staring, as if waiting for someone to come outside with wet hair and a coffee to-go.

It wasn’t really that it was scary, it’s that it wasn’t tended to. The door covered in spider webs, waiting for opportunity to wake up.

Between the Lines is a weekly column by EcoSalon’s Editor-in-Chief on navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of conscious life and culture between city and country, between inner worlds and outer.

Image: TheDarkThing

The post Between the Lines: Waking Up With Opportunity appeared first on EcoSalon.

The best of the week at EcoSalon, hand-quoted for your perusing pleasure.

“What to make of news that the Saudis are building a women-only industrial city in the Eastern Province of Hofuf – with similar plans for four more cities elsewhere?”

“It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a SCAM.”

“With that, I vowed to concoct my own variety (and acquire an ice cream maker to get the consistency just right). So, here we are, nearly 730 days later.”

“The seaside city is still dotted with my French Canadian relatives who must still believe that religious statues bleed and cry when we sin and masturbate.”

“Hummus is grey and tan and dull; it is the color of hopelessness.”

The post The Friday 5: Say What? Edition appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

I was brought up Catholic by two parents born and raised in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The seaside city is still dotted with my French Canadian relatives who must still believe that religious statues bleed and cry when we sin and masturbate.

If you go today to the Sacred Heart cemetery there, you will see plots marked with the DuFault, D’Avignon, Kerouac and Lauzon names marking territory where once both sides of the family flourished, but now, the cemetery is the most populated place to find us.

A main focal point as you drive through the city on I-195 is St. Anthony’s church, a soot covered, neglected cathedral you might see the likes of in Europe, (but taken care of). This is the place where my mother went to school her whole life and where as a child, I would sit at Sunday French mass en route to my memere and pepere’s house. I was very religious at that time and would be dizzied from the thick incense and stained glass windows, the chants in French and the organ player’s sonorous bass that would rattle my ribs. God was for sure watching. I was freaking scared.

“Seigneur, écoute notre prière,” over and over we would chant in hopes that the lord would of course hear the communal prayers of desperation, of desires to have better jobs, of hopes that this wasn’t all there was, and that life everlasting was a much better place than the shithole we were all festering in, albeit laced with some really great smelling Frankincense.

As I grew older and sinned a lot more, confessions dictated lots of Hail Marys. There on my knees, staring up at Jesus on the cross, I would recite the prayer, 5, 10, 20 times, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the lord is with thee…” as if some fictitious woman would suddenly descend from the heavens and save me from stealing, swearing and masturbating like a one armed bandit.

I slept with rosaries on my bed post to ward off devils, vampires and my older brother’s friends who tried to make out with me in the middle of the night when everyone was asleep. I prayed to The Virgin to uphold all the truths I was trying so hard to manage as a good, upstanding young woman and still nothing.

It wasn’t until I was about 18 that I realized, in life, WE are the Hail Mary and the Our Father and the Glory Be that will save us from the bad choices we make and the world we choose to create for ourselves. Thanks to the atheist friends who baptized me that 18th summer talking incessantly about life and freedom as we beat on drums and sang in wooded cathedrals.

A good friend mentioned in conversation the other day “this might be the Hail Mary we need.”

I laughed pretty hard when he said it and though I knew what it meant, I still looked it up for a proper definition:

“A Hail Mary pass or Hail Mary route in American football refers to any very long forward pass made in desperation with only a small chance of success, especially at or near the end of a half.”

For this referenced Hail Mary, there are no Woolworth’s rainbow headbands or Wet & Wild neon polishes to steal anymore. I swear like a truck driver still and those friends of my older brother? I would kick their balding, overweight asses the minute they puckered up. This Hail Mary, oh this one just might be calling on all things holy to help.

But one has to wonder where all the incense is, where the weathered relative’s faces are chanting like monks beside me, hoping and wishing, praying that pass will be the touchdown, that the Virgin Mary will open her statue eyes and say “You’ve done it. See, prayer works.”

Sometimes, it’s just the facts. It’s all about timing and money and how much you’ve got in you to weather a moral, ethical and physical hellstorm.

C.S. Lewis was quoted as saying: “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.”

Sometimes I feel like that Mary statue, my arms open as I wait at the end of the field trying to scream with my mouth set in stone.

Between the Lines is a weekly column by EcoSalon’s Editor-in-Chief on navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of conscious life and culture between city and country, between inner worlds and outer.

Image: vchili

The post Between the Lines: Living The Hail Mary appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

When I was 19, living in Italy and then backpacking Europe, I re-entered my life back here in the States with a whole new perspective on what I would want from the future. Oh, I could envision this virgin bucket list and sitting here writing this – at this very moment – I can tell you I remember what I FELT like when I saw the future and it had very little to do with being responsible.

(Bucket List 1990): To remain forever single, forever childless, to explore jungles clad in dirty tank tops and a camera around my neck shooting images of wild eyed women who have no idea why the hell I would want to be there, write a novel alone in a cabin on a mountain, learn how to fly a Cessna, have many affairs, romances, always take coffee with lots of cream, explore existential freedom, sexual freedom, get published in the New York Times, get published in National Geographic.

(Bucket List 2000): To love my husband forever, to take my two children to all the places that inspired me, to inspire at least 10 women to succeed, to buy a cottage on a lake, buy a 1963 Ford Falcon to look cool in, drive in New York City without having an anxiety attack, go on a roller coaster again, get published in the New York Times, get published in National Geographic.

(Bucket List 2010): Breathe more, take yoga weekly, take my two children to all the places that inspired me, inspire another 10 women to succeed, get that damn cottage on a lake, get published in the New York Times, get published in National Geographic (because for shit’s sake I know enough people who work there now).

(Bucket List 2012):

I had this column all mapped out for you. I was going to be clever but truthful and write a few things here about what is REALLY on my current bucket list. But as with life, and all the twists and turns it offers us, I stumbled upon an article in the daily newspaper early this morning.

A former philosophy professor who is forever my mentor and friend had written his own column with the title “A New Kind of Clock Tells the Truth.”

“Here are three things that we all know to be true,” he writes.

“1. The past does not exist.

2. The future does not exist.

3. All that does exist is the present.”

I often tell my 92 year old neighbor when she laughs and tells me I’ll “probably outlive her,” that in this life, we cannot always be so certain. I told her just last night on her back porch that at that very moment a satellite from space could suddenly plunge from on high and crush me right in front of her. She didn’t think that was so funny and went inside.

Bucket lists? To what purpose do they serve? To add to longings and make us feel inadequate with what we do have? I have everything I need at this very moment: a comfortable chair, a cold glass of lemon water, a light breeze on my shoulders and an audience who will read this article.

My family is safe and healthy and we have traveled. I have taken flying lessons, listened to countless women’s dreams, driven in New York City, rode roller coasters, taken yoga classes and sat quietly taking deep breaths.

I disagree a bit with my professor. I say the past does exist and that it has a big part of the present. That in the grand scheme of things, these experiences are all things that have made us who we are sitting here together. We have not only checked things off the list but we are the total of them. Regardless of whether they’ve been right or wrong, we are them.

How full we should be now and ready for the falling satellites.

Image: Naomi Lbuki

Between the Lines is a weekly column by EcoSalon’s Editor-in-Chief on navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of conscious life and culture between city and country, between inner worlds and outer.

The post Between the Lines: Rethinking the Bucket List appeared first on EcoSalon.

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”

– Jim Jarmusch

Inspired by the idea of inspiration, Editor-in-Chief and sustainable fashion consultant Amy DuFault, and curator/trender and heARTbeat columnist, Dominique Pacheco bring you the Influencer Project, in which ideas are found everywhere, and the creative force of cultural influence brings to fruition the genius of the creator.

We start The Influencer Project with artwork by Yayoi Kusama who is a national treasure of sorts in her native Japan. The Tate, where an exhibition of hers just closed, describes her so:

The nine decades of Yayoi Kusama’s life have taken her from rural Japan to the New York art scene to contemporary Tokyo, in a career in which she has continuously innovated and re-invented her style. Well-known for her repeating dot patterns, her art encompasses an astonishing variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance and immersive installation.

It ranges from works on paper featuring intense semi-abstract imagery, to soft sculpture known as Accumulations, to her Infinity Net paintings, made up of carefully repeated arcs of paint built up into large patterns. Since 1977 Kusama has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution, and much of her work has been marked with obsessiveness and a desire to escape from psychological trauma. In an attempt to share her experiences, she creates installations that immerse the viewer in her obsessive vision of endless dots and nets or infinitely mirrored space.

The influence of Kusama abounds in fashion at the moment as her much-anticipated collaboration with Marc Jacobs by Louis Vuitton was unveiled Tuesday at Louis Vuitton’s Fifth Avenue flagship store in New York. Kusama-inspired window displays and pop-up stores will open globally later this week, timed to coincide with the opening of a Kusama retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, following her run at the Tate Modern in London. Not to forget, the Vuitton venture will see a new line of ready-to-wear clothes and accessories, including polka-dotted jewelry, purses, shoes and watches.

In the case of sustainable fashion, we look at Kusama influences of patterns, dots and nets and ask is it truly life that imitates art, or is it that art imitates life?

Images from top to bottom: Kusama in Dots Obsession-Night, Olsen Haus, Kusama, Afia, Carrie Parry, Kusama, Kyler jewelry, Gretchen Jones, Natalie Frigo, Kusama, Dahl, Matt & Nat

Photo: Courtesy of Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc./Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Victoria Miro Gallery, London

The post Introducing The Influencer Project: Fashion Influenced by Yayoi Kusama appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

A friend commented on a recent column I wrote, saying, “The last time I went to hear a band in Boston, I realized I’d become the creepy older guy in the back of the room.”

“Creepy?” I asked him. “We’ve become creepy?”

Christ.

A few weeks ago I hit an indie music shop and instead of plopping down a dogeared album or a new band’s CD, I – completely embarrassed – laid down The Essential Simon & Garfunkel.

“Please, don’t say anything,” I said to the earlobe-gauged-20-something year old behind the counter. “I just like a few songs on this.”

“Hey,” he said from his perch looking down at me, “S&G have street cred!”

“Hmmmm….yes, they do,” I said, raising my eyebrows. “And staying power, too.”

Driving home from a meeting the following weekend, I called the only foodie I really know to tell her about my dinner.

“Oven fired pizza with local cheeses and veggies, and, don’t laugh at me, a beet, goat cheese, and spinach salad,” I said over her immediate laughter. But it tasted good regardless, I thought. And Simon and Garfunkel are still in music stores and I am still going to hear new bands – so have I really lost my edge?

I tried explaining it to my father.

“Edge?” He shouted, exasperated. “How do you ‘lose your edge?'”

I rubbed the rounded side of the dinner table. “Like this…not with an edge, dull, old hat.” He still didn’t get it. It was like I was speaking in a foreign tongue.

When is it we get to that point in our lives where we have the sudden (hard) realization that we are just that much older and not as cool? I’m not talking about saying words like gasoline, Sears & Roebuck and slacks, but that we just don’t have all the “right” words at just the right moment. We dance like we remember Uncle Don did at all those family weddings – freely but still, uncomfortably. When we go out with our closest friends who are a decade younger, people ask, “Is that your daughter?”

All those same, younger girlfriends see you as a “mentor,” someone with “so much experience” they can learn from, which is strange. You thought, the reason they wanted to hang out was because you were fun, not because you had anything to offer.

Walking through Midtown New York City a few Sundays ago en route to judge a handbag contest, I mused on all the times I’d walked alone in the city and how it never gets old. Being alone in a city, the possibilities are endless to just fade away and be someone else. It brings to mind a quote permanently tattooed in my head by British explorer and travel writer Freya Stark who once said: “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.”

Pleasant and full of anonymity.

I use enough expensive organic beauty products to look younger than I am, so who knows I’m not one of those edgy friends 10 years my junior? Especially with sunglasses on. Who is really to know I like listening to Simon & Garfunkel and eat goat cheese and beet salads? For all they know, I’m “that badass chic in that band, you know the one, that’s her isn’t it?”

If we are to define what this edginess means – if we even care at all – then I’m going to have to go with the line of thought that says what is cool is what is not.

There’s always going to be band I know and have hung out on a tour bus with that earlobe dude has not, there’s always going to be that food I ate with the Bedouins in Africa that my friend hasn’t (yet), and of course there’s the fact that I’m not creepy. Never will be. Unless I try being something I’m not.

And that CD with Art Garfunkel sporting a blonde afro? If I told you it reminded me of driving through the canyons in New Mexico with wrapped sage on my dash and carved animal totems, that it reminds me of some of the sweetest moments of my life adventuring alone with my dad’s old camera to take pictures of cliff dwellings and ruins, then maybe I’ve just convinced myself that getting older doesn’t make you creepy at all – it just makes you edgier from all the experience.

Image: Psylight

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EcoSalon’s Managing Editor Amy DuFault shows us how she plans to accessorize her favorite red jeans and freshly thrifted top this spring.

Ever wondered how our editors channel this season’s trends to complement the favorite pieces in their own wardrobes? Well, look no further. Here’s how our managing editor Amy DuFault is planning to accessorize her favorite red jeans (thrifted!) and a top she found at a Goodwill in Maine last weekend for $5. Her style is simple, with a tough-girl vibe and she likes pieces she can play with and mix up with other pieces already in her wardrobe. Amy lives by a solid cocktail ring and always wears either stud earrings or plain hoops, like these stunners by Kyler by Joy O. She loves braids and you will probably see her pairing this outfit with a funky wrap braid of some kind.

Brilliant Minimal Hammered Hoops in Rose Gold
These handmade hammered hoop earrings by Kyler by Joy O are made of recycled rose gold fill and the shape is inspired by the outline of a brilliant-cut diamond. They’re simple, yet modern and I love that they have a handmade feel. If you’re going for only one pair of earrings this spring, these should be it.
$68, Kyler by Joy O

Seamed Pocket Tank by Stewart + Brown
When I don’t feel like rocking the monochrome red look, I’ll swap out the tank for this one, which is made in the U.S. from 100% organic lightweight jersey cotton. The asymmetric cut is universally flattering and works well with jeans. Despite what your grandmother may have told you, pink goes great with red.
$78, Stewart + Brown

Klucia Coat Heels by Coclico
Jeans require a good pair of heels. These peeptoe oxfords from Coclico have a great sculptural wooden platform heel that is not too high to actually be able to walk on, and the laces and ebony piping are great details that add a lot of interest. They’ll also be great for adding a tougher edge to a light summer dress.
$398, Coclico

Large Blue Bronze Crystal Rings
Nothing pulls an outfit together like a big show-stopping cocktail ring. The stone is naturally formed in Arkansas, and the colors are attained by the stones being bonded with titanium, which actually enhances the crystal’s healing properties, if that’s your thing. The bronze alloy is 100% reclaimed and comes from United metal. It is widely used by jewelers as a prototype for 14k gold, and is resistant to tarnish.
$295, Beklina

Octopus Sweater by Koch
Sometimes I think we take fashion too seriously. This crew neck sweater from Koch is the antidote to that. The funky octopus print is not only cool, it’s also hand painted in Texas.
$90, Future:Standard

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