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"I use hemp silk charmeuse a lot, which is smooth, silky and clings to the body," Lorna Tallowin, a fashion student at Nottingham Trent University recently told WWD. "I want to prove that clothes can be sexy and sleek and beautiful and still be ethical." Typical of the up & coming generation of fashion tastemakers, many designers of tomorrow not only use eco-friendly fibers like hemp, but they seek them out. "There's a huge awakening among fashion colleges," agrees Safia Minney of ethical fashion brand People Tree, who has partnered with Nottingham Trent to produce various student designs using karmically correct fabric. These days, many students are flocking to courses on sustainable development and ecology & ethical production being offered by New Academy of Art in Milan, and the joint British fashion school project with Labour Behind the Label, Fashioning an Ethical Industry. "I wanted to wear clothes made in an ethical and responsible way, but like many people my age, I wasn't fully prepared to sacrifice my style," explains former Nottingham Trent student Rachel Plant, who went on to create the Annie Greenabelle label. Similary, after learning about fair trade issues at London College of Fashion, Erin Tabrar helped created Amana (Arabic for "delivered in trust"), which contributes to carbon emissions reduction initiatives and creates garments from organic cotton, hemp and silk. Other successful ethical fashionista concerns include Green Knickers, founded by Goldsmith University eco-design graduate Sarah Lucy Smith, who crafts lingerie and other sexy unmentionables from hemp & silk. Stella McCartney's Eco-Friendly Fashion Fashiontribes Daily Fashion & Lifestyle Blog

In some countries, $35 can provide a child with a school lunch every day for a year. And fewer hunger pains are the least of it. According to research by the United Nations' World Food Program, providing a school meal not only dramatically improves the childrens?? classroom performance, but providing a school meal can increase enrollment a staggering 300 percent ?? which directly affects girl children who then wait longer to marry, and have almost half as many children. Inspired by her work as honorary spokeswoman for the WFP in the developing countries she visited?? including Guatemala, Cambodia, Chad and Honduras ?? model Lauren Bush decided to put the power of fashion to good use. "I was traveling, taking pictures and doing what I could to help," Bush recently told WWD. "But it just didn't seem like enough. I wanted to do more." So she designed a practical and reversible burlap & muslin "Feed" bag tote which retails for $60, of which $34 goes directly to the WFP. "It's meant to be a multipurpose bag that looks really good and is eco-friendly." Available exclusively at Amazon.com, the bags are the latest initiative by the WFP which hooked up a staggering 16 million children worldwide with school meals in 2006 as part of their goal of tending to the 300 million children around the world that suffer chronic hunger. Feed Bags on Amazon.com Fashiontribes Daily Fashion & Lifestyle Blog

"We are absolutely invested in emerging talent. Part of us has always been about celebrating young designers," Marka Hansen, president of Gap North America recently told WWD about the chain??s decision to bring in upcoming designers to collaborate on a limited edition collection of white shirts. As part of their partnership with the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund to promote fresh design talent, Doo-Ri Chung, Thakoon Panichgul, and Kate & Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte have all been hired to create white shirts - a Gap staple for 35 years ?? retailing between $68 to $88 as part of the Gap Design Editions. "Throughout history people have always tried to redesign the classic white shirt ?? that's what made it so exciting,? says Chung about her shirtdress inspired by iconic American sportswear designer Claire McCardell. The ad campaign in which the designers appear with their designs - the only way to discern who designed which pieces - was shot by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, and stars fashion model A-listers like Stella Tennant, Liya Kebede and Carmen Kass. The campaign will run in high profile outlets like The New York Times, WWD, and the May cover of Vogue. "Vogue has a long tradition of supporting young talent ?? in particular, our local talent ?? to secure a brilliant future for American fashion,? adds Vogue??s Anna Wintour. ??And Gap's Design Editions project?will give a boost to the three CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund winners, and bring their wonderful designs to a much bigger audience." However, whether the Gap Design Editions collaboration helps the ailing Gap out of its prolonged slump remains to be seen. "Such short-term design initiatives are positive indications of their intention to improve, but it will probably require at least two to three years of reexamination and re-engineering before Gap can reclaim some of its former status," opines Arnold Aronson of Kurt Salmon Associates. "They must revision the business in terms of merchandise thrust, fashion sensibility, depth and breadth of assortments, size and number of stores." Moving toward less expensive, faster fashion is probably the solution, agrees Mark Montagna, an analyst at C.L. King and Associates. "They need to define their market, which is what they are working on. I believe they need to buy with greater breadth and less depth and run it more like the H&M and Forever 21 where you get faster fashion. Their strategy of buying deep and narrow just encourages customers to wait for the sales?Gap should be doing what H&M does ?? get a collection by someone like Madonna or Karl Lagerfeld. These are people America has heard of." Fashiontribes Daily Lifestyle & Fashion Blog

It??s a brave new Internet world and the traditional fashion press machine seems either to not have grasped that concept, or would simply prefer to ignore it. US budget chain Steve & Barry's recently launched the press blitz for the new "Bitten Sarah Jessica Parker" line, promising an exclusive preview of the line to Oprah and other traditional long-line media outlets. However, the new Fashionista blog (edited by Elizabeth Spiers, the founding editor of Gawker.com) published photos intended for print publications, and a fashion tempest erupted. Steve & Barry??s legal eagles contacted Fashionista to remove the pix, which they did - but by that time other blogs had already begun reposting them, making them widely reposted & easily accessible. One such blog, the widely read & influential The Budget Fashionista obtained the pix circulating in the public domain, and ran them with a less than glowing review. Steve & Barry's attorneys contact TBF, explaining the photos were "wrongfully obtained" from a password protected area of the Bitten site not open to the public, and they need to be taken down. Not only did TBF not sneak photos off a site illegally, but it??s time for the traditional media to wake up: this is the age of the Internet, and once the fashionable cat is out of the bag, it's out. Times have changed. If exclusivity was that important, they should never have put them on the web, sending them instead as a CD or DVD-ROM instead of being so clueless. Interestingly, fashion firms crave coverage of their products from the blogs because they are so widely & enthusiastically read by a loyal readership; however, they tend to forget that unlike traditional magazines with a specific "voice" and a faceless masthead, bloggers are real people - with real opinions (which companies could probably benefit from) ?? as are their readers, who love to share their opinions and comments. "I always thought SJP had great personal style, now I see she had a great personal stylist!" reads one comment on the Fashionista blog, reports WWD. "They look a lot like those clothes she modeled for those Gap ads she did a while back, especially those cuffed jeans!" As a prominent fashion blogger, it??s particularly irksome when certain large & influential PR firms (who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty) send bloggers hard-sell pitches, but then refuse to give any of us a decent seat at one of their fashion shows during Fashionweek, or even invite any of us to fancy product launches or events, limiting the invite list to (dinosaur) print editors only. Unlike the blogs, long-line media is beholden to their roster of advertisers; it's specious (on their part) to talk about their "editorial" content, when in truth, it should probably come with an "advertorial" warning label. The Budget Fashionista reviews Bitten by Sarah Jessica Parker for Steve & Barry's Fashiontribes weighs in on the controversy. Fashiontribes Daily Fashion & Lifestyle Blog

Starting June 1, Carrie Bradshaw acolytes will be able to dress like their heroine for less when the 400 piece "Bitten Sarah Jessica Parker" collection launches at the 200-store Steve & Barry??s low-price chain. Priced at $20 or less, the offerings will include wool blend suit separates; shirts in a fabrics like voile, Swiss dots, dobby stripes & stretch poplin; classic sweaters in wool and cashmere; black cotton dresses, denim, lingerie, swim, bags, jewelry, and accessories. For fall, an additional 100 items will be added. As a high profile fashionista, it??s not surprising that SJP is launching a line. "The fact that she's going into apparel does make sense because she's a fashion icon," Robin Kramer of Kramer Design Group (a brand identity and store design firm) recently told WWD. Plus she??s a familiar face to many with a high Q score amongst women between the ages of 18 to 34, regardless of income level. "She has a 90 percent familiarity in that age group, which is an important consideration," notes Steven Levitt of Marketing Evaluations. "Are there better choices [of celebrities] to hit this market? Probably. Are there better markets for her to go with this product? That depends on the product." And with such merchandise retailing at such a low price, the risk is that should the product be poor quality, her image could suffer. "I don't think any of this is about price. It's about the image they project and whether they add a lot of value and fashion to the products," agrees licensing expert Mary Gleason ?? who helped Kathie Lee Gifford with her Wal-Mart collection and the Payless launch of Shaquille O'Neal sneakers. "The only way it will hurt her image is if they don't produce a quality product." However, as a big fashion fish doing business with the chain dubbed "the fastest-growing retailer you never heard of" (Forbes magazine, 2005) ?? whose fashion offerings to this point have been limited to sweatshirts bearing college logos, Coors or Marvel Comics for $10 - Parker??s licensing deal is no doubt lucrative, which Gleason estimates to be in the range of 4 percent to 10 percent of sales. Nonetheless, she is of the mind that Parker might have sacrificed the opportunity to do a higher priced line. "I'm really surprised [by the deal]?, adds Gleason, mirroring other insider??s surprise that she ended up partnering with Steve & Barry??s. "She could have done H&M or Target. It doesn't make any sense that this would be the retailer she'd talk to. Her fragrance, Lovely, was so successful in department stores. There would have been a great opportunity to do a regular-priced line." Steve & Barry's Fashiontribes Daily Fashion & Lifestyle Blog