Inhabitat Launch Fashion Site Ecouterre

After recently launching a New York version of her considerate-design website Inhabitat, Jill Fehrenbacher has turned her attention to fashion with the launch of Ecouterre in reaction to the poor job she thought fashion was doing around green. With her new site she hopes to convince skeptical fashionistas that there is more to ‘eco-fashion’ than organic T-shirts while simultaneously trying to convince hardcore environmentalists that they need to focus their eco attention on the clothes they wear on their back. Jill told PSFK:

Doing a spin-off website about green fashion has been a long time coming for Inhabitat. Inhabitat has covered clothing design for years, as we feel that it is as important as any other type of design: be it architecture, product design, or urban design. However, we’ve consistently gotten complaints from riled up readers whenever we do fashion coverage on Inhabitat — it seems to really hit a nerve with certain people, especially architecture snobs and grouchy greenies. I don’t know what it is, but a lot of people just don’t seem to think clothing design deserves the same attention that is paid to building design or product design. I think many people associate fashion design with vapid consumerism, so that even if that isn’t our editorial focus AT ALL, when certain readers see an image of a runway show, they immediately think “Paris Hilton”.

The fashion industry, unfortunately, has done nothing to really allay this negative stereotype. After my last fashion article was called ‘drivel’ by an irate reader, I decided it was time for change: we would launch a website dedicated exclusively to eco-fashion, and the goal would be to try to start changing people’s perception of what “fashion” actually means, and start raising awareness that “fashion” is just another type of design that has a life-cycle, uses a lot material resources, and impacts the wearer and the environment heavily.

The new site includes the regular apparel categories like mens and womens plus has special focus sections like ‘Vegan Style‘.

Ecouterre