Go Green Expo

Inspired by the film "An Inconvenient Truth," Bradford Rand and his team of managers and event producers set out to to make a difference in the world-- this was the birth of Go Green Expo, a showcase of environmentalism at its finest. Featuring large and small companies that have taken steps to reducing their carbon footprint, the Go Green Expo is a green event from the bottom up. Everything involved in the production of these conferences is thought out ecologically, from the biodegradable trashbags, eco-friendly printing, table coverings, recycled signs, compostable banners and more. With an aim to change the public's perception of environmentalism, the Go Green Expo travels across the nation showcasing their eco-friendly alternatives to current everyday products and services.

On March 19-21, The Go Green Expo will be in New York! Visit their site at www.gogreenexpo.com to find out more information about the event and to purchase tickets. The Go Green Expo is also involved in this year's NOW Fall 2010 Showcase. We are glad to have this group as a sponsor for our event, helping to promote fair, forward, and sustainable style.

Follow the Expo on Twitter -- http://twitter.com/gogreenexpo
Follow the Expo on Facebook -- http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8254588769
Follow the Expo on LinkedIn -- http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=113721
Go Green Expo Youtube Channel -- http://www.youtube.com/GoGreenExpo

Sustainable Style Foundation and NOW

Founded in 2003 by Rebecca Luke and Sean Schmidt, the Sustainable Style Foundation is an international, member-supported nonprofit organization that provides information, resources, and innovative programs that promote sustainable living and design. Who says that being environmentally responsible is limiting? SSF, through a myriad of methods, demonstrates how much fun and creative living eco-consciously can be, and proves that sustainable style isn't about trading in 'fabulous' trends for more eco-conscious threads. From fashion, food and film to interior design, travel, music and more, SSF provides a positive message in attracting more consumers to go green.

SSF is a sponsor of the NOW Fall 2010 Showcase, and will be presenting some of their ideas to the Showcase audience. On Sunday, Feb 21 at 10am, Rebecca Luke (co-founder of the SSF, stylist, costume designer) will be hosting an SSF salon "How To Sell Sustainability." She will also be joined by a guest interior designer from the NBBJ. Breakfast will be served. Please Join us!

Playfully Regal by JAI Activewear

Smart Design=Sustainability=Contemporary Elegance

Out of a determination to reduce damage caused to the environment by the mechanisms employed by the fashion industry, emerged a sustainable clothing line custom tailored to meet the needs of the modern day princess-- women on the go who love to look and feel amazing. These women, crowned 'ambassadors of contemporary elegance,' are the main consumer audience for the Playfully Regal line by JAI Activewear, a brand that promotes holistic approaches to fashion and style, featuring eco-friendly and and socially conscious clothing that bridges the gap between comfort, fashion, style, and sustainability.

JAI Activewear is exactly that... activewear. The collection was launched last season and is now evolving into a contemporary woman's wear brand, keeping the activewear line as a continuum.


Crafted by British designer Kizzy Jai Knight, JAI is a brand elegantly influenced by movement, versatility, and flexibility. With a degree in Dance from The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, as well as a background in yoga, Knight uses her designs to captivate the essence of her extensive physical artistry. "As a dancer and choreographer I learned about the fluidity of fabrics and how clothing should compliment and assist the body. Styling created opportunities that contextualized these discoveries and gave me a platform for testing and developing ideas with a mainstream audience," says Knight. With pieces appropriately and playfully named-- Miss Jumpsuit, Sunningdale Classic, Lady Romper, Long Len Jen-- Knight creates a style of clothing that marries luxury, comfort, and elegance with eco-conscious sensibility.

Ranked in the Top 2 on a list of Seven Up-And-Coming Green Designers of 2009 by online green fashion magazine Ecouterre, Kizzy Jai Knight continues to exceed herself by continually upgrading her style, designing uniquely fashioned and environmentally mindful pieces that prove the future of fashion is sustainability. Using biodegradable and recycled fabrics such as tencel, recycled nylon, and recycled cotton, Knight ensures the longevity of her line, as well as the endurance of the green fashion movement. Recycling is a cyclic process-- by generating products of this caliber, it becomes self-sustainable and keeps in tune with preserving our planet's resources.

The NOW is JAI-- Look out for JAI's Fall/Winter '10 collection at the NOW Fall 2010 Showcase, Feb 20-22, at the ICO Gallery. Spring immediate collections will also be available.

Feral Childe: Fashion at Play!

Feral Childe is the eco-loving Indigo baby of two art girls--Moriah Carlson and Alice Wu--who met over a sink of eggshells at an art installation and have been making killer clothes ever since. Their line is especially whimsical and one-of-a-kind to say the least: even the buttons used in their pieces are hand-cast so that no two are exactly alike. Taking fabrics hot in the organic world like soy, hemp, organic cotton, and mill-end scraps, they paint and dye by hand to make unexpected prints. The creative process is a wild thing in the designers' Feral world of play and craft. After all, they launched into fashion fame by making clothes for each other and getting stopped so often on the street that they had to start selling. Now their clothes are sold all across the US, as well as in Japan and Korea. Paired with a playful sensibility is their serious dedication to green fashion, which for them isn't just about changing the state of our environment for the better, but also changing the way the world produces and receives fashion. Their vision is that collaboration among conscious designers will allow for change in the fashion industry, bringing forth more eco-conscious ideas and more eco-friendly designs.

Spring 2010 was reminiscent of making music on the Swiss Alps: the collection was called "The Hills are Alive," referencing The Sound of Music, though the locally produced garments still managed to exude a strong sense of Brooklyn. The hand-drawn textiles hide some tricky images--alpine mushrooms, wild pigs, lightening bolts, and rainbows--reinforcing the Childe-ish chaos motif that runs luxuriously through their collection. With every piece comes a little surprise. Notice their wheat cowl neck pull-over with neck-tabs, and a little blue babydoll dress printed with what looks like underwater photography on textile. Last year, the inspiration was Ansel Adams and the year before, Buckminster Fuller. But this year it's back to the classics, Feral-style. Fall looks like it will be mixing in some tweedy greys and ribbon skirts. For more, make sure to visit Feral Childe at their website here: http://www.feralchilde.com/

Feral Childe will be displaying their Fall collection at the NOW Fall 2010 Showcase, February 20-22 at ICO Gallery. Spring immediate collections will also be available.

naturevsfuture: organic-futurism

Launched in the spring of 2002, naturevsfuture was born out of a desire to generate unique designs that would blend imagination with architecture, nature with technology, and fashion with eco-consciousness. Founded by Parsons alum and Brooklyn native Nina Valenti, naturevsfuture is a striking fusion of classic and cutting-edge, with a futuristic aesthetic that employs the use of innovative sculptural design and sustainable fabrics. Using the body as a palette, and adding the elements of balance, line quality, rhythm and movement to the mix, Valenti constructs clothing that is functional, comfortable, bold, and fitting to the shape of the female physique. Trading her former métier of designing streetwear for her new organic-futuristic line, Valenti now focuses on creating pieces that not only defy contemporary trends, but also confronts the plight of our environment. In an effort to address these environmental concerns and promote the need to preserve and respect the earth, Valenti increasingly incorporates organic, sustainable, renewable, and biodegradable materials in the collection each season. These fabrics include organic cotton, organic wool, hemp, soy, bamboo, seacell, lyocell, and Ingeo (created from corn), as well as recycled and technological fabrics such as Polartec (made from soda pop bottles or industry waste). This eco-conscious approach to fashion is the basis for her line as well as the inspiration for the brand's name-- "The more we advance the more we need to consider nature before we deplete it. In this tension to find balance is the living energy of the collection and hence the name," says Valenti.

In the span of a few years, naturevsfuture has garnered an impressive amount of positive attention from the press including reviews in WWD, Italian Vogue, ELLE Girl, Nylon, Fader, The New York Times, Time Magazine, as well as featurettes in online magazines such as Treehugger, The Huffington Post, Trendcentral, Daily Candy, and The VillageVoice.com. In addition, naturevsfuture has also made onscreen appearances on the Today Show, General Hospital, Gilmore Girls, and What Not to Wear. With so much already accomplished, what's next for this futuristic brand? Menswear.

Check out naturevsfuture at their website here: http://www.naturevsfuture.com/ to be updated on news events about the brand, press releases, as well as access their online store.

Naturevsfuture will be presenting their fall collection at the NOW Fall 2010 Showcase. Spring immediate collection will also be available.

SDN: Vintage Fabrics for Modern Designs

From the beginning, it was all about the worn, beautiful quality of vintage fabrics. Working at a vintage clothing store in San Francisco in the early 90s, Marcus Hicks developed a penchant for the attractiveness and versatility of these antiquated materials that would later become the foundation for his own clothing line, SDN. Dissatisfied with the standard of mainstream retail at the time, Hicks began to put his designs into production, recycling old fabrics to make one-of-a-kind screen-printed t-shirts.

Stemming from the singular idea of creating beautiful and stunning upcycled clothing, SDN has become a popular eco-fashion label, with menswear and womenswear included in the collection. In keeping his fabric supply rich and unique, Hicks obtains entirely organic, sustainable, and recycled textiles, and works his designs around the fabrics. With brilliant red vests, skinny pinstriped shirts, capes, and collar-dresses, SDN’s 1920s-hipster inspired clothing bleeds an aesthetic of clean lines and bright red lipstick, fedora-clad men in dark alleyways, a touch of grunge, glam, and the effervescence of youth. This noir-chic brand not only addresses style in an innovative way, but also takes care to address world situations by using textiles that are good for the earth, people, and even politics. SDN supports “progressive political causes” and does not utilize sweatshop labor in the creation of their clothing. SDN merchandise can be found in NYC at Tessan, Kaight, and Sodafine, and will also be featured at the NOW Fall 2010 Showcase, February 20-22 at the ICO Gallery.

Check out more of SDN's looks here: http://www.sarahdixonsnova.com/

And Now a Word from our Sponsors...

What do sweet honey drinks, delicious chocolate, an online fashion magazine, sparkling water, a building materials surplus warehouse, and a social networking community all have in common? The keyword is GREEN. Honeydrop, Divine Chocolate, Ecouterre, Perrier, Build It Green! NYC, and Ecohookups.com all share in their efforts to sustain the environment, utilizing individual methods such as recycling, reusing, and raising eco-awareness, to promote the preservation of a healthy planet. In addition to these commonalities, these companies have all banded together this year to support the NOW Fall 2010 Showcase, featuring sustainable fashion by independent designers.

Honeydrop is a healthy honey beverage brand, founded by David Luks, which carries an assortment of fantastic blended honey drinks. Based on the simple idea of creating a drink that is natural and not from the lab, Honeydrop features products that are made from 100% organic honey, free of harmful pesticides and chemical additives. To add to the flavor, the drinks are then induced with ingredients such as organic apples, blood-orange juice and orange peel, blueberry juice, and chamomile. In an effort to save energy and keep the planet healthy, Honeydrop uses fully recyclable plastic bottles and gathers their honey from organic bees that are sustained in natural habitats and are not exterminated at the end of each harvest cycle.

Starting as a small farmer's co-op in Ghana, and now recognized as a leading Fair Trade brand in the UK and a pioneer in the world of socially responsible enterprise, Divine Chocolate represents not only a product that is divine, but also a green endeavor that effectively supports its workers and the environment. With a firm belief in environmentally friendly cultivation of cocoa, Divine Chocolate stands out as an eco-tasty treat that is simply delicious!

As an online fashion magazine that supports the future of sustainable fashion, Ecouterre makes many efforts to raise the level of eco-awareness in the realm of clothing and design. Though many might not realize, clothing production uses a lot of energy and also accounts for a large amount of toxins being released into the ecosphere. Ecouterre believes that clothing production can be accomplished in a better, smarter, and more socially and environmentally sustainable way. Through a steady supply of daily postings, articles, links to blogs, featurettes on new green fashion trends, clothing items and designers, Ecouterre provides a forum for fashionistas and greenies alike to learn more about eco-fashion while supporting our environment.

What comes to mind when thinking about crisp, refreshing, sparkling mineral water? Perrier. With its famous green bottle standing as an emblem for its quality and taste, the brand contributes to the sustenance of the environment while at the same time providing water that sustains its consumers. Each glass bottle is recyclable, and their new plastic take-anywhere bottles are made from 100% recyclable materials. Inside each of these classic green bottles is water that is completely natural, caffeine-free, and free of additives.

Build It Green! NYC is a retail outlet for salvaged and surplus building materials, as well as other items including furniture, small odds and ends, and movie props. This non-profit organization promotes reuse as an alternative to more manufacturing. By keeping these materials out of landfills, Build It Green! helps to reduce the amount of carbon being released into the air, and prevents the clogging of landfills.

Tagged as a social network with purpose, Ecohookups.com takes the theme of sites such as Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter, and gives them a big green makeover. Featuring eco-fashion, beauty, lifestyle, food, technology and design, Ecohookups.com is an online network where people can support each other as a green community. Members are called "peeps" and everyone has their "yard," and through blog posts, comments, and inter-web dialogue, useful tips are traded, and everyone is kept up to date with what's new on the green scene.

In supporting fair trade and sustainability, Honeydrop, Divine Chocolate, Ecouterre, Perrier, Build It Green! NYC and Ecohookups.com all make efforts to create a healthier environment. NOW is glad to have these groups as our sponsors. With their help, the NOW Fall 2010 Showcase can further make an impact in the fashion world, presenting an alternative to conventional and ecologically harmful designs. Fair. Sustainable. Forward. NOW Showcase. It's about time.