Magazine

Every week we feature a sustainable brand on our blog. This week's featured brand is Litke.

Anointed by Vogue as a 'designer on the rise', Catherine Litke's line of American made womenswear sits at the intersection of crafty and cool. Not surprising when you consider that her friends consider her personal style 'sexy Amish'. 

I've never really seen the need to buy apparel from high end designers. For starters, I find it extremely difficult to spend more than a couple of hundred dollars for a single item of clothing considering the overstuffed state of my closet. But more importantly, I'm just more of a shoe person. When you consider how many hours we spend on our feet every day, it just seems easier to justify spending more on well made and comfortable shoes than it does to spend it on yet another dress or shirt.

People have been wearing animal prints for decades if not eons. After all, what can compete with conveying just a hint of our innate primal nature even as though we continue to move farther and farther away from these humble origins?

Nevertheless, it doesn't hurt to refresh this enduring classic with a a modern gray color scheme. 

Every week we feature a sustainable brand on our blog. This week's featured brand is Kordal Knitwear.

As the days keep getting shorter and nights keep getting colder, there's nothing better than curling up on the sofa with a warm beverage and a cozy sweater. Enter Kordal, a knitwear brand that uses natural fibers like wool, organic cotton and alpaca to make their fair trade knitwear. 

It's the only one hour show dedicated to a single brand and you know exactly what I'm talking about if you were one of the more than 15 million + that watched the Victoria's Secret Fashion show yesterday evening. The show has come a long way since it's humble beginnings twenty years ago when it was held at Plaza to a select crowd of fashion insiders and no TV simulcast.

I'm not a huge fan of designer collaborations with discount brands since the quality rarely tends to be up to scratch. What's the point of wearing Balmain for H&M if it doesn't feel like Balmain? Cheap fabric and shoddy construction are the hallmarks of fast fashion and collaboration or not, there is no escaping the fact that this is the only way fashion can be produced at rock bottom prices.

Every week we feature a sustainable brand on our blog. This week's featured brand is Angela & Roi.

It's not uncommon to have had a bad experience with products made from leather alternatives. After all, people having been making shoes, bags and countless other products from leather for good reason: it's a really durable raw material that only seems to get better with age. 

You can't run a marathon at a 100m race pace so it's not surprising that fast fashion, which these days requires designers to produce six or more collections a year, is starting to run out of steam. Speculation is rife that this is the reason that Raf Simons left Dior after three and a half years as creative director. 

Aside from the fact that I don't like boring clothes, I tend to go by instinct when I'm shopping. All I have to do is see something to know if I need to add it to my collection. And so it was with this suit, even though some would consider it too much of a good thing, I was only interested if I could have both the jacket and pants.

Every week we feature a sustainable brand on our blog. This week's featured brand is Atelier Delphine.

If you're in search of affordable loungewear made from eco-friendly fabrics, then look no further than Atelier Delphine. Southern California cool meets Japanese fabrics, for this line from Japanese born but L.A. based designer Yuka Izutsu.

We didn't have access to much entertainment in Kenya when I was growing up. There was only one nationally owned TV channel until I was a teenager and it only aired eight hours a day from late afternoon to evening. The movie selection was a little bit better but tended to lean toward the action genre, particularly Bruce Lee, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren and of course James Bond. 

The minute I laid eyes on this leather bustier I knew I had to have it (it was the cutout detail in the back that did it for me). Never mind that I didn't think of myself as the type to wear bustiers or the fact that I couldn't think of an occasion where I would wear it, I just knew I needed it in my life.