On May 6, there will be a new eco-fashion capital: Lodz, Poland. That’s where the second annual RE-ACT Fashion Show will rock the runways with dead stock and upcycled designs.

The show will feature the debut of London-based eco-brand Goodone’s Fall/Winter 2010 collection. (One of the line’s prettiest dresses for spring is pictured at left.)

And if you’re a fashion innovator, listen up: There’s a contest for young designers to honor the best recycling collection. The prize? 15,000 Polish zloty (or about $5,300 USD). That could buy a lot of food for starving artists.

The event will kick off the Spring 2010 FashionPhilosophy Fashion Week, so it’s worth your time to stick around afterwards.

Tesco is in some ways the U.K. equivalent of Target — a place where you can buy well-priced groceries and clothes in the same trip. Now, in the tradition of Target’s eco-minded Go International collections, Tescois releasing a sweet sustainable clothing line in collaboration with From Somewhere. Fast fashion, this isn’t.

As Ecouterre reports:

Made up of damaged stock, end of rolls, and pre-consumer textile waste from Tesco’s own supply chain, “From Somewhere to F&F” consists of six striking, paneled designs that are being produced in a LEED-certified factory in Sri Lanka—the first apparel factory in the world, in fact, to receive a Gold rating for lowering its carbon footprint by 48 percent and using 60 percent less water than a standard factory.

Also, the clothes are pretty hot — we’d wear any of these dresses out on the town. Well played, Tesco!

The dresses, which start at £16, are set to go on sale on Tesco’s website this spring.

We were surprised to read this environmental statement by Canadian outdoor-gear brand Arc’teryx regarding its refusal to use recycled materials:

Arc’teryx believes in integrity and responsibility. Due to the present state of textile technology and our unwillingness to sacrifice technical performance, the majority of Arc’teryx products are made with materials derived from non-renewable resources. We have not yet found acceptable renewable alternatives that don’t substantially affect our product’s performance or durability.

This is likely a direct shot across the bow of Patagonia, one of Arc’teryx’s main competitors, which was one of the first companies to distinguish itself with its high-quality eco-fleece. But it’s also a bit mystifying that Arc’teryx is seemingly justifying the use of non-renewable resources to its consumers given that people who love the outdoors are also probably the ones who want to save the environment.

In other words: Isn’t Arc’teryx alienating its market?

(via TreeHugger)

As the fashion industry mourns the death of Alexander McQueen, we at E.S. would like to salute the British designer for his contributions to the ethical movement. He inspired many young minds in the fashion world with his avant garde ideas and although his apparent suicide took him from us too soon, his legacy will live on.

Here, a retrospective of his work in the eco-realm:

• In his Fall 2009 Ready-to-Wear collection, McQueen explored the ideas of recycling, reinvention, and sustainability. “This whole situation is such a cliché,” he said in an interview last March before his Paris show. “The turnover of fashion is just so quick and so throwaway, and I think that is a big part of the problem. There is no longevity.”
• In November, McQueen gave items from his collections to the “6 Degrees of Cool” project, which encourages Brits to don warm clothes indoors to reduce their reliance on energy-sucking heat.
• McQueen nurtured the next generation of talent by offering internships to many up-and-coming fashion visionaries, including Ada Zanditon and Mark Liu.
• As one of the spearheading brands behind the Fakes Are Never in Fashion campaign, McQueen sought to end the use of child labor in the production of counterfeit designer items.
• McQueen also lent his name and talent to many charitable causes, including 21 First Century Leaders and Breast Cancer Care.

Anthropologie is one of our favorite destinations for feminine, tailored clothes, and we were tickled pink by an email yesterday that shows the new recycled chandeliers the company’s design team has been working on since last year.

These creative light fixtures can currently be found in Anthropologie fitting rooms in four stores across the country. Each chandelier is made from repurposed plastic bottles cut by hand into floral shapes and bunched together like a giant lit-from-within bouquet.

Says the lead designer:

“My favorite part of my job is using simple, recyclable materials to create things that are beautiful and extraordinary.”

Would that we could all have such a neat job!

We love eco-conscious costume jewelry as much as the next gal but the pickings for baubles made with precious jewels and metals are slim indeed. There are a few notable exceptions — Melissa Joy Manning and BrilliantEarth.com among them — and now we can add Choo Yilin Artisan Jewellery to that list.

Ms. Yilin herself contacted us this week with information about her Singapore-based line:

Choo Yilin Artisan Jewellery has set out to demonstrate that luxury and fine jewellery can coexist. It first started work with the hill tribe artisans in northern Thailand. By working with them, the label helps sustain a centuries-old culture which would otherwise be in danger of dying out; the effects of modernity see many young tribesmen leave their villages for the cities to seek employment. The renewed demand for their hand-forged silver provides the tribesmen with a form of employment that allows them the choice to continue with their traditional way of life.

The label has since expanded its sustainability outreach to using eco-friendly, reclaimed precious metals, and sustainably sourced gemstones that include the avoidance of conflict-free diamonds. In addition, it helps support and raise awareness of traditionally marginalised groups like the hill tribe people and the environmental destruction caused by the use of certain types of material like coral.

Is it time to start sending Valentine’s Day hints to your beau? You can shop her beautiful and delicate creations at Cate.com.sg.

Have you heard of ThredUp.com? We hadn’t until today, but as soon as we got this tip from E.S. reader Ali in Canada, we knew it belonged on the blog.

Here’s a common scenario: You’re looking through your closet for something to wear and realize all your best stuff is in the laundry. So instead of pulling out those trousers you swore you’d live in when you bought them months ago, you throw a load into the washer so you can re-wear the same pants you last wore on Monday.

But now you can rehome those trousers and get stuff you will actually wear. ThredUp.com seeks to pair you up with a style twin to expand both of your closets in three easy steps:

1. Tell us exactly what you like. We shop other people’s closets to find you hidden gems in your size that we think you’ll love.

2. Let us know the great items you’re no longer wearing. We find thredUP members who are interested in items like these.

3. We manage the peer-to-peer exchange. You send and receive items using our pre-paid envelopes – no trips to the Post Office, ever!

We are chronic sufferers of nothing-to-wearitis, but this sounds like the perfect, no-muss solution. And don’t you kind of wish you could meet your style twin?

Interested in the idea of swapping but want to be able to try stuff on first? Check out model Lucinda Story’s tips for organizing a swapping party with your friends.

I probably fall into a very small sliver of people who have a box or two purely of fabric scraps.

Unless you sew quite a bit, you will likely not accumulate this many too-small-to-make-anything fabrics scraps. So unlike the women in India will old saris to convert into floor mats or women in the old south converting gingham dresses into quilts, you probably couldn’t do much with a “here’s how to make something out of your fabric scrap box” DIY article.

But that’s not to say that you don’t have an extra fabric resource. You just may never have thought about it before.

The Problem: Copious amounts of worn-out tee-shirts. I used to have stacks of them. Maybe you have ten you still wear, but sixty you don’t want to throw away—because you got the darn thing at a [family reunion/football game/your ex-boyfriend/in Vegas/from a sensitive glue-gun wielding relative]. What do you do with them? Nothing. So they collect dust…and one day, you’ll get over the nostalgia long enough to throw them out.

The Solution: Make a tee-shirt quilt. Ultimately, each beloved graphic tee-shirt will yield one to two quilt squares — one from the logo on the back, and one from the front.

1.     Take a long look at your t-shirts, and pick out as many as you want to cut up.

2.     Based on the size of your shirts it might make sense to make 10, 12 or 14-inch squares. The logos on my shirts worked best with a size 14X14 in.

3.     Determine based on how many tee-shirts you have what the dimensions of your quilt will be. Remember, you need twice as many squares as the dimension of your quilt (front and back). Mine is 6 square by 9 squares, front and back, so I needed 108 squares in all from more than 54 t-shirts.

4.     Make a cardboard cutout at the size you want each of your squares.  I cut a large whole in the middle, making it more like a frame, so I could see where I was placing the square.

5.     Lay the square on a t-shirt and trace around the edge.  Repeat on the opposite side.

6.     Cut out as many shirts as you have plans, piling up the squares.

7.     Lay them out in the pattern that you want, for example, checkered light and dark squares, all the big patterns on one side, or some more involved placement.

8.     Begin to sew the squares together in strips, keeping the seam width the same.  For my quilt, I had 2 sets of 6 strips of 9 squares.

9.     Sew the strips of squares together. Then you will soon have two large squares, the front and back of your blanket.

10. Put the two sides together, right sides facing inward. Trim the excess fabric to make both pieces the exact same size.

11. Pin and then sew around the outside, leaving an opening to turn the quilt inside out.

12. Turn the quilt inside out and iron around the edges. Be sure to iron under the edge that has the opening, in order that you can easily stitch over the opening.

13. Run the sewing machine around the edge of the quilt, to finish off the edges of the quilt.

14.  Find several points around the quilt to attach the two sides together, basically tacking the quilt in four or eight places with a hand or machine stitch.

15.  You may notice a pile of scrap fabric that you have left over. This shouldn’t be wasted. Hear are a few ideas: Shred finely and use as stuffing, make another quilt with smaller squares, or the most practical — use the left over scraps as rags for work around the house.

By making a fun quilt that’s full of memories and using the leftovers for new rags for housework (which can later become rag rugs), zero waste isn’t an impossible goal for any of us.

I’d venture a guess that humans have been recycling fabric since the dawn of time.

Silk rag rugs are hand-loomed in India by weaving twisted strips of old saris.

When you have to weave for weeks to make one item of clothing (not to mention gathering the wool or harvesting the cotton or tracking the deer), once made, you would never choose to waste the cloth.

By contrast, today we often throw out clothes with the slightest need for a mend. We throw out clothes because we have too many. We throw out clothes because they just aren’t cool anymore.

Now designers are thinking up new ways to cut up existing fabric to avoid waste, and other methods to keep extra fabric at a minimum. As we “Oooo “and “Ahhh” over these new technologies to not waste fabric, let’s take a minute to respect our ancestors for finding creative ways to do the exact same thing.

From quilts to rag rugs, potholders to aprons, stuffed toys to pillows, our predecessors have been finding creative ways to turn bits of fabric into functional masterpieces for generations. Here are a few ideas from around the world.

• Indian silk “rag” rugs: Silk rag rugs are hand-loomed in India by weaving twisted strips of old saris into wide gorgeous rugs. They are substantially brighter that their American-European counterpart, as they are made from bright silk saris that are often adorned with metallic paint and thread shining through.
• European/Country rag rugs: This craft was brought to the United States, likely by European immigrants, although it is hard to tell from where and first became popular in the 1890s. Some type of rag rug was likely the original American floor covering. A rag rug can be made from any material sewn into strips, although organic materials such as cotton and silk are the very common. Getting its name from what it can be made from—old rags—the name conveys the charm of these classic rugs. In the Old South, rag rugs were mostly cotton, leftovers from textile mills. Strips of scrap material can be woven in a rectangle on a loom, crocheted, or strips of fabric can be braided and then coiled and sewn in concentric circles, creating large circular, oval, and even heart-shaped rugs.
• Pieced and patchwork quilts: The quilt is as old as ancient Egypt, and has remained popular throughout history. The patchwork quilt only came to prominence after the 1840s when industrially produced fabric made it common and affordable, and while often the quilts are very ornate (and not made from scraps), women in the American interior and frontier preferred to use fabric scraps from used clothing and especially leftover scraps from other things they were sewing. The story of the quilt in America is particularly strong in the abolitionist movement, among the Amish, and in the Midwest. Certain quilting techniques are traditionally very “American,” but variations on the quilt can be found around the world.

I plan to keep plumbing the depths of this movement, but it has been much harder than I thought to track down ways that people around the world recycle their fabric. But that is not because they are not recycling — they are. Truth is, from Tulsa to Timbuktu, men and women will reuse fabric for a thousand things not just out of choice, but out of necessity. A lesson for us all.

What’s better than recycling? How about getting rewarded for recycling with free lipstick?

An advertisement from MAC Cosmetics' Hello Kitty limited edition collection in 2009. (Courtesy of MACCosmetics.com)

Such is the philosophy behind MAC Cosmetics’ successful Back to MAC program to reappropriate its iconic sleek black packaging. Consumers who return six empty cosmetics containers to MAC counters, stores, or online can receive a free MAC lipstick of their choice. (The only exception is lip color from the Viva Glam line, since the proceeds from those lipsticks and glosses are donated directly to AIDS research.)

That means any lipgloss wands, eyeshadow cases, blush pans, foundation bottles, or powder compact earns you something you can continue to use — and then recycle again at the end of its life. The containers need not be completely empty, but you may as well use them up before trading them in. MAC then recycles these plastic containers to make new packaging for its products.

Cosmetics packaging traditionally isn’t easily recyclable. It is commonly made from plastic resins like polypropylene that pose challenges in melting down and reusing without destroying the integrity of the plastic. But with MAC’s program, the glass and plastic can be reprocessed into new products, and any waste is incinerated to generate the energy required for the processing.

Not all of MAC’s packaging qualifies for the program. Cardboard boxes, cellophane wrappers, and sample or trial-size products are excluded from Back to MAC, but many of these items can go into your household recycling (specifically the plastics and cardboards). And tools and accessories can always be cleaned and donated or resold if they are unwanted.

Previously, MAC would accept the plastic pots from “depotted” eyeshadows and blushes, but a policy change in 2008 means consumers must now also return the metal pan that encases the powder. No cheating!

Origins — which, like MAC, is owned by Estée Lauder — also runs a successful cosmetics-recycling program. Bring in your empty Origins packaging to any department store counter or freestanding store for recycling, although unlike MAC, you don’t receive a bounty for your good deed.

Aveda also has taken steps to gather up hard-to-recycle plastic bottle caps through its Recycle Caps program. Not limited to just Aveda cosmetics, the program takes responsibility for keeping nonbiodegradeable plastics out of landfills and the ocean.

According to the program’s website, Aveda “accepts caps that are rigid polypropylene plastic, sometimes noted with a 5 in the chasing arrows recycling symbol. This includes caps that twist on with a threaded neck such as caps on shampoo, water, soda, milk and other beverage bottles, flip top caps on tubes and food product bottles (such as ketchup and mayonnaise), laundry detergents and some jar lids such as peanut butter.”

As recycling becomes second nature for consumers, it seems likely that more and more beauty companies will prioritize keeping the planet as beautiful as it keeps its customers.