NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR EGGHEAD FREELANCE JOURNALISM
FutureFashion, an initiative pioneered by Earth Pledge and sponsored by Barneys New York and others, is bringing eco-conscious clothes to a well-heeled audience. For New York Fashion Week, Earth Pledge presented a group show featuring everything from casual day wear to ball gowns — all made with nature-friendly or secondhand fabrics. “Design and creativity don’t have to be sacrificed to make garments that are less harmful to the earth,” says Julie Gilhart, Barneys’ fashion director. “In fact, developing something sustainable can be a much more creative process.”
“Green With Envy.” The New York Times. April 27, 2008.
This article in the Style section of the New York Times magazine on Sunday made me see cartoon lightning bolts and stars before my eyes. I felt exactly as if all of the things that I’ve been working on for the last ten years had been pushed together and had gathered momentum until they rolled over the edge of a cliff and plummeted into the mainstream, landing with great impact. “…PVC, a chemically-produced plastic that doesn’t break down, perhaps isn’t the slickest of materials after all,” was part of the second sentence of the first paragraph. It was a small profile of Future Fashion, which has a database of 1,000 sustainable materials and a white paper on sustainability available for sale on its website. There was a goofy edge: the materials sounded as strange as the bits of nature that Alexis Rockman sent home from Tasmania to mix with painting materials to make his portraits of the local wildlife. Future Fashion recommends fabric made from the “…leaf stalks of a banana species native to the Phillipines“ and “… fur from the brush-tail possum, which is an animal that has become a scourge in Australia.”
Fifteen years ago I inadvertently fell out of the mainstream media orbit. I was working on book-length projects about robotics and design for small, hyper-specific foreign publishers and almost everything that I was translated into Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese and never published in English. And I began experimenting with bookbinding techniques inspired by the engineering and construction techniques of modern architecture. I dreamed of writing white papers and profiles of materials that would be as fascinating and full of character as Joseph Mitchell’s profiles of the people he encountered in New York in the 1930’s and 1940’s. But it was too early, my interests were still out on the nerd fringe then and I’m no crusader or pioneer. So while the media world has changed, probably irrecoverably, I can suddenly imagine writing white-paperish features and biographies of materials for the few high-profile global magazines I’m still connected to.
