Organic--the New Mantra of the Fashion Industry
5 August, New York Times News Service

"Organic style," once an oxymoron, the verbal equivalent of stiletto-heeled
Birkenstocks, has become a marketing mantra to pitch everything from Hermes
handbags to Armani clothing and the latest products and designs are aimed at
consumers who are as committed to living in style as they are to living
"green."

Style and substance: "We call them 'conscious sensualists,'" said Maria
Rodale, the founder of Organic Style, a new women's lifestyle magazine that
hopes to profit from the trend. The publisher, Rodale Press, which also puts
out Organic Gardening, is betting that readers who once wanted to grow
pesticide-free spinach are eager to acquire a high-fashion wardrobe and a
sumptuously furnished home -- if the case can be made that the products are
earth-friendly. The magazine, due out next month, is for "women who want to
do the right thing for their health and the environment, but not at the cost
of living well," Rodale said. "They don't want to sacrifice anything -- not
great food, great clothes, nor a comfortable home that looks good.
Increasingly there are options that don't compromise on either front."

Many marketers are betting that the broad base of organically minded
consumers can be nudged along an upgrade curve. Already people are
responding to all-natural and ecofriendly products that are "highly
designed, with softer, more natural colors and curves that follow those in
nature," said Jody Crane, whose company, New Solutions Marketing, provides
market research and trend analysis to corporations. Packaging has become
simpler and more artful. "You may still see brown paper wrapping, but it's
going to be refined brown paper, with beautiful fibers woven into it," Crane
said.

The concept is not novel to cosmetics makers. The Body Shop and Aveda,
pioneers in the field of plant-based beauty balms, were among the first to
seduce customers with eye-pleasing packaging and rainforest-redolent
fragrances. Many others have acted on the premise, first expounded by Horst
Rechelbacher, Aveda's founder, that "ecofriendly style need not be a
contradiction in terms."

Today that phrase has the ring of an edict, one that resounds throughout the
marketplace, from Sephora, the high-end cosmetics emporium, to cutting-edge
fashion boutiques like Kirna Zabete, a Manhattan outpost for trend seekers.
It stocks Red Flower organic tea and candles, and the Jules and Jane line of
botanical treatments, which are embellished with eye-catching black-on-red
graphics. "The old hippie vitamin store packaging just no longer cuts it,"
said Sarah Hailes, a co-owner of the store.

Similarly seductive wares have insinuated their way into the home, from the
front porch, where a hemp hammock swings, to the kitchen sink, awash in
coriander-scented, biodegradable dishwashing liquid.

"People say they want products that are environmentally friendly," said
Danny Seo, 24, who has been called the Martha Stewart of organic style. "But
unless a product is affordable and appealing to the eye, who is going to pay
for it?"

In "Conscious Style Home" (St. Martin's Press), a forthcoming coffee table
guide to stylish ecofriendly home design, Seo enjoins consumers to buy rugs
made of hemp (more durable and renewable than cotton), whiten their fabrics
with nonchlorine bleach and sip their carrot juice from recycled glass
tumblers. The organic philosophy is "good-hearted," Seo said, "but you
can't force someone to part with their money just because the product is
good for the planet. That's what charity is for."

That message has not been lost on the fashion world, where "organic,"
"natural," and "holistic," adjectives once mostly applied to food and
shampoos, are the last words in hip.
Today the Hermes Kelly bag, the ultimate badge of luxury chic, comes in
Amazonia, a rubbery canvas coating made from the sap of the Brazilian Hevea
tree, a renewable resource, the company points out, that does not sacrifice
a living tree. The bag, a travel-sized version of the classic Kelly, is
priced at $5,250 -- a long way from any back-to-the-land lifestyle.
Ralph Lauren manufactures an upholstery fabric in khaki-tone hemp. And
Giorgio Armani's jeans line, carried by Emporio Armani, which has offered
hemp apparel for more than a decade, this fall is raising the fashion
quotient of the line with such items as a hemp military overcoat with a
cartridge bandolier style trim.

Anne Fontaine, a Parisian designer whose pristine white cotton shirts are
sold in her SoHo and Madison Avenue boutiques of the same name, lives by the
credo "construire sans detruire" (build without destroying). True to her
word, she has her shirts stitched and embroidered with old-fashioned,
manually operated machines, to conserve energy, she says.
In recent years, the whole-earth lifestyle has received the endorsement of
pop-culture goddesses like Madonna, Courtney Love and Christy Turlington,
who have been among its most vocal devotees. Now Turlington is marketing
Sundari, a line of skin treatments made with plant extracts ($52 for a jar
of moisturizer), and Nuala, a collection of yoga and gym togs with a racy
edge, made by Puma.

"People perceive such items as sophisticated," said Susan Kurz, the
president of Dr. Hauschka, an upscale natural skin treatment line, adding
that using the products is the equivalent of "eating mixed greens instead of
iceberg lettuce."