Steven Kolb was at breakfast this morning at the place he called “the best store in the city”: ABC Carpet and Home. As of next spring, the furniture and housewares landmark will offer a curated selection of sustainable pieces by CFDA designers, including those who have won the annual CFDA/Lexus Eco-Fashion Challenge, which awards $25,000 prizes to selected designers whose businesses are at least 30 percent sustainable. “Fashion is about change, and these designers are at the forefront of this idea that eco-fashion doesn’t have to be branded independently,” Kolb said today, toasting the 2011 and 2012 winners: Marcia Patmos, John Bartlett, Johnson Hartig of Libertine, Pamela Love, Melissa Joy Manning, and Victoria Bartlett of VPL. Their collections were on display alongside those of Diane von Furstenberg, Donna Karan, and Loomstate’s Scott Mackinlay Hahn.
Sustainability tends to flow in and out of the fashion conversation—”People don’t realize that we manufacture in New York City with stones that are sourced ethically, because it’s not really part of our branding,” Love said, “but I started my jewelry line in my house in Brooklyn because I didn’t realize there was any other way to do things”—but the CFDA is hoping to bring it to the fore. For that, Patmos said, “The shop is really great because it makes the whole thing tangible.” She was so excited at winning the award, she added, that she’d wanted to jump up and down. “But I was at my desk when Steven called me with the news, so I had to contain myself.”
—Jessica Minkoff
Photo: Warwick Brown
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