What the heck is eco anything, these days, let alone something as ambiguous to begin with as fashion? Good question. I don’t know. I gather that few people really do. I monitor my annual carbon footprint, bike to work, avoid excessive plastic purchases, unplug appliances. But the footprint of my fashion haunts me. Pesticide use in cotton, let alone the synthetics with petroleum bases...it's hard to shoulder that. Yet there is no fashion impact calculator, no quick online test. This will be my attempt at one, and exploration of alternatives.

What am I getting into?

After thinking about this for at least two years, I’m going to dive in right now, and vow to only buy clothing that meets the criteria below. This includes everything: shoes, socks, skivvies, formal dresses, sweaters, ski gear, everything. Yes, I’m aware that people have closets like this already. Good for them. Unless they open them up and list every last thing (and hold a clothing swap party), I’ll have to hunt it down myself.

So what is eco fashion? Wikipedia, shed your light. The entry for sustainable fashion was created on August 8th, 2007. I knew to look for this history because Wikipedia was devoid of any green fashion anything on October 27, 2006, when I wrote about the green fashion night of Portland Fashion Week for Ultra PDX. As a cultural barometer, Wikipedia adopts terms much quicker than dictionaries and is second only to, say, urbandictionary.com in catching on to new words. But in the fall of 2006 no eco fashion, no green fashion, no sustainable fashion entries existed. My my, how the world has changed.

Portland Fashion Week’s once small Green and Sustainable Design Night ended up becoming the entire theme, and our hometown event last year humbly declared itself “the first fashion week in the world which was produced all-green.” Having attended a night of the 2007 show, I call that a big stretch. But more on that at a later time.

Point being, there’s wikipedia, there’s fashion shows, but when it comes to the clothes on your back, in your drawers waiting to be worn, and in the shops waiting for your purchase, how and where are you supposed to dress your bad self in line with your eco ideals?

I don’t know. Who does? And can they tell me where to find a cute pair of eco shorts?  Nau made some slick ones but they’re currently caught up in the whole Phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes thing and I'm not sure if the shorts I loved will emerge. And don’t tell me Patagonia, because though I love their company, I do not love their shorts. They look great in my childhood hiking photos, but we’re thinking more Carrie Bradshaw here and less Dora the Explorer. Moving on.

Key questions for determining eco cred:

1.) Beginning materials. Growing something with chemicals or extruding strands from vats petroleum, and processing the wits out of it with more chemicals is not an earth friendly idea. Organic cotton is better than conventional cotton like trees are better than chemical cesspools. Got it.

2.) Ending materials. A poorly made piece is just that, and will last about long enough to throw the shreds into a rag pile. Clothing that can hold its own can be worn, passed on, sold or donated and worn again. Clothing that can be recycled and reused is the ultimate goal, and especially tricky one for synthetics and complicated garments that can't be easily taken apart for recycling.

3.) Labor. Things made far away by unmonitored factories filled with underpaid people are bad, bad, bad. We’ve all heard about insert-big-company-here, but the little ones do it too, we know. So, Fair Trade, or directly and fairly managed labor, are essential. If a company doesn’t clearly state its labor practices, my skeptical flag goes up. Also, the garment industry can call the last place of production the place where the item was made, so a bag made in China and shipped to the USA or Italy for a piece of applique or zipper can then be labeled MADE IN USA. That makes it difficult to track where something is from and how many times it was shipped around the world unless the company states it outright.

4.) Clothes for living. They must be something to walk in and lightly bike in (in summer, not in winter, let’s be reasonable). These are my rules and I get to make them up, and this is a good one. Looking cute on a bike promotes more biking, so it’s a double whammy.

I may occasionally delve into the one of a kind, the ritzy, the hard to find. I’m kind of a fancy pants, kind of a wacky dresser, and mostly just a lover of clothes.

And finally, gentlemen, you will not be left out. Because what’s more fun than dressing yourself? Dressing the person you stand next to. So you’ll get our fare share of attention in this blog, too.