Pubdate: Sun, 15 Jul 2001
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2001 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Source: The New York Times
Section: Fashion & Style
Author: Ruth La Ferla
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/hemp.htm (Hemp)

FASHIONISTAS, ECOFRIENDLY AND ALL-NATURAL

"I had my first tofu birthday cake when I was 9," reminisced Natane Adcock, 
an actress and model, who grew up with a mother who was a charter member of 
the health-food movement. Mealtimes, she confided, used to make her cringe. 
"At school I got made fun of," she said. "Finally, I stopped using anything 
that had the word 'whole' in it."

But at 25, Ms. Adcock has changed her tune. A devout consumer of organic 
goods, she shops at the Whole Foods Market in her Upper West Side 
neighborhood, sleeps on unbleached cotton sheets, bathes in a detoxifying 
ginger bath and ingests All-Zyme -- a preparation said to aid digestion -- 
from her medicine cabinet. Her household pharmacopeia is not much to look 
at, she conceded, adding wistfully, "It would be nice to have a product 
from the health food store that actually looks good in my bathroom."

These days she can have her pick. Ms. Adcock's health food store, and no 
less her drugstore, furniture emporium and favorite clothing boutiques are 
likely to be well stocked with wares that aim to be all-natural and very 
stylish.

"Organic style," once an oxymoron, the verbal equivalent of stiletto-heeled 
Birkenstocks, has become a marketing mantra to pitch everything from Hermes 
handbags to Armani clothing. It has lately been adopted by high-end 
fashionmakers, who once would have shuddered at being linked with a 
lifestyle reminiscent of a commune.

The latest products and designs are aimed at consumers who are as committed 
to living in style as they are to living "green."

"We call them 'conscious sensualists,' " said Maria Rodale, the founder of 
Organic Style, a new women's lifestyle magazine that hopes to profit from 
the trend. The publisher, Rodale Press, which also puts out Organic 
Gardening, is betting that readers who once wanted to grow pesticide-free 
spinach are eager to acquire a high-fashion wardrobe and a sumptuously 
furnished home -- if the case can be made that the products are 
earth-friendly. The magazine, due out next month, is for "women who want to 
do the right thing for their health and the environment, but not at the 
cost of living well," Ms. Rodale said.

"They don't want to sacrifice anything," she continued. "Not great food, 
great clothes, nor a comfortable home that looks good. Increasingly there 
are options that don't compromise on either front."

How big a market is there for organic high style?

In a Gallup poll last year, between 80 percent and 90 percent of Americans 
said they participated in simple eco-conscious behaviors like recycling and 
reducing energy and water usage, while 73 percent bought environmentally 
beneficial products. The Organic Trade Association estimates that sales of 
organically grown food in the United States was $6.4 billion in 1999, with 
a projected yearly growth of 20 percent.

Many marketers are betting that this broad base of organically minded 
consumers can be nudged along an upgrade curve. Already people are 
responding to all-natural and ecofriendly products that are "highly 
designed, with softer, more natural colors and curves that follow those in 
nature," said Jody Crane, whose company, New Solutions Marketing, provides 
market research and trend analysis to corporations. Packaging has become 
simpler and more artful. "You may still see brown paper wrapping, but it's 
going to be refined brown paper, with beautiful fibers woven into it," Ms. 
Crane said.

The concept is not novel to cosmetics makers. The Body Shop and Aveda, 
pioneers in the field of plant-based beauty balms, were among the first to 
seduce customers with eye-pleasing packaging and rain-forest-redolent 
fragrances. Many others have acted on the premise, first expounded by Horst 
Rechelbacher, Aveda's founder, that "ecofriendly style need not be a 
contradiction in terms."

Today that phrase has the ring of an edict, one that resounds throughout 
the marketplace, from Sephora, the high-end cosmetics emporium, to 
cutting-edge fashion boutiques like Kirna Zabete, a SoHo outpost for trend 
seekers. It stocks Red Flower organic tea and candles, and the Jules & Jane 
line of botanical treatments, which are embellished with eye-catching 
black-on-red graphics. "The old hippie vitamin-store packaging just no 
longer cuts it," said Sarah Hailes, a co-owner of the store.

Similarly seductive wares have insinuated their way into the home, from the 
front porch, where a hemp hammock swings, to the kitchen sink, awash in 
coriander-scented, biodegradable dishwashing liquid.

"People say they want products that are environmentally friendly," said 
Danny Seo, 24, who has been called the Martha Stewart of organic style. 
"But unless a product is affordable and appealing to the eye, who is going 
to pay for it?"

In "Conscious Style Home" (St. Martin's Press), a forthcoming coffee-table 
guide to stylish ecofriendly home design, Mr. Seo enjoins consumers to buy 
rugs made of hemp (more durable and renewable than cotton), whiten their 
fabrics with nonchlorine bleach and sip their carrot juice from recycled 
glass tumblers.

The organic philosophy is "good-hearted," Mr. Seo said, "but you can't 
force someone to part with their money just because the product is good for 
the planet. That's what charity is for."

That message has not been lost on the fashion world, where "organic," 
"natural," and "holistic," adjectives once mostly applied to food and 
shampoos, are the last words in hip.

Today the Hermes Kelly bag, the ultimate badge of luxury chic, comes in 
Amazonia, a rubbery canvas coating made from the sap of the Brazilian Hevea 
tree, a renewable resource, the company points out, that does not sacrifice 
a living tree. The bag, a travel-size version of the classic Kelly, is 
priced at $5,250 -- a long way from any back-to-the-land lifestyle.

Ralph Lauren manufactures an upholstery fabric in khaki-tone hemp. And 
Giorgio Armani's jeans line, carried by Emporio Armani, which has offered 
hemp apparel since 1995, is raising the fashion quotient of the line this 
fall with items like a hemp military overcoat with a 
cartridge-bandolier-style trim. Armani Casa offers hemp sheets.

Anne Fontaine, a Parisian designer whose pristine white cotton shirts are 
sold in her SoHo and Madison Avenue boutiques of the same name, lives by 
the credo "construire sans detruire" (build without destroying). True to 
her word, she has her shirts stitched and embroidered with old-fashioned, 
manually operated machines, to conserve energy, she says.

In recent years, the whole earth lifestyle has received the endorsement of 
pop culture goddesses like Madonna, Courtney Love and Christy Turlington, 
who have been among its most vocal devotees. Now Ms. Turlington is 
marketing Sundari, a line of skin treatments made with plant extracts ($52 
for a jar of moisturizer), and Nuala, a collection of yoga and gym togs 
with a racy edge, made by Puma.

"People perceive such items as sophisticated," said Susan Kurz, the 
president of Dr. Hauschka, an upscale natural skin treatment line, adding 
that using the products is the equivalent of "eating mixed greens instead 
of iceberg lettuce."

Mass marketers, too, have rallied to the stylishly organic. With little 
fanfare, the footwear giant Nike has sought to incorporate organically 
grown cotton into many of its most coveted designs, notably the Presto, its 
stretchy, slip-on sneaker. Next year the company will begin to phase 
organic cotton, which is grown without water-polluting pesticides, into 
women's apparel, with the ultimate goal of becoming the largest purchaser 
of organic cotton in the world.

Joani Komlos, a Nike spokeswoman, said that the company is hoping to appeal 
to a "mainstream consumer who is becoming much more eco- conscious and 
informed."

Even Target is thinking green. The national discounter is working on the 
development of sleekly designed housewares made from recycled materials. 
Earlier this year, according to Mr. Seo, the company asked him to create 
prototypes for glass bowls, bottle openers and tumblers, the last made from 
recycled wine bottles and handsome enough to grace Martha Stewart's dining 
table. "If you add a design element to things that people have resisted, 
they will sell," Mr. Seo said.

That view is shared by manufacturers who have taken up the cause with one 
eye on the consumer's psyche, the other on the bottom line. Since last 
year, when the Dr. Hauschka skincare line introduced a fancier-looking, 
gold-printed package for its all-natural products, sales have surged 30 
percent, said Ms. Kurz.

The objective, she said, is to persuade users "that they are experiencing 
something very fine, that whether they know it is good for them or not, 
they just have to have it."

Larry Grunstein, the president of the Citizen watch company, which 
manufactures a line of Eco-Drive watches powered by sunlight, echoed that 
thought.

"If a consumer is really going to use the product, he has to feel good 
about it," Mr. Grunstein said. "But if you make the product too costly, or 
ugly," a consumer might applaud its intentions, but won't buy, he added. 
The newest Eco-Drive models, priced between $500 and $600, are dressed up 
with diamond-set bezels and mother-of-pearl dials.

With organic products, "you walk a fine line," said Gary Esposito, whose 
company, Bronze-Esposito, designs consumer goods and packaging. "You don't 
want to feel generic or mass produced somewhere in Kankakee," he said. "At 
the same time, you don't want a high-polished item that looks produced in a 
fancy photography studio in Manhattan."

The company, which designs such ecofriendly items as recyclable paper 
plates and cups sold at price clubs and supermarkets, has experienced a 25 
percent growth in this segment of the business in the last two years, Mr. 
Esposito said.

Organic and natural products "are in vogue," he said. "They seem to be the 
wave right now, and we are going to ride it."
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager