Forging a new fashion trail with Suzanne Rae’s Fall/Winter 2012 collection.

There’s a new frontier in fashion – a glamorous harkening back to the simply beautiful and designer Suzanne Rae is the perfect pioneer. She’s personable, a true philosophizer, a family girl and constantly evolving toward what she calls a “higher consciousness.”

It’s this clear consciousness that came through her Fall/Winter 2012 collection showcased at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in collaboration with the W Hotels Fashion Next Showcase. In her fourth season showing here, she’s no stranger to hard and high fashion.  And, it shows.

The impeccable detail to pieces like her fur print bias gown with “Suzanimal,” as Rae affectionately calls it, (see below), is silk screened to look like real animal fur yet she assures, it’s entirely fur free.  The “Suzanimal,” a wolf pelt stole, follows the same silk screened printing process and is then layered on a bed of wool – all sketched out pre-production by biologist-turned-artist Sam Dakota.

For Rae it’s each little element that makes a piece, which is why we couldn’t stop staring at her cowl backs, fringe backs and cotton tails, nearly more riveting than their front-facing counterparts.

Inspired by the Internal Revolution stirred by Jim Morrison and William Blake, Rae’s collection was a melodic merging of poetry and rock-n-roll. Elegance with an edge. As Rae tells EcoSalon, “The internal revolution is really how you feel inside and how you take that out into the world and act. It begins with you – your progress, your personal responsibility. And everything begins with awareness.”

As for Rae’s responsibility, she gets that fashion can be designed and produced more consciously. Currently, she’s at the crossroads of incorporating more sustainable textiles into her collections although, these fabrics don’t pop-up too much in this collection. Still, Rae does produce everything in the New York Garment Center and creates all samples in her Brooklyn, New York studio.

“It’s incredibly important to me to support local fashion production,” Rae emphasizes. “If the garment center gets smaller and goes away, then independent designers like me wont’ be able to produce. And then, American fashion will go away.”

With The Door’s lyrics encouraging the audience to “break on through to the other side,” it seems clear that Rae’s message is all about helping to lead the new awakened fashion paradigm. And as if to enforce what we already know about her, Rae quotes Blake: “the road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” When we ask Rae if she’s ever lived in excess, she laughs and says, “Sometimes you just get so caught up in it all. Now, I’m growing with those experiences – through the ups and downs, the light and the dark.”

With this collection, the light prevailed. Post-show, with glistening eyes and a beaming face, Rae’s mother told us, “It just warms my heart.”  (see Rae’s post-show family photo, below)

See more of our favorite Suzanne Rae looks below:

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Safari meets punk rock meets everything in between at EDUN’s Fall/Winter 2012 runway show.

In the program for EDUN‘s New York Fashion Week runway show, the Fall/Winter 2012 collection was described as “a mash-up of 80s vibe leathers, bonded plaids, mesh, and tech-finished fabrics, juxtaposed with African safari prints.”

Sounds like a lot going on? It was.

On a cold, blustery Sunday afternoon at Manhattan’s Pier 57, head designer Sharon Wauchob presented a line inspired by the EDUN girl who has taken her punk rock roots on safari. Even on paper, it sounds like a tough combination to pull off. Several of the ensembles were elegant, like a charcoal-cassis double face wool parka over a navy-charcoal turtleneck vest and black double face pleat skirt. Others made me scratch my head, like an electric pink silk fil-coupé zip dress that looked straight out of a Disney Channel tween’s wardrobe.

It’s tough to evaluate EDUN’s progress without bringing up its past, which has been rocky to say the least. In 2005, U2 frontman and human rights crusader Bono and wife Ali Hewson launched Edun to great fanfare, with the aim of using the brand to bring about economic development in Africa. However, they quickly ran into quality control issues, with retailers complaining about late shipments, poor garment construction, and ill fit. Soon after, it was revealed that 85 percent of EDUN garments were being produced outside of Africa, primarily in China but also in Peru. The news outraged people in the industry, and EDUN is still struggling to recover its image.

This season, in an attempt at greater transparency, EDUN highlighted in the show’s program which items would be produced in Africa. About half the pieces were in bold, including many of the following ensembles.

Images: Jessica Marati

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Titania Inglis, winner of this year’s Ecco Domani Fashion Foundation Award in Sustainable Design, gets street cred with her first New York Fashion Week show.

The show started early for Titania Inglis. Bedecked in black – lots of stylized black – guests waited upbeat, mingling behind black curtains. It was Inglis’ inaugural New York Fashion Week show, made possible by her recently announced 2012 win of the Ecco Domani Fashion Foundation Award in Sustainable Design. It was clear that something award winning was about to take place. And, it felt as if we were part of Inglis’ cheerfully somber production. So, like good cast members we waited in the entryway of the Eyebeam Art & Technology Center, a non-profit enterprise and one of the country’s leading media art centers.

The stage was set for Inglis’ own shade of black, uplifted and far from bleak – a seamless blend of preppy plaid and gothic darkness. It was as if two, vastly separate, high school cliques instantly merged into one, very cool and non-cliquey band of fashion mavens. So, it came as no surprise when I overhead Inglis characterize her collection as “My So Called Life all grown up.”

Street-tough models bedecked in vegetable tanned leather from a farm in France, (where they guarantee the entire cow has been used, from food to fashion), in herringbone, recycled cotton plaids, asymmetrical skirts and soft fabrics like raw Japanese silk and Cupro glided by effortlessly.

Inglis, I discovered, has a special affinity to Japanese design – in part attributed to her preference for minimalism and in part, as she says, because “Japan just makes high quality textiles.  They also know how to work with the shorter organic cotton fibers in a way that we don’t in the U.S.” Despite her penchant for The East, she brings it back west with local production in New York City.

With just one month to put her show into motion after winning the prestigious 2012 Ecco Domani award, Inglis didn’t seem to cut corners.

“I wanted to create something clean, sophisticated and wearable for the everyday,” Inglis told EcoSalon. Simple as it sounds, the beauty lies in the details, like the contrast piping inside the garment and her attention to each piece’s “skeleton,” as she calls it.

When asked about her recent win, she appeared nonchalant and merely acknowledged, “My life has gotten a lot busier.”

In a show of support, last year’s Ecco Domani winner for Sustainable Design, Tara St. James of Study New York, congratulated Inglis and, as Inglis told me, offered words of caution over previous phone calls.  “The award is great, but it’s also just the start. It doesn’t guarantee you success,” Inglis paraphrases.

It may just be the beginning for the young designer, but it also feels just right.

Here are some highlights from the Titania Inglis show below:

Images: Jennifer Barckley

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A long wait to view the M.Patmos Fall/Winter 2012 collection, but well worth it.

On Thursday night outside Milk Studios, it looked like a scene from the Occupy movement’s Fashion Week spin-off. A long line snaked down 15th Street, filled with high-heeled fashion girls and thick-spectacled fashion boys waiting upwards of an hour in 30-degree weather for entry to the five presentations taking place on the 8th floor: Libertine, John Bartlett, Erickson Beamon, Tim Hamilton Redux, and M.Patmos. From the top of the line, you could hear the rough shouts of security guards yelling at the hordes of people who dared think they could surpass the line. One of the guards, hauling a metal security barrier to block the crowds, shook his head and muttered, “Who are these people?”

I was there for the M.Patmos presentation, and by the time the guards finally let my block in, the show was nearly over. I had a hot second to ogle Marcia Patmos’ artfully crafted collection of knitwear, though, and it left me wanting more.

For Fall/Winter 2012, Patmos was inspired by Edward S. Curtis’s The Women, a book featuring portraits of Native American women at the turn of the 20th century. Patmos incorporated Native American-inspired graphic patterns and traditional Indian trading blankets into a small collection with a mostly black-and-white palette, with pops of red, orange, hot pink, and camel. The luxe materials included eco-friendly merino wool and alpaca, faux fur made from wool and alpaca, and vegetable tanned leather.

In designing the collection, Patmos emphasized a slow fashion approach with multifunctional garments and layering that transcends seasons. Her pieces incorporated handwork techniques from women’s artisan collectives in Nepal and Bolivia, as well as zero-waste seamless knitting technology from Japan. In this line and moving forward, Patmos recognizes the importance of working locally, and has committed herself to producing a larger portion of her garments in the United States and sourcing materials closer to her factories.

Also showcased in the presentation were vegetable tanned leather booties produced in collaboration with Manolo Blahnik and reclaimed wooden jewelry made by TENTHOUSANDTHINGS for M. Patmos, which perfectly complemented the infinitely wearable knits. Below, some of our favorite looks.

Images: Jessica Marati

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