Tag Archives: Sass Brown
Mei Hui Liu, the founder of Victim Fashion Street, has a street rebels eye for recycled materials. Her naïve punk approach to recycled fashion is her signature style, with a ten-year heritage. Combining vintage fabrics from multiple different eras, Liu carefully crafts scraps and shreds of antique lace, Great British flags, and seemingly haphazard haberdashery into her creative patch-worked designs.
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Le Moine Tricote, which means “the monks knits”, is an exquisite collection of women’s hand knits at the very highest level of intellectual and creative exploration and expression. The entirely hand produced knits, fluidly undulate through different yarns, textures, a dazzling array of lacy stitches, directions and tensions, to produce quite simply art, in the form of women’s knitwear.
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Young Moscow designer, Julia Seregina produces a fresh, interesting, contemporary knitwear collection, hand knitted with natural, eco yarn, that capitalizes on her Russian heritage. Specializing in transforming and reinventing space into new forms through knitting, Seregina combines contemporary design with the comfort of knitwear to create new forms that flatter and follow a woman’s curves.
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Frei merges design, comfort and sustainability to produce a beautiful, ethereal and whimsical collection of great beauty, through intriguing and clever cutting, Zen-like print and plain combinations, and understated color coordinates. The clean simple lines of the collection belay the complexity of the cutting, the sophisticated asymmetric silhouettes, and draped and tailored pairings.
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Meo Fusciuni is an artisanal, apothecary style perfume maker founded in 2009. The company was created from the alchemic mix of three people from three different cultures, with three different concepts and ideals of beauty. The artisanal line of perfumes is entirely composed of natural essential oils, and recreates the charm, art and traditional of perfumery. Fusciuni means flow, flow in Sicilian, and the nickname of Meo’s grandfather, who was also a great traveler.
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Although Gretchen Jones now calls Brooklyn, New York home, she has never lost touch with her rural, Western roots. The American Mid West touches and colors all her work from the casual knit sweaters she pairs with floral skirts, reminiscent of blooming country meadows, to the accessorizing of her collection with heavy brown leather ankle boots, as at home on a farm as a catwalk. Her collection infuses an earthy Americana with a lingering 1970’s romanticism through subtle color and print combinations and silhouettes.
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Eva Zingoni is an Argentinean, Italian, sometimes Madrileña (a Spanish counter cultural movement characterized by freedom of expression), deeply Parisian and completely Latin. A traveler, a personality with boundless curiosity, eclectic taste, and a cultivated independence, she is also the founder of her namesake label specializing in sustainable couture. Made entirely in France from recycled materials, Zingoni’s designs are limited edition pieces cut from surplus materials sourced from Parisian fashion houses. Unique fabrics, chosen one by one, they constitute a collection based on recycled luxury.
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Italian label Giulia Rien a Mettre, founded by Italian born Giulia Mazzer, create a unique women’s wear collection with a quirky, off kilter design aesthetic. With a focus on fabric, and intriguing color and textural combinations, that include tone on tone, monochromatic, undulating, stripes, slub’s and basket-weaves, Mazzer also incorporates graphic color combinations, such as black, deep coral and muted un-dyed natural fiber shades. Her asymmetric styling often incorporates a single flounce, frill or tuck, but not in a girly overly pretty way, instead with a sense of volume and a sculptural quality.
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Brooklyn Designer Samantha Pleet debuted her namesake collection in 2006 with quirky, youthful designs intertwining story telling with modern, wearable clothes. Her signature look is a mix of quirky Americana ala Little House on the Prairie, meets the Amish rights of Passage, Rumspringa, where the strict religious community allows their youth to experience modern society, before committing or breaking from the faith. There is something almost puritanical about her look, but with a naïve innocence and sensuality.
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Kowtow is a fair trade organic clothing label based in Wellington New Zealand. Nine seasons old, Kowtow produce a sensitive, intelligent collection of easy wear women’s dresses and separates; this is not an over simplified yoga line of unstructured pieces, but a highly sophisticated, deceptively simple architectural collection of shapes, worn in combination to create an individualistic statement, a point of view and express real character.
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Young designers and business partners Daniel Silverstein and Marge Bacon, both recent graduates from the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Fashion Design Major, are the founders of 100%. As the name suggest, the duo are one hundred percent committed to creating extraordinary garments, with every piece in the collection cut from one hundred percent organic supine cotton.
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Guðrun & Guðrun is a Faroese company, owned by two women, living in the remote Faroe Islands. With a vision to simply make a difference, Gudrun and Gudrun’s ambitious intent is to make clothes that live up to the standards of conscious consumers who care about their clothes, their environment and their natural resources. Hand made by Faroese and Jordanian women, and produced from one hundred percent untreated and un-dyed Faroese wool, the Faroese sheep live year round on unfertilized grass.
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Fiber artist and knitwear designer, Julia Ramsey, creates rich, dimensional knitwear that connects fiber to figure through oversized knitted drapes. Her custom knitwear collection emphasizes handwork, craftsmanship, and an appreciation for raw materials and the techniques that transform them. With a rare appreciation for material, Ramsey aspires to showcase the fiber itself through her work. Her designs, adorned with giant knots, broad cables and shell like patterns, devour and envelop the body, never disguising the material origin or relinquishing their animal independence.
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Minimalistic Dutch design house, Studio JUX, winner of the first category at the January 2012 Amsterdam Green Fashion Competition, is renowned for their use of organic materials as well as their simple, clean and intriguing styling. The competition-judging panel was impressed by their thoughtful business plan, as well as their history of working with sustainable practices. Playing with bright colors and unexpected shapes, Studio JUX works with organic cotton and hemp, and is always searching for innovative sustainable materials. With a workshop in Nepal, JUX insures that the collection is produced under fair labor conditions.
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Goveo Balmaseda’s graduate knitwear collection for the Fashion Institute of Technology, entitled Manifesto, was a craft led exploration of the concept of transition and hybrid evolutions reflected in moss and critical weathering. The knitwear collection was produced using only recycled, and ethically responsible methods and materials, and explores her personal journey into biomorphic design in knitwear. The inspiration behind the collection, stems from Hunertwasser’s Mouldiness Manifesto, as well as Govea Balmaseda’s respect and tolerance for irregularity, with nature taking over, dictating the form and appearance to some degree. Goveo Balmaseda worked with organically grown cotton, recycled cotton; made in the USA from T-shirt production waste, mulesing-free merino wool, and some dead-stock yarns, hand dyed with non toxic, low impact dyes.
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London eco fashion brand PARTIMI, was founded by Central Saint Martins graduate, Eleanor Dorrien-Smith. With work experience at Mary Katrantzou, John Galliano and Eley Kishimoto, Partimi presented their first full collection at Estethica, London Fashion Week’s eco fashion trade show, with the presentation of their spring summer 2011 collection. Making her splash in the fashion world as early as her graduate collection at Central Saint Martins in 2008, Dorrien-Smith’s runway presentation was spotted and admired by US giant, Antrhopologie, who subsequently commissioned Dorrien-Smith to create a capsule collection for their stores.
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Raggedy is a Welsh based label that creates recycled women’s clothing, by combining knitwear, tweeds, linens and cotton into new incarnations of unique quirky couture. Designs are one of a kind, raw and playful in nature, with more than a passing resemblance to a romanticized Oliver Twist, or a Victorian noble woman fallen on hard times. A sort of extreme version of make do and mend as viewed through an idealized Victorian London, or probably Wales come to that. Utilizing a wonderful mix and match array of knubbly tweeds, hound’s-tooth and heathered wools, crazily patched and pieced together into shrunken versions of Victorian men’s vests and women’s riding jackets, and worn with jauntily hitched and ruched petticoat style skirts, with flounces, lacing and frills all cobbled together into a pleasing, deconstructed whole.
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Lemuria specialize in polymorphic clothing, with a full range of adaptable tops, dresses and even pant/skirts, with options that range from short to long voluminous and fitted, and even sleeveless, strapless, short sleeved and long sleeved all in a single garment. Made form high quality cotton or viscose jersey, some styles are also reversible giving different color, and print/plain options within a single piece.
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Art house accessories label Hybrida, transforms recovered and discarded materials through design and craftsmanship, to produce a contemporary, avant garde collection of body accessories. Motivated to create beautiful objects, full of symbolic meaning, Hybrida infuse discarded materials with new value, prolong their life, and divert them from landfill. The concept behind the collection, is a hybrid design process, hence the name, inspired by an abstraction of elements, new and old, contemporary and vintage, valued and discarded.
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Karen Stewart and Howard Brown, partners in life as well as work, launched their ethical fashion brand, Stewart and Brown, in 2002 in Los Angeles, California. A fusion of experiences filtered through the brands unique and personal aesthetic, Stewart and Brown produce a quirky, wearable collection full of life, layers, textures, muted colors, lengths and asymmetries, with a very Parisian sense of style; the kind of easy wear, yet stylish comfort that Parisians achieve so effortlessly.
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Individual and irreverent, John Patrick Organic makes sensible, modern work wear, as beautiful as it is affordable. With a lovely easy wear yet stylish aesthetic, Patrick’s collection pairs cocooning sweaters with bias diaphanous chiffon dresses, classic jackets and utilitarian khaki pants. The collection is artfully coordinated to create a wearable, yet inventive collection that translates as easily to the countryside as it does to the city, all the while defying a customer demographic, translating across age ranges and lifestyles.
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Inspired by the colors, sights, sounds and tastes of different countries and cultures, and shaped by her work as a vogue editor, Lilly Marthe creates a beautiful handmade collection. With a focus on rich, elemental colors and textures, all the pieces in the collection are exquisitely hand-crafted, with a single piece taking a master knitter as much as forty hours to complete. Working exclusively with one hundred percent natural fibers, chosen for quality, uniqueness and character, Marthe produces a collection that is as instinctual as it is poetic.
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A supporter of slow fashion, Ludgate’s understated silhouettes are haunting in their simplicity and sophistication, with a slight retro sensibility, intonated more by her exquisite tailoring and attention to detail than anything else, she never the less maintains a distinctive and undeniably modern aesthetic. Drawing inspiration from Elsa Schiaparelli, and her surrealist imagery, Ludgate imbues her designs with a certain architectural sense of humor, through sculptural necklines and collars, standing in sharp contrast to the slender tailored sheaths they crown.
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Feng Ho is an award winning ethical designer working with a range of sustainable textiles, including bamboo, soy, organic cotton, hemp and peace silk, to produce a bespoke range of womenswear. Hand crafted in her Oxford, UK studio, Ho’s also utilizes end of line British textiles for her creations, through which she hopes to create a harmony between architecture and nature. With her clean lines and draped silhouettes, Ho produces an effortless, easy wear collection of jersey dresses from surprising print and plain combinations, and complex cut and pieced color blocking.
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A whimsical, rich textured hand knit line, Of Handmade is exactly that, handmade by Simona Giaomo. Each piece in the collection is entirely hand knitted or crocheted with rich textural yarns and chunky stitches. Simple cocooning shapes are punctuated with deep ribs and coursing whales. Colors are all naturally inspired from heathered grays with undertones of lilac and blue, through to moss green, blueberry and berry. Buttons are oversized or crocheted or sometimes replaced with a simple silver safety pin.
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Santiago designer, Juana Diaz is both a fashion designer and a textile artist, working with textile scraps to generate exclusive hand crafted products through fair labor with female home workers. Developing a technique that cobbles varying scraps of fabric together, with her signature contrasting top stitching bridging the textural and color diversity between fabrics, she produces simple kimono style tops and wrap dresses, which belay the complex nature of the fabric piecing and stitch overlays.
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With its recent inclusion in the European Union, Bulgaria is in the process of establishing its own unique identity, through its distinct mix of ethnicity and creativity. As part of a this vanguard of art and design, Evengi Petkov stands apart, as a designer who works to incorporate his native cultural landscape through his work.
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Working with organic cotton woven in the legendary denim mills of Japan, Titania Inglis crafts a minimal, effortless, cutting edge collection for the modern woman. Produced in New York’s garment district, with a focus on minimizing waste, through her minimal aesthetic, Inglis expresses a similarly minimal color story, with a play on tonality, asymmetric lines, and an intriguing juxtaposition of opaque and sheer materials, all expressed with an urban sensibility.
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Asian sustainable fashion label Ultra, design an avant-garde sustainable women’s collection, with a focus on naturally dyed, recycled, biodegradable and innovative fabrics. Ultra place an emphasis on material culture, with a laundry list of eco certifications. With an aesthetic that centers somewhere between Belgian deconstructionism with its minimal layered aesthetic, asymmetric slashing and interesting proportions, and a more Asian architectural, dimensional silhouette.
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Schmidttakahashi is a Berlin based label that specializes in upcycled and restyled, redesigned clothing. As the name suggest, there is a decided Asian aesthetic to the collection of women’s wear. Reanimation / Wiederbelebungsmassnahmen, is the name of their project, to value, track and communicate the history and heritage of each item that goes into their recycled design collection.
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As we draw towards the end of August, it seemed fitting to do a final summer posting on swimwear, especially as I haven’t posted about eco swimwear before. In another first, I thought it made sense to combine some of the best eco swimwear labels in this single posting: Eco Swim by Aqua Green, Vitamin A and Olga Olsson.
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Austrian label MILCH produce a women’s collection from upcycled classic men’s wear suitings. Working with only the best discarded men’s wear the collection is entirely sourced and produced in Vienna, in an ethically and sustainable fashion. With environmental and social considerations taken into account throughout production, MILCH work with natural fibers, with all production done under fair trade working conditions.
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The Urban Zen Foundation creates, connects and collaborates to raise awareness and inspire change in the areas of well being, preserving cultures and empowering children in mind, body and spirit. The store features a unique collection of dresses and separates under the Urban Zen label name, with decided African inspiration, and alongside a host of unique, independent, artisanal jewelry designers.
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Nau translated from Maori, and meaning “welcome, come in”, is a design oriented performance sportswear company, invested in breaking the model of how fashion companies do business, through a whole new business paradigm. Nau’s goal is to demonstrate the highest levels of citizenship in everything they do, from product development, production, and labor practices to environmental practices and philanthropy. Believing that companies have a broader responsibility than simply generating profit.
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German designer Isabell de Hillerin develops her sustainable collection from a combination of delicate fabrics and folkloric handmade Romanian materials, to communicate a creative position somewhere between new design and old tradition. Her collection represents a rebellious response to the modern system of life, a reflection on our distance from the past and our separation from our history. With the Romanian traditional fabric industry close to extinction, Isabell de Hillerin is working with Romanian manufacturers to support the production of handmade materials, with the aim of supporting these highly skilled craftsmen by utilising their skills in a new way.
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Italian label, Silent People make a beautiful and creative collection of mostly bags from a diverse range of vintage and recycled materials, putting an entirely new twist on heritage. Their unique ‘remade’ collection has a wonderful artisanal avant-garde aesthetic, through their inventive use of a myriad of unused and discarded materials, reinterpreted through a broad-based range of eclectic, patched and pieced styles.
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Roark is a collective of talented friends, creative’s and partners, more in the vein of an old fashioned commune than a business partnership, sharing many of the same altruistic ideals with their sixties counterparts. Living and working in a single space, the four friends bonded over a single vision; that of designing, producing and promoting a menswear collection, made locally from natural and organic fabrications.
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Frau Wagner processes vintage and unwanted clothing and turns them into one-of-a-kind, desirable items. The worn garments are innovatively reconstructed into something completely new, using only the highest quality materials, such as silk, chiffon, organza, velvet and fur. The collection has a contemporary feel with sporty overtones, totally reworked into sophisticated high fashion items, so that Nike stripes and ribbed active wear cuffs become the finishing details on floaty silk dresses or featured in sophisticated halter neck tops with crisp white collars and cuffs
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The inspiration from a lifetime love of travel and fashion forms the basis of the label Emesha. With the fusion of different cultures and traditions, from the free spirited lives of American teens to crazy summers spent in Tokyo, Emesha works with experimental pattern cutting, draping and crisp tailoring techniques, to create clean, classic silhouettes and feminine looks.
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Husband and wife team Pamela Tuohy and Edward Thomas Novinsky are redefining the concept of precious through their use of original art in their hand crafted jewelry collection, 2ETN. In the spirit of American portraiture and mourning miniatures from the 1700 to1800’s, 2ETN craft one of a kind, original art with graphite, oils, and acrylics, framed by found period antiques, reclaimed precious metals and ethically sourced stones.
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Generation love, founded in 2008, was born of the desire to create a brand of chic casual wear that effortlessly took the wearer from day to evening. Bridging the cultural as well as the knowledge gap, the founders, with no formal training in fashion, hail from New York and France. Roni Hirschberg and Bressa-Vakcourt dove head first into New York’s garment district, and aligned themselves with those that could help bring their vision to life.
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Award wining fashion label Goodone designs a contemporary fashion collection made entirely from off cuts and excess fabric. Founder and Creative Director Nin Castle, creates fashion forward, assertive but feminine collections for the conscious fashion buyer. Reinventing up-cycled garment design, they are giving women the opportunity to feel good about their clothes, while working with materials that already exist.
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People Tree produce beautiful garments that create equally beautiful change somewhere in the world. The collection is full of life and love, with playful, quirky, wearable dresses and separates, a sort of Anthropology with a heart. Their designers work to produce garments that are beautiful, as well as caring, with an imaginative use of local skills. People Tree designs garments to be produced by hand as much as possible, so their products have small carbon footrpints. They recognize that each choice they make in the design process effects the lives of their producers, deliberately choosing to utilize more labor intensive methods over less.
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Scandinavian, American eco fashion label, Jonano, designed by Bonnie Siefers was founded in 2006. The company’s mission is to create cohesive collections that appeal to those devoted to style and fashion, as well as the environmentally conscious. An advocate of slow fashion, Siefers believes that style and quality are essential to sustainable design, never compromising on design or qualify of fabrics, and coining the term EcoCouture to describe the collection. The brands philosophy is shaped by the designer’s passion for the environment, as well as her commitment to sustainability and social responsibility, her interest in world affairs and sociology.
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RIGHT AS RAIN designer Francesco Mugnaini designed a men’s and a women’s T shirt that idealizes the body, making strong references through the cut and fit to its natural form, as a means of visualizing our connection to nature, not our separation from it. The T shirt was considered the ideal starting point for this ongoing experimentation and discussion, as a simple unpretentious garment, it is an empty canvas on which nature could create its designs.
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Royah is an ethical design company from Afghanistan, bringing together art and development for women. A vehicle to present the rich Afghan cultural heritage, Royah was set up in Kabul in 2005, with a handful of women who wanted to make a difference. Drawing on Afghanistan’s rich cultural heritage, Royah creates contemporary fashions using Afghan textiles, combined with Italian Expertise. Mostly utilizing indigenous hand-loomed fabrics, including the magnificent geometric embroideries made famous by Pashtun women, and working with local artisans, Royah employs traditional and innovative reinterpretations of Afghan fabrics. Employing twenty women in Kabul, the project is aimed at supporting the condition of women in a place in which access to work and free expression has been denied.
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During the week of the internationally renowned Salone del Mobile, it seemed only fitting to feature an Italian label. Based in Milan but producing in Calabria, the brand is both ethical and ecological. The Cangiari collection incorporates hand woven and traditional textiles, with frayed and tailored detailing, and styles that are timeless, ageless and sophisticated in nature.
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Piece x Piece is a women’s sustainable fashion label that only works with pre-consumer textile waste as its material base. A personal response by the founder, Elizabeth Brunner, to the overwhelming amount of waste produced by the fashion industry each year, Piece x Piece works with sample fabric swatches, known as headers in the industry. The textile headers, supplied by mills around the world, are used by designers as tactile samples of the fabrics they are designing for in the upcoming season.
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Christine Mayer is the designer behind the Mayer Peace Collection, which represents the fusion of fashion, charity and the transformation of recycled materials. The collection is comprised of beautifully crafted and tailored jackets and coordinating separates. Strict retro military cut jackets hark back to Napoleonic lines, and are combined with sleeves crafted from humble milk maid cross stitched aprons and asymmetric tea towel skirts.
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Avant-garde, Danish designer Barbara I Congini is one of a group of designers that participated in Bright Green Fashion, a collaborative project spanning the borders of Berlin and Copenhagen, and showcasing sustainable fashion, as a means of striving for greater environmental and social responsibility within the fashion system. Congini’s ongoing environmental concerns shape and direct her collections, sourcing most of her fabrics from organic sources, she produces the collection in fair trade conditions, recycles, and works towards safer production methods. Her aesthetic however, is far from granola, Congini’s designs are slick but rough, urban, raw and powerful.
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