CFDA/Lexus Eco-Fashion Challenge Winners Impressed With Collections At NY Fashion Week

Showing a love for socially and environmentally friendly design and manufacturing practices, the winners of the second annual Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA)/Lexus Eco-Fashion Challenge gave an impressive display of sustainable fashions during this New York Fashion Week.

Marcia Patmos collection at New York Fashion Week 2012. Photo courtesy of ecouterre.com.

The collections of this year’s three winning fashion designers – Marcia Patmos, John Bartlett, and Johnson Hartig – were presented at Milk Studios to a full audience, including fashion editors and buyers.

As a winner of the fashion challenge, Marcia Patmos reflected on her experience, saying, “I’ve been really interested in the eco-friendly design process for a long time. I think it started when I worked for the Gap because we were producing such large volumes of things, so I really start thinking about it. I started to try to get them to do organic cotton tee shirts and use recyclable packaging.

“I always try to think of new ways to incorporate sustainability and I had a new idea this year which was to try to use discontinued end-stock service yarns, and to just not even create anything new. You know each piece will be slightly different, but it won’t matter because it’s part of the design and all.

“Also as a designer I was interested in the technical things and ways to put things together. It’s a challenge and it’s a fun challenge just to think of a better way of doing anything. It’s so exciting to be a winner and such an honor, and also to possibly inspire more people to be involved in this movement.

“It can’t all just be about being organic, it has to be something that people will want anyway. It’s an added value and something that they will feel good about when they are buying something.”

Patmos’ inspiration for this collection was early 20th century Native American design. Her materials included vegetable-tanned leather, animal-friendly faux fur, lightweight woven linens, silk-cotton blends, domestically milled cottons, as well as discontinued and mill-end leftovers, which are commonly discarded by manufacturers because of insufficient yard lengths.

She also tried to minimize as much waste-creation as possible, working with Shima Seiki to knit sweaters using wholegarment machines. They create single, seamless garments that don’t require post-production finishing.

In creating her garments, Patmos also worked with artisan cooperatives – an ongoing practice in her manufacturing process – from places including Nepal, Uruguay, Peru, and Bolivia.

“There is something very special about an item touched by a human hand. By working with artisan communities, multiple families and even whole villages can be supported,” she said.

John Bartlett has also been on a recent journey of transformation – in both this personal and professional life – becoming more environmentally and socially conscious.

Bartlett collection at NY Fashion Week 2012. Photo by thediscerningbrute.com.

Reflecting on winning the eco-fashion challenge, he said, “About a year and a half ago, I went vegan and that really inspired my design sensibility. I stopped using leather. I stopped using wool, and I wanted to develop a collection that was both environmentally friendly and cruelty free.

“My design philosophy is now of eco-luxury, eco-luxe, and really creating a luxury product, but something that is environmentally friendly, something that is much more green. Going forward I am very excited that I am going to be starting to work with (materials like) ultra-suede and faux leather fabrics coming from close-looped factories. So to me, it has been very exciting to start on this path that was both personal and professional.

“I think that the CFDA/Lexus Eco-Fashion Challenge is going to be inspiring to a much larger population of fashion designers and retailers. I think that this is really the first of what I really think is going to be a big movement to come. Sustainable design is really important to me because it is the future and that is where design is headed.”

Bartlett’s winning “Future-Rustic” collection was made with almost entirely materials such as plant-based fabrics, organic cottons, and recycled synthetics.

Ecouterre calls his collection “a mixture of streamlined silhouettes and unfettered masculinity. The overall effect is one of outdoorsy, all-American appeal, with sailor stripes, lumberjack plaids, and refashioned Hudson’s Bay point blankets, coalescing into the first cruelty-free menswear collection to show at Fashion Week.

“Unlike other heritage-inspired brands, Bartlett’s elegant suits don’t consist of wool, but rather blends of organic cotton and conventional cotton. His striped henleys, sweaters, and dress shirts also made of organic cotton evoke the romanticism of the preindustrial era.”

Libertine designer Johnson Hartig was also inspired by the theme of making what’s old, new again. Excited by being a winner in the eco-fashion challenge, Hartig said, “I just want to talk about why sustainability is so important to me and my collection.

Hartig collection at NY Fashion Week 2012. Photo from Examiner.

“Libertine has from the beginning used all recycled clothing. So we will for instance go to a flea market or a thrift store and buy up 50 blazers that have been discarded, restructure the fit and either print on them or in some other way augment them.

“People wanna be seen in something that no one else has, so it was kind of this instantaneous connection. Yeah from day-one, we have been eco-friendly for 10 years now. It just made common sense to me. These were perfectly good things that people had disregarded that I took and made them covetable again.

“It’s really an honor to be part of this award and I’m really glad that Lexus and the CFDA have done something like this because the more all of us do in this regard, the more conscious we are all going to be and that can only lead to better and greater things.”

Hartig’s winning collection included a red and black houndstooth sequin embellished coat that the Atlanta Fashion Examiner called “a stunner with just the right amount of glitz so it can be worn at night or during the daytime.” Hartig describes his style as having a “less historic and more contemporary feeling.”

Each designer was required to have a minimum of 25 percent of their collection to be produced in an environmentally friendly manner. The winning entries were selected based on design and commitment to ecologically responsible practices, with emphasis placed on eco-materials, processes, and packaging.

The winners were selected by a panel of judges which included Zanna Roberts Rossi (Senior Fashion Editor at U.S. Marie Claire), Simon Collins (Dean of the School of Fashion at Parsons the New School For Design), and Julie Gilhart (Fashion Consultant, with 18 years prior experience as Fashion Director at Barneys New York).

The three winners each received $25,000 to support the further development of their eco-friendly fashion collections.

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