Ecouterre

KCD wants to revolutionize the runway, and you can watch it all unfold on your laptop or iPad. The public-relations powerhouse, which manages high-end labels such as Gucci, Versace, Alexander McQueen, Alexander Wang, Chanel, and Diane von Furstenberg, announced Monday that it will produce a number of fashion shows in a purely digital format. Coming on the heels of a recent show date “crisis”—a result of Milan pushing back the dates for its September shows—KCD is pitching the invitation-only Internet platform as an alternative to the increasingly crowded schedules that pull editors and store buyers in multiple, often opposing, directions. (Cue the usual gripes about aching feet.) Set to launch during New York Fashion Week, Digital Fashion Shows will debut with Prabal Gurung’s inaugural ICB collection on February 15, although his signature label will appear more conventionally on the catwalk.

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Photo by Olivier Saillant for Chanel

As if fashion wasn’t already synonymous with environmental excess. Karl Lagerfeld commisioned a life-size aircraft to house Chanel’s Spring/Summer 2012 couture show inside the Grand Palais in Paris on Tuesday. Subtlety has never been the designer’s strongest suit—this is the man who flew a 265-ton glacier to the City of Lights on a whim, after all—but the display of such extravagance in a depressed economy feels gauche even by the most liberal standards. Set designers didn’t just spend five days constructing the plane (or at least, the innards of one) from anodized aluminum. They also outfitted it with an extra-wide 164-foot aisle, 180-degree swivel seats for 250 high-profile guests, double-C monogrammed carpet, a holographic cockpit, and a slatted roof that revealed a vista of clouds. Mon dieu!

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New Hampshire, whose state motto is “live free or die,” has a new champion in state representative Michele Peckham, who thinks that her constituents should live free of the consequences of other people’s poor decisions. The politican is the primary sponsor of House Bill 1444, a piece of legislation that would ban state employees from wearing perfume or scented products on the job, particularly if they deal with the public. “It may seem silly, but it’s a health issue,” Peckham tells the New Hampshire Union Leader. “Many people have violent reactions to strong scents.”

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Katie Ledger wants you to make like a serpent and molt—the layers of your clothes, that is. Inspired by the way a snake sheds its skin, London College of Art student envisions garments with layers that slough off without the need for frequent laundering. In addition to slashing the heavy energy burden that washing and drying entail—an average laundry cycle uses up to 40 gallons of water and 5,500 watts of electricity, according to the U.S. Department of Energy—Ledger’s “Shed Me” project imagines clothes that change color and even style with the removal of each successive layer.

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American retailers take note: Marks & Spencer may have joined the ranks of Patagonia and Uniqlo with its own clothing take-back program, but it isn’t doing it alone. The British department store has teamed up with Oxfam U.K. to help underprivileged communities worldwide. Simply bring any store-branded garment, shoe, or bag into an Oxfam shop for “recycling” and you’ll receive £5 off when you spend £35 or more on clothing, home, or beauty products at M&S. To help you visualize the impact of your contribution, M&S created a nifty little app that posts a piece of trivia for every article of clothing you drop onto a mannequin. Donate a blouse, for instance, and Oxfam gets £5 to buy a container for four families in Nigeria to collect water and keep it free of diseases. Drop off a purse and Oxfam has an extra £16 to protect a hectare of Colombian rainforest. (And yes, that’s Twiggy smiling at you from the top of the page.)

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Skimpy underthings, fabricated events, thinly veiled threats, and a dead girl’s birth certificate—just when you thought the Victoria’s Secret West African child-labor scandal couldn’t get any weirder, now Homeland Security is leaping into the fray, according to Bloomberg News on Friday. The media outlet, which “outed” the lingerie empire in December for allegedly using underaged labor in its so-called “fair trade” line of undergarments, also refuted claims by Fairtrade International that the story was complete bunk. To thicken the plot, Fairtrade International, which oversees the fair-trade program in Burkina Faso, has also removed certain assertions about Bloomberg’s report from its website, specifically one that claimed that Cam Simpson, the reporter, asked a girl and her family to pose in a cotton field under false pretenses.

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Bloomberg News’ exposé on the so-called fair-trade cotton used by Victoria’s Secret is being called into question by Fairtrade International, the nonprofit organization that develops and upholds fair-trade standards, particularly when it comes to certifying producers and facilitating relationships with buyers. In a heartbreaking account in December, reporter Cam Simpson detailed the abuses Clarisse Kambire and other child laborers faced toiling in the cotton fields of Burkina Faso in West Africa, despite programs designed to improve the lives of women through responsible sourcing. “Paying lucrative premiums for organic and fair-trade cotton has—perversely—created fresh incentives for exploitation,” Simpson wrote. The blame, he intimated, lay with Fairtrade International for not keeping a more guarded eye. After conducting its own investigation, however, the group fired back on Tuesday with a list of “substantial contradictions” to the facts presented in the article, chief of which was that Kambire was not 13 as previously reported but 18 or older—by no means a child as defined by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

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Photos by Evan Browning

Hearty congratulations to Titania Inglis, winner of the 2012 Ecco Domani Fashion Foundation Award for Sustainable Design, an honor that was previously bestowed to Tara St. James of Study NY, John Patrick of Organic, and Bodkin’s Eviana Hartman. The award, which comes with a $25,000 grant, is a major coup for any designer, particularly one as young as Inglis, who debuted her eponymous label with a lineup of rust-dyed, vintage-inspired playsuits in early 2010. Since her breakout collection, Inglis has come into her own, creating crisp, impeccably tailored looks that are as sustainable as they are immaculate.

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As the wise (if fictional) Miranda Hobbes once noted after moving to Brooklyn and braving a very long commute, “You can take me out of Manhattan but you can’t take me out of my shoes.” Any woman who’s had to hoof it to and from work knows that slipping on a pair of heels can cause days of painful regret, not to mention disdain for that co-worker who breezes past your cubicle all day in her platform pumps. Enter Day2Night, a versatile shoe with five heel heights you can swap in or out at will.

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In a world saturated by marketing jargon, the labels on products aren’t always easy to decipher. While the term “organic” is regulated—to an extent, anyway—phrases like “all-natural,” “hypoallergenic,” and “cruelty-free” are not. One Hollywood actress, however, has mounted a crusade against companies that don’t mean what they say on their labels, particularly when it comes to our critter pals. As a spokeswoman for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a nonprofit health organization that opposes testing cosmetics on animals, Kristin Bauer (Pam the vampire in HBO’s True Blood) wants to expose brands that exploit semantic loopholes for their own purposes.

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The halo on Victoria’s Secret is looking a tad askew after a report alleged that malnourished, underaged West African children picked the cotton used in some of its undergarments, including a number labeled as fair trade and organic. In a startling exposé by Bloomberg News, reporter Cam Simpson documents the heart-wrenching story of 13-year-old Clarisse Kambire, who works on an organic-cotton farm in Burkina Faso under a program designed to financially empower women and enable more children to attend school. But Kambire’s reality couldn’t be further from the truth. Beaten and verbally abused, she labors in the fields on bare hands and feet to harvest tiny tufts of fiber that are sent to factories in India and Sri Lanka to be fashioned into leopard-print hip-hugger panties and lacy fishnet thongs.

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The days of Tony Manero-esque leisure suits may be over, but polyester’s heyday has only just begun. From dress pants to scarves, the controversial synthetic is as ubiquitous as ever, standing in as easily for wool as it does for silk and at a fraction of the cost. Yet the health and environmental hazards that petrochemicals pose are well-documented. Scientists at Toray Industries in Japan, however, have created samples of what they claim is the world’s first fully renewable, bio-based polyethylene terephthalate (PET) fiber—the stuff that polyester’s made of. Plant-based disco flares? We just might be able to get on board with that.

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If you’re looking to put a little pep in your step this winter, and you’ve got a yen for helping wildlife, we’ve got the shoe for you. For a limited time, Suno will be offering a line of lace-ups and slip-ons in its trademark multihued prints. Fairly made in Kenya from fabric offcuts …

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If you’d rather get lost than be caught wrangling a giant, fluttering bike map while you’re wheeling around town, here comes Timbuk2 to the rescue. Its new, limited-edition map messenger includes a Google bike map of San Francisco or New York City sewn into its flap, so you can …

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Cycling after dark isn’t child’s play. With dark roads and passing vehicles to contend with, a blinking red light on your tail is rarely enough. Enter Dargelos’s “Lightning” vest, a reflective mesh vest for nocturnal pedal-pushers. Hand-netted in Brooklyn using reflective material custom-manufactured by 3M in Rhode Island, the vest is designed to help you stand out even on the darkest evenings. The neck opening is large enough fit over your helmet, while the open-weave construction allows quick and easy access to any pockets. Best of all, the vest is compact enough to fit inside said pockets, without any risk of tangling. Who said you needed to look like a crossing guard to ride safe?

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Pencils, sharpened to a nub, aren’t good very many things. If you’re Dublin-based designer Karolin Felix, however, they’re the perfect size for turning into colorful, whimsical necklaces. Sectioned into bits, each piece gets a slap of paint and varnish before it’s strung from delicate nylon thread. Pick the delicate “Pink Candy” for …

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Cardigan, a small town of 4,000 in western Wales, once churned out 35,000 pairs of jeans every week for 30 years. That was in the days before outsourcing, of course. With the closure of the last denim factory in Britain, the people who once crafted the world’s finest dungarees have nowhere to practice their skills—skills that, in some cases, they spent 30,000 hours honing. “In Hollywood, it’s hard to find a waiter who is not going to be an actor,” says David Hieatt, a clothing entrepreneur who plans to set up shop in the centuries-old town. “In Cardigan, it’s equally as hard to find someone who hasn’t made jeans.” Hieatt wants Cardigan’s “Grandmasters” of denim to make jeans again. If he can get his proposed denim label off the ground, they will.

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You might consider missing out on Missoni for Target a tragedy, but trust us, that’s just the hyperbole talking. For the female garment workers in Jordan, however, the nightmare of cranking out cut-price clothing to sate American appetites is very real. After the Institute of Global Labour and Human Rights reported allegations of serial rape, abuse, and torture at Classic Factory—which makes clothing for U.S. companies such as Target, Walmart, Hanes, Macy’s, and Sears, and Land’s End—the fifth woman in two years has come forward to claim she was raped by a manager. “He said, if you try to do anything now, I’ll kill you right here,” the Bangladeshi national says in

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Jeffrey Costello and Robert Tagliapietra had one thing in mind when they started designing their Spring/Summer 2012 collection and that was romance. With their ice-blue Grecian gowns and Georgia O’Keefe-inspired floral prints, we, for one, were wooed completely. Watch their new styles in action in our exclusive video above, and hear what the always stylish-in-plaid designers had to say about their perfectly draped creations.

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You don’t need to tell us that girls look good on bikes, but designer Phillip Lim manages to amp up the glam quotient to an entirely new level. In “Girls on Bikes,” a video shot to showcase 3.1 Phillip Lim’s Fall/Winter 2011 collection, we follow three lovely ladies as they scoot around San Francisco on Linus bikes in tuxedo blazers, cigarette pants, and vertiginous heels. “ It’s about these chic girls on bikes …

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There’s more ways than one to take a page from IKEA’s furniture catalog. Portugal’s Tela Bags cribbed sheets from the Swedish retailer’s out-of-date tomes to construct a series of tote bags, zipper pouches, and wallets papered with tableaus from the big blue box itself. Plus, all “Ikea Family” …

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Be still our design-loving hearts! Brooklyn designer Caitlin Mociun has teamed up with the bag-makers at BAGGU on a line of super-modern, limited-edition totes. With the average consumer piling up 500 plastic bags in a year, we could all cut back on the polluting disposables. Not that you have to settle for a boring old sack, of course. …

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It’s a bird! It’s a plane! Nope, it’s a parachute. If you don’t believe us, ask British designer Debbi Little, who teamed up with AO textiles in London to create gorgeous pieces of “ecouture”—not a typo, that’s what AO calls their fabrics—by sewing silk remnants onto discarded Ministry of Defense parachute netting. Through the use of organic silk thread and haute-couture techniques, whimsical military-camouflage patterns spring to life on lighter-than-air fibers. Little and AO may have named their collaboration “Little AO,” but there’s nothing meager about their product.

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A University of Georgia scientist has discovered how to make clothing—stinky socks and gym shoes, included—permanently germ-free. Developed by Jason Locklin, an assistant professor of chemistry in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, the process involves spraying a thin coat of chemicals onto textiles and other materials. The antimicrobial agent, which bonds to the surface after exposure to ultraviolet light, comprises microscopic spikes that pierce though bacterial cell walls upon contact, killing them medieval-style. And unlike other chemical treatments, Locklin’s invention won’t wash off, even after multiple hot-water laundry cycles.

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Going cruelty-free doesn’t have to be limiting. In fact, vegan alternatives can open up a whole universe of textures and possibilities Take Cliff’s cork belts, for instance. Lighter than leather and more interesting to look at, each handmade (and machine-washable!) belt distresses beautifully over time, just like the real thing. Cliff harvests the cork—don’t worry, it grows back—then laminates …

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