Fashion Seeing An Explosion of Styles Emerging in Hats Made With Eco-Friendly Materials

I love hats, especially eco-friendly hats because they boost my style, and they limit harm to the environment.

Eco-Friendly Wool Felt Hat from Millinerium.

Today, eco-friendly hats are made in every style. The only real differences between hats made the eco-friendly way and ones made the traditional way are the materials they use and the processes used to make them

Right now, there are eco-friendly hats for every personality – whether you’re fashion sense is really flamboyant, chic, retro, urban or classic conservative.

When looking to buy an eco-made hat, the challenge is no longer finding the right style to suit your tastes and needs, but finding one at all! It’s often considered a specialty item, and most conventional retail stores don’t carry them. Online is often your best option, and I found three places that have some of the hugest collections of eco-hats: Millinerium, hats.com, and JustSayHats.com.

Millinerium

Millinerium is great because it’s a women’s boutique site from Ginger Strand, a designer exclusively devoted to making eco-made hats.  

Millinerium’s collection runs the full gamut from street hats to fascinators (the tiny hats that Kate Middleton wears) to wedding headpieces.

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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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Eco-Sunglasses: Keeping Your Eyes Healthy and Improving the World at the Same Time

Beautiful eyes are subjective - whether it has to do with color, shape, or something else - everyone has an opinion. Though beyond looks, our eyesight is one of our most important assets, which doesn’t make the sun our friend.

Image courtesy of davidicke.com.

Experts are finding that ultraviolet light can cause a number of short-term and long-term ocular problems.

 Dr. Troy L. Bedinghaus - a board certified optometric physician, who owns and operates Lakewood Family Eye Care - says, “Studies show that ultraviolet radiation can accelerate the development of cataracts.

“The bright sun can also cause pinguecula and pterygium, which are benign growths on the surface of the eye. Ultraviolet radiation can also cause cancer of the eyelids and the skin surrounding the eyes.”

Dr. Bedinghaus adds that, “Ultraviolet radiation can also cause photokeratitis, which is a temporary but painful burning of the cornea. Photokeratitis often occurs while water or snow skiing without sun protection. Studies are also showing that long-term exposure to the sun’s harmful rays may contribute to the development of macular degeneration.”

As a preventative measure, he suggests, “At the very least, you should look for sunglasses that block at least 99 percent of both UV-A and UV-B radiation, and screen out 75 to 90 percent of viable light.”

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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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