2007 Archives: Gary Harvey: Green, Recycled Clothing
Sick of green fashion yet? Call us junkies, but we’re still obsessed by the amazing eco-conscious clothes designed by visionaries like Gary Harvey.
His collection visually demonstrates the whole cradle-to-cradle mentality. Okay get ready for a major digression: Basically the idea of “cradle-to-cradle” is that when you throw something away there really is no “away.” Because the earth is a contained system nothing that we create can actually be disposed of—it just becomes waste if it can’t be reused. We need to rethink the way we make products so that they can perpetually be reused or repurposed, therefore creating new “cradles” each time we create a new use for the product. This is an extremely poor paraphrasing of the 2002 book by William McDonough and Michael Braungart; if you really want to know what it’s all about, read Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, which you can buy used (hence, a new cradle) here. Suffices to say (Suffice it to say? Sufficed to say? Will somebody please decide this grammatical question for us?), it’s genius.
We’re back. Finally. So this London-based creative director named Gary Harvey takes the brilliant cradle-to-cradle concept and applies it to fashion with fantastic results. It’s all couture, and it’s all statement: We’d pay good money to see some red carpet celebrity strut her stuff in his Denim Dress, made from 41 pairs of Levi’s 501s. Or the Baseball Puffball Dress, made from 26 nylon baseball jackets, which poses the question: What do you do with your kid’s old soccer uniform after the season’s over?
With a dress made from 30 copies of the Financial Times in his repertoire, the man certainly knows how to make a statement, but does he make things we’d actually wear? Yes, yes, oh yes. If we had our druthers we’d glide through life each and every day in Harvey’s University Scarves dress. Sadly, our daily uniform is far more schleppy and typically covered with some kind of child-generated food spew. But in our dream world, each morning we’d swoosh into some futuristic, solar-powered office where our assistant would be waiting to take our coat and hand us a perfectly steeped cup of green tea to sip while we pondered the glamourosity generated by our fabulous presence garbed in the rainbow of contrasting stripes that is this dress.
Apparently, in our dream world we are Anna Wintour. But maybe we could wear it on date night?
very lovely.