CFDA/Lexus Eco-Fashion Challenge Winners Impressed With Collections At NY Fashion Week
February 23, 2012 Kyriaki (Sandy) Venetis 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.