The white wedding dress is still the most popular choice of even the most modern of brides.

The focal point of every wedding – even the most casual – is the dress.

Most feminists manage to turn a blind eye to the entrenched patriarchy behind most wedding rites. Even after decades of changing attitudes, the traditional long white gown symbolizing virginity is still the most popular choice of modern brides, by far. While early Roman brides wore white robes as a tribute to Hymen, the god of marriage and fertility, the white wedding dress is in fact a relatively recent phenomenon.

For medieval brides blue was the color of purity, not white. The wedded couple would wear blue ribbons, which evolved into our “something blue” tradition today. For centuries afterwards, brides wore bright colored wedding dresses to symbolize their happiness. Depending on their status and position, they’d incorporate expensive fabrics like fur, velvet or silk. White was considered the traditional color of mourning and therefore the last choice for a wedding dress.

The wedding dress responsible for the prevailing Western trend for long, white wedding dresses.

All that changed in 1840 when Queen Victoria wore a white satin and lace gown at her wedding to Prince Albert. The official wedding portrait was published around the world and her elaborate full-skirted fairytale white wedding gown became the first choice of Western brides, then and now, looking to be “princess for a day.”

Yoko Ono wore a white mini dress with a sun hat, over-sized sunglasses and white knee-highs for her 1969 wedding to John Lennon.

Traditional white dress fever dipped during the depression in the 1930s, when women settled for their “best dress” to get married.  Wartime brides in 1the 1940s got married in their uniforms or scraped enough fabric rations together to sew a simple dress.  The impact of Grace Kelly’s “Wedding of the Century” to Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956, and her highly influential MGM designed gown made of ivory peau de soie, some with a fitted bodice and Brussels lace embroidered sleeves, inspired a return to the full-skirted romantic looks of the Victorian age by women in the prosperous post-war era.

Bianca Jagger’s gender bending wedding pantsuit was both chic and shocking in 1971.

The counter culture 1960s and 1970s ushered in an age of unorthodox wedding dresses, notably minidresses worn by such celebs as Mia Farrow at her 1966 wedding to Frank Sinatra and Yoko Ono at her 1969 wedding to John Lennon. When Priscilla Bealieu wed Elvis at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, the commercial wedding industry – and its tendency towards cheese – was born. Her big bouffant veil and babydoll-style dress perfectly matched the glitz of the wedding setting. When Bianca Jagger wed Mick in St. Tropez in 1971 wearing a large floppy hat and a white pant suit with – outrageously – nothing underneath, it seemed as if wedding attire would never be the same again.

Princess Diana’s fairytale dress reignited a trend for big wedding dresses that lasted throughout the 1980s.

And yet, in 1982, Lady Diana Spencer’s wedding to Prince Charles showcased another fairy-tale bride complete with a grand white Victorian-styled dress. Puff-sleeved with a fitted bodice and full-skirted of ivory taffeta, it inspired a generation of meringue-like frocks and royal wedding recreations across the U.S.

Carolyn Bessette’s sleek and sexy Narciso Rodriguez wedding gown.

The nineties saw a return to sleeker, less complicated styles. Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, the “it” girl of the  1990s embodied the simple yet classy look in the Narciso Rodriguez bias-cut silk sheath she wore in 1996 for her wedding to John F. Kennedy Jr..

Rocker Gwen Stefani’s unique pink and white dress showed classic with-a-twist wedding style.

In 2002, No Doubt singer Gwen Stefani embraced a classic style with a unique twist in her custom-made silk faille wedding dress Galliano for Dior gown with a fuchsia dip-dyed skirt.  The dress garnered accolades among critics and brides-to-be alike, making various best celebrity wedding dresses of all time lists. Stefani donated the wedding gown to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2011, cementing its place in wedding dress history.

Want to catch up on some more fashion history?

Now & Then: The History of Shapewear.

Now & Then: The History of the Sneaker.

Now & Then: The History of the Statement Outfit.

Now & Then: The History of Flared Pants

Now & Then: The History of the Ballet Flat

Now & Then: The History of the Breton Shirt

Now & Then: The History of the Platform Shoe

Now & Then: The History of the Pencil Skirt

Now & Then: The History of Skinny Jeans

Read more Now & Then articles here.

The post Now & Then: The History of the White Wedding Dress appeared first on EcoSalon.

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.

Questions over the price of our clothing – be it too cheap, the environmental cost of producing it, consumers shifting ideas about what luxury or true value actually is – all seem to go hand-in-hand when it comes to fashion. Regrettably, I have to admit that the crux of most conversations I have in the world we call “eco”, “fair-trade”, “sustainable”, “green” or (the most un-fun fashion moniker ever) “responsible” fashion always comes down to this, “How much more does it cost?”

With last year’s economic climate, getting more for less was an exceedingly relevant question. However, in 2011, things appear to be looking up. Timed with last week’s high profile Paris Couture Week there were a slew of news reports that customers of flagrantly expensive Haute Couture are increasing and that couture houses are thriving.

For the rest of us, couture fashion runways are an unobtainable but accessible indulgence. It’s when fashion watching goes from merely aiding the delight/dilemma of what to wear daily to the heart-pounding fantasy of a whimsical dreamscape. It’s fascinating to trace couture colors and details as they go on to inform and interpret a broader, mass market fashion story. (Remember Meryl Streep, as the Devil in Prada’s great soliloquy about the origins of skeptical assistant Andy’s cerulean blue sweater?)

“It’s been an excellent year for couture,” Sidney Toledano, CEO of Christian Dior, was heard saying from the sidelines of John Galliano’s runway show. “The young generation, even if they don’t buy, they want to go to the Internet and see the couture shows…The image is so strong, and this generation is looking for strong images.”

Back home in Northern California, I recently came across a look book of a sustainable line that is as substantial and arresting as the appeal Mr. Toledano speaks of. Sonoma County sustainable designer Emily Melville’s eponymous line was not originally conceived as “eco-fashion.” For her, “sustainability is actually a byproduct of my interest in creating the highest quality locally designed and produced, made-to-order luxury clothing. I don’t feel like there is always a clear dividing line between sustainable fashion and “conventional” fashion. Good design, good quality clothing, creating a connection between the consumer and the creator… these are the things I’m interested in.” With that in mind, I was delighted to ask Emily (currently taking some time out to have her first child) about the role price has in creating a strong brand image.

Vivienne Westwood was recently quoted saying “I was on the bus on Saturday going down to Whitehall. I just looked at everybody and there wasn’t one person who had a silhouette or stood out. They all looked like babies who had come out from a big washing machine – all easy-care jerseys and tights.” Your designs are the antithesis of this.

What a great quote. This is something I’ve observed as well, how there is this trend towards shabby, comfy, sloppy clothing. Where is the glamour? Where is the drama?  At the same time, I have to admit that I tend to dress for comfort a lot of the time too. I think some of it has to do with what a fast pace we are all expected to live by these days.

But there have always been people who just wear clothes rather than fashion. I am very inspired by the blog The Sartorialist; it captures images of women around the world who do stand out, who do find ways to create the glamour and the drama. I am always interested in looking at the way that women combine items, new pieces with vintage items, low price things with high price things. As a designer you create whole new looks every season, but that is not the way most women actually dress. That is something I like to keep in mind as I design – how will this jacket fit into her entire wardrobe, not just into my collection.

What are the eco credentials of your line? Who inspired you to design sustainably?

All my clothes are locally designed and produced here in Sonoma County. I’m creating garments that are made-to-order which hugely reduces the amount of waste I create. I strive to create timeless designs, and use the highest quality construction to ensure the longevity – and isn’t that what sustainable actually means? Whenever possible, I try to focus on natural, biodegradable, and fair-trade fabrics. I save all of my sample and production fabric scraps, which I either reuse or donate to a local charity.

The biggest challenge for any small designer just starting out, whether their focus is sustainable fashion or not, is fabric. My vision required me to look beyond what was available in the “eco” fabric market and instead try to find what was the best quality in the fibers, finishes, and colors. Someday I dream of being able to find organic wools and cruelty-free silks that behave like luxury fabrics and that I can get dyed to any color with a natural dye. And hopefully my line will be become big enough that I can demand that kind of product in the market.

While I was studying for my MFA from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, I took a course in Sustainable Fashion taught by Lynda Grose. That was probably the most challenging classes I took the whole time I was at AAU. Lynda is always questioning, always pushing you to think deeper about sustainability, and constantly pointing out how there are so many “catch-22’s” in the world of eco-fashion. That course sparked in me the desire to focus on small fashion, slow fashion, local production, hand-made garments. At the same time, I was being encouraged by my other instructors to cultivate my high-end designer sensibilities.

I love your classic color palette of charcoals, olives, steel gray and pale lemon. Did you intend to create a timeless, heirloom quality in a world of fast, disposable fashion?

That is exactly my intention. Clothes that will last for years, clothes that won’t ever go out of style, clothes that can work with other things in your wardrobe, clothes that you will pass on to your children… that is what I’m aiming for. There is no way that I could compete with the fast fashion that is out there. The only option for a small designer like myself it to aim for the opposite of that, to design for a woman who doesn’t want to change her entire wardrobe twice a year.

What is your price point? How do you persuade a customer to spend more on sustainable fashion?

My price points put me in the high-end, luxury market $600- $5000, depending on the piece. The question to me is less about persuading them to spend on “sustainable” and more about spending for quality and design. My hope is to create a relationship directly with the customer, so they feel like they understand where the garment is coming from, what the story is behind it.  When someone can see the hand of the designer in a garment, it takes on much more meaning, becomes more important to them and therefore is worth the extra money.

The post Fashion: Is This The Year You Pay More For Less? appeared first on EcoSalon.

A perennial fashion archetype, equestrian-chic has long been popular among those with the dream or the means for horse ownership. With a new appreciation for all that’s classic in clothing, it’s only a matter of course that riding styles are a AW 2010 trend that is already off and running.

Revived this time around by John Galliano’s romantic vision for Christian Dior’s Fall 2010 runway, the standard components were masterfully made modern in a memorable spread in Vogue’s February 2010 “Back in the Saddle” shoot by Raymond Meier and featuring Constance Jablonski.

And while the equestrian theme has been done many times before, it appears that fashion’s current shift from hungering for “it” bags to appreciation for simple and enduring classics is bringing out many of the bits and pieces necessary to assemble the look.

True and trusty wardrobe items like the knee-high riding boots, a single-breasted hacking-style jacket and turtlenecks alongside the recent return of jodhpur-style pants, saddlebag shaped purses and a trend for leather accented clothing.

All the ingredients are available to easily assemble the trend. And with the current color persuasion for restrained ivory, navy, black and caramel coupled with supporting trends for outdoor, rural looks that incorporate tweeds, herringbone and chunky sweaters –  its a look that’s champing at the bit for a shot.

Before saddling up, consider that bohemian, dandy, pirate or any other style archetypes worth plundering, aim to incorporate one element, maybe two, into your everyday wardrobe. Riding boots or Jodhpurs. A blazer, a turtleneck and skinny pants, instead of the jodhpurs. If you emerge from your closet flicking a whip against your thigh and wishing you had a top hat, it’s probably a clue you’ve trotted this trend too far.

Here’s some sustainable finds that are more than just good horse sense.

Feral Childe‘s beautifully-tailored (longer in the back, shorter in the front) blazer is made from surplus Italian stretch wool gabardine and is available October 1st. The inside is equally beautiful with classic Feral Childe print of emerald green scratch art.

Their Barringer Legging in silk and organic cotton jersey is a fun twist of equestrian and print.

Prairie Underground’s Carpenter jean with funky inner leg stitching are reminiscent of a riding pant, in an easy-to-wear-denim.

Cri de Coeur’s Ariel boot. Over-the-knee in textured faux leather.

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