In 2008, eco-fashion is “the new black.” It’s “fashion’s statement.” It’s “not just a trend.” But as many will remember, this isn’t the first time green fashion has been supposedly new on the radar.

Environmentalism in fashion can be traced back to at least the 1960s. However, it wasn’t until the late ’80s that the “green” mentality and hemp fashions of the hippie era gave way to mainstream eco-fashion.

A kinder, gentler fashion industry reigned in the early ’90s and was receptive to eco-ideas. Katharine Hamnett’s goal of a green cotton takeover by the year 2000 made her a household name. Esprit’s first ecologically sound collection, the Ecollection, was revolutionary. Style section headlines declared that “Green’s the Fashion in Europe” and “Ecological Awareness Is the Next Fashion Style.”

But the revolution was short-lived. By mid-decade, the initial enthusiasm for recycled bottle cap fashions, organic cotton tees, and proud canvas bags was already fizzling.

Environmental awareness in the fashion industry, so celebrated as the future of fashion, had apparently gone out with grunge and the flannel button-down. While labor and advertising issues in fashion remained on the public’s mind (mostly thanks to Kathy Lee Gifford and Calvin Klein, respectively), green fashion fell, well, out of fashion.

Whatever happened to Hamnett’s Green Cotton 2000? Why didn’t the Ecollection give way to a new industry standard?

Technological limitations, the comeback of the worker’s rights movement, consumer backlash to “green” marketing ploys — many factors played a role in eco-fashion’s first failure. It is generally remembered as a time of hemp sack dresses and similarly unpleasant beige fashions.

But those memories may hold the key as to how green fashion’s latest revival can avoid the same fate.

The obvious roots of eco-fashion can be described in terms of hippie environmentalism, but the fact is that those years also gave way to fashion for the masses. As one expert wrote in the New York Times in 1990, there is more to fashion’s underpinnings than out with old and in with the new.

“A fashion trend is the result of a convergence of political, economic and other social factors,” wrote Ruth P. Rubinstein, a professor at New York’s prestigious Fashion Institute of Technology, ”and it meets a need for affiliation and value affirmation, particularly important in our heterogeneous, multiracial society…. Fashion is the expression of the latest political, artistic, and literary ideas, the spirit of the period.”

In other words, there is much more to trends than industry profits and vanity. This reality — the reasons why so many of us love fashion in the first place — is too often overlooked by modern criticisms of fashion’s “obsession” with disposable trends.

What was arguably missing from the ’90s version of eco-fashion was balance, a steadying of environmental concerns with its cultural and aesthetic value.

Like her ’90s predecessors, the eco-fashionista of today looks for fashion first and green second.

Or as Esprit Ecollection designer Lynda Grose put it, “Fashion cannot survive on beige alone.”