2 posts tagged "ABC Carpet & Home"
Sustainable Design Gets A New Home
Steven Kolb was at breakfast this morning at the place he called “the best store in the city”: ABC Carpet and Home. As of now, 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 Rogan Gregory and 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.”
Gary Graham’s Collector’s Editions
Yes, it’s strange to shop for fall clothes in May, but that’s how the fashion world rolls, so Friday night I stopped by ABC Carpet & Home for Gary Graham’s autumn trunk show and ended up not only placing an order for a red silk dress, but going home with another dress in black jersey from Spring. My two purchases notwithstanding, one of Graham’s specialties is the washed, shrunken leather jacket. Taylor Momsen has been seen around town in the Spring version; the Fall style is named after Hepzibah Pyncheon from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables. “She’s the ultimate spinster and I loved the idea of using her as inspiration for the Victorian silhouettes,” Graham explained. Among the collection’s other keepers was a jacquard coat with a pattern taken from a 1774 Spanish-Flemish engraving, which the RISD museum purchased for its permanent collection. Talk about museum-worthy design. More information at www.garygrahamnyc.com.