Vancouver Fall/Winter Eco-Fashion Week Growing In Designers and Styles

Kim Cathers’ Kdon fashions at Vancouver Eco-Fashion Week Sept. 2010. Photo courtesy of myvancouverstyle.com.

Vancouver’s bi-annual eco-fashion weeks just keep getting bigger and better every year, expanding in designers that are continually coming up with new materials and designs for clothes and accessories. This week will be no exception.

Vancouver’s historic Salt Building will be the venue for the fashions shows, exhibits, seminars and other events that will kick off this Wednesday for the public.

With over a dozen clothing designers showing off their styles, and even more accessories designers, this will definitely be a can’t-miss event. Some of the more established design brands whose fashions will be strutting the runway will include: Kim Cathers’ Kdon, Echo Rain, and Nicole Bridger’s NBD.

Kim Cathers’ Kdon

Kdon’s new fall/winter collection is called ‘suture’ and will debut at the show. Cathers’ press says there are “a grand many reasons this word is the ultimate title and presentation for this coming collection.” It will blend and tie together many contrasting forms and colors.

Cathers specializes in handmade, draped dresses. The designs will include a lot of flowing cuts, with a palette that will include single color pieces, prints, and strips. Cather’s collections are inspired by a mixture of vintage, urban, and couture styles.

All of the fabrics used in Kdon come from Our Social Fabric’s recycled materials. Cathers is also on the board.

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Eco-Friendly Fashion Designers Finding Unusual Materials For Making Sustainable Handbags

Vegan leather laptop bag by Matt & Nat accessories design.

What we wear always says a lot about who we are, what we care about, and of our sense of style.

While eco-style means making sure our clothes look great and are made from sustainable materials, it is also important to remember that our accessories need to be made the same way. And, what’s our top accessory – handbags!

I love handbags because besides looking good, they’re where we put all our stuff in, which hopefully is eco-friendly, too.

The tough thing about shopping for eco-friendly handbags - like all other things that are considered specialty items - is that they’re still hard to find in most department stores and boutiques.

Luckily, now many designers are using the internet as a way to get the word out about their sustainable handbags – from classic, urban, vintage, couture, and everything in between.

Some of this year’s unique trends in sustainable materials by eco-fashion designers include: vegan materials, repurposed candy wrappers, recycled plastic bottles, dead stock car upholstery (out-of circulation unused fabrics originally intended for use in American automobiles), and reclaimed tractor inner tubes.

Four of these unique designers letting their imaginations run wild are: Ecoist, Matt & Nat, Kim White, and Passchal.

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Fashion Show to Launch Designers’ New Sustainability Awareness Campaign

loyale summer outfit. Photo courtesy of inhabitat.com.

Wanting to show younger Americans that they can look fashionable and live more sustainable lifestyles too, designer Jenny Hwa held a campus-level fashion show this week at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., where she also operates loyale, her eco-friendly clothing company.

Ms. Hwa said that she’s trying “to inspire the regional community to live stylishly green.” The goal of the show was “for all guests and participants to walk away with a sense that incorporating eco-friendly attributes into one’s daily life is fun and doable,” she added.

The designer’s 2010 collection has an open airy simple feel to it, which is themed after the American road trip experience of the 1950s and the idea of just getting away from it all. loyale’s design style embraces vintage and feminine tones, with silhouettes and some prints. The pieces are made primarily from organic cotton and factory reclaimed overstock fabrics, which would otherwise become landfill waste.

Other designers at the show included: Lara Miller, John Patrick Organic, Stewart + Brown, and Bodkin.

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