Luxury in fashion is known for the recurring themes of excess, decadence, and an appreciation for the finer things. By contrast, eco-fashion celebrates minimizing waste, finding new uses for the discarded, and changing what goes into and comes out of the earth. Luxury is Marie Antoinette to the green movement’s Joan of Arc. It seems, then, that eco-luxury would be a contradiction in terms — how does one justify extravagance with the waste-not, want-not tenets of ethical consumerism? Is it an oxymoron?

High-end designers, for their part, have mostly grouped into two camps: those who have dipped a toe in eco-fashion by releasing a capsule collection of sustainable garments or designing a reusable grocery bag, and those who have utterly ignored the green movement.

Designs from the FutureFashion show in Los Angeles. (Rebecca Sapp/WireImage.com)

The Earth Pledge FutureFashion shows in New York and Los Angeles tried to rustle up enthusiasm among the crème de la crème of fashion last spring, inviting top designers to show off creations made from natural and sustainable materials. Among the 28 fashion houses to participate were Bottega Veneta, Burberry, Marc Jacobs, Versace, and Yves Saint Laurent.

The collections met with largely positive reviews, and a few big names paid lip service about how consumers will be seeing a lot more of this awareness in the future. Said Francisco Costa of Calvin Klein to Vogue: “The awareness is always there, but with things like this show, I feel like we’ll be doing that more. The customer has to be educated, especially if it’s global. But I think everybody will catch on — and who doesn’t want to be a part of it?”

Still, the bulk of eco-luxury designing has fallen to the up-and-comers who are trying to make a name for themselves associated with ethical fashion. And while it’s great to support independent designers — and to be sure, there’s a lot of creativity coming out of those smaller shops — the top names in fashion are in a better position to bring sustainable design into the mainstream.

The major obstacle, as explored in EthicalStyle’s last issue, is that going green would mean more luxury brands would have to reconsider moving their operations to China, the home of cheap manufacturing and all manner of environmental and human-rights sins. That would be a critical first step.

But they are unlikely to do so when Chinese factory workers are becoming more skilled and producing goods faster and for less per hour than European and American factories can compete with. At the same time, few designers are willing to go on the record about their reliance on Chinese labor.

In the end, it comes down to whether lovers of luxury are providing enough demand to create the supply. It’s fair to ask whether someone who would spend $760 on of-the-moment Yves Saint Laurent Tribute sandals would also be willing to spend the same amount on something with an ethical pedigree.

Luxury is about exclusivity, whereas the stigma still exists where anything labeled “green” smacks of hippies and socialism. The green revolution has fizzled before, and if designers are serious about making it stick this time around, fashion needs an upstart to change that grubby image. And it needs to come from the high-end segment of the industry.

To advance, the green movement needs the luxury market to accept its principles. If a major headline-maker were to step up to the plate and subtly go green, it would legitimize the movement in a major way. Make it so that it’s not about organic cotton or emissions offsets at all and the focus is still on the clothes. It wouldn’t have to be splashy; in fact, it shouldn’t be. All it would take is a Marc Jacobs or a Tom Ford to start doing things exactly the same way but with an elevated social consciousness.

Designers are always looking for inspiration. This could be it.