Meeting one of the eco-fashion world’s most visionary minds in an exclusive, members-only club in the heart of London counts as a career highlight for me as a fashion writer. I briefly worried about what to wear as I prepared to interview Ada Zanditon, one of Estethica at London Fashion Week’s brightest stars, in Covent Garden earlier this month. Her designs are full of edgy details and exaggerated structure — neither of which pack well.

Hexagons rocked the runway during Ada Zanditon's "A World Without Bees" collection at London Fashion Week. (Image: Paul Persky)

As it turns out, this is not something that required a second thought. Disarmingly dressed in jeans and a faded grey tee-shirt, the pocket-sized Ada greeted me in the foyer of Hospital Club, a sort of urban country club for London’s creative types.

We sat down with cups of peppermint tea and our backs to some magnificent views of the city, and then we got esoteric about how fashion forms in her mind.

Ada burst onto the scene in 2007 when she graduated from the London College of Fashion with a degree in womenswear design. She interned for such notable names as Alexander McQueen and Gareth Pugh, then made a splash for herself with her first collection, titled “Emergence,” at London Fashion Week in October 2008.

She says she draws her inspiration from great design, be it fashion or natural or architectural. She counts Balenciaga and Jil Sander among her favorite designers but prefers not to borrow from extensively traveled territory like, for example, Gone With The Wind. How many dresses can one make from curtains?

“For me, what makes it more exciting to design is when you go outside fashion,” she says. “Like bees, or weather patterns.” She also counts the late Danish furniture designer Vernor Panton as one of her muses for his ability to build structure out of shapes.

Rather than chasing after trends or struggling to make her work fit into the current era, she says she prefers to “develop design that has a timeless quality because it comes from ‘the other.’”

But of course, what sets ethical designers apart is how they think about waste issues and synthesizes those ideas with great design.

Ada acknowledged that she has that added layer of mission. She prioritizes minimal-waste materials like recycled polycarbonate in her jewelry and lines her dresses with cutting-room floor scraps of linen and silk organza. ”It’s important to make pieces that make people think — to stimulate consciousness and not just spending,” she said.

To that end, she chose the plight of the disappearing honeybee as the focus of her Spring/Summer 2010 collection, which she showed at London Fashion Week this fall. Titled “A World Without Bees,” she wishes to draw attention to colony collapse disorder, a worldwide phenomenon that is causing honeybees to die en masse.

To read Ada’s detailed dissection of her latest collection, click here for a slideshow and her commentary on what went into “A World Without Bees.”