Green Style: Trend Spotting at Eco Fashion Week

Article by Anna Cohen, Vancouver mom and green style maven.

Green Style at Eco Fashion Week

Last week I attended Vancouver’s Eco Fashion Week. Eco Fashion week is about showing buyers, designers and fashion-lovers such as myself all aspects of eco-consious design, sourcing, production and merchandising of garments as well as how to purchase, care and dispose of our clothing in a eco-friendly manner. It’s green style heaven.

Reducing

Eco Fashion Week’s main sponsor this season was Value Village (incidentally one of my favourite stores!). Founded in 1954, Value Village is a chain of thrift stores that collects clothing from charities such as Developmental Disabilities Association and Big Brother and resells them. What are the benefits of shopping at a place like Value Village? You save money, reuse clothing thus conserving natural resources, eliminate waste and help others! It’s green style at its finest. Eco Fashion week offered a Value Village donations table where fashionistas had the opportunity to donate their clothes and the opening show featured clothes purely from Value Village showing us how to style their pieces.

Reusing

Some of my favourite brands that showed during Eco Fashion Week were the vintage stores such as F as in Frank (their Vancouver store is at 2425 Main Street). What I love about vintage clothing is that there is cyclical effect in fashion (my Mom calls it the 25 year cycle) in that a blouse from the 1970’s, a purse from the 1950’s and a hat from the 1960’s can all be worn over and over again. Also, what I love about vintage fashion and about F as in Frank’s show in particular is that you can reuse pieces in different ways. For F/W 2012, I loved their men’s shirts styled as dresses (below), shorts over patterned tights and denim jeans cut down and rolled up over wool tights with hiking boots.

Recycling

Maybe it was their products or the fact that the models handed out candy at the end of the show, but I fell in love with Arm Candy who use recycled materials (candy wrappers!) to make amazing accessories. They also work with the Mexican government to provide employment for communities in need. The candy wrappers are woven to make brightly coloured, bold and funky bags.

Eco Fashion week was both enjoyable and educational. Spring/Summer 2013 Eco Fashion Week will be held later this year in October. Consider purchasing some tickets to the shows to find out how you can protect our environment while rocking some awesome green style!

Anna Cohen is editor of www.simplystylishmom.com, a style blog about maternity and mommy fashion with snippets of parenting woes and adventures thrown in. Originally from Australia, Anna now calls Vancouver home, and has raised two boys here in this wonderful city. She loves finding local sales, deals and steals and enjoys yoga, “proper” coffee and will never say no to a new pair of shoes.

*Image credits – feature image courtesy of Jason Hargrove on Flickr, runway images courtesy of Eco Fashion Week