Burda Style For people who sew

Once upon a time, looking like an environmentalist pretty much meant looking like a patchouli-smelling hippie. Not so anymore. The ideals of the environmental community have changed, and though you can still find a few hardcore, hemp-raising, off-the-grid types who preach a back-to-nature gospel, much of the focus now is on integrating sustainable goods and practices into everyday modern life. Hence: biodegradable dish soap that smells like lavender and lemongrass, botanical nail polish, and organic wine, to be drunk in recycled-glass goblets. The lifestyle focus extends to fashion. A new generation of designers is emerging, and they are committed to making eco-conscious dressing the ne plus ultra of cool. As Barneys Fashion Director Julie Gilhart told WWD, announcing the department store’s new Barneys Green initiative: “This isn’t a trend. A trend is something that dies. This is a movement.”

A long time ago now, a fellow writer friend and I came up with a no-fail pitch: A story about “the break-up kit,” the autopilot stuff all women do after a bad split. The first editor that bit said she wanted to know more, and asked us to do some preliminary research. We called a bunch of our friends, not exactly a random sample, but even so we realized right away that our story had a major problem. We’d theorized that there are a few universal break-up rituals, and as it turned out, there aren’t. Some women rent sad movies and eat ice cream out of the pint. Some women join a kickboxing class. Some women color their hair, others go on safari, yet others try to get laid as soon as possible. One woman said she burned all her sheets and bought new ones, which I thought that was worth a feature all by itself. The only thing we heard again and again was: Lipstick.

A guy I knew in London used to be in this not-so- great band with his old flatmate from art school. Said flatmate at some point dated a cute but grungy girl from the fashion department, Stella, who described herself as “from up north” and who tooled around the city in the world’s crappiest hatchback. After seeing the flatmate for a few months, Stella invites him to her parents’ place for the weekend. They ride out to the country, and arrive at a much larger house than the flatmate had expected. The parents are out on the grounds when they get there, so Stella and the flatmate perch themselves in a den of some kind, and wait. There are photos on the wall. Photos of Paul and Linda McCartney.

Boy. Boy, boy, boy. I guess it’s true, what they say about spring, all that stuff about life renewing itself as the season turns over. I woke up a week ago to discover a pigeon nesting on the ledge outside my bathroom; when I opened the window to let in the fine, warm morning, she flew away, revealing two speckled eggs. She’s back now. Normally, I hate pigeons, and normally, when nature sneaks up on me in New York, I call the exterminator. I have a particular phobia about mice. But here I am, two or three times a day, peering at my pigeon sideways through the windowpane so she doesn’t catch my shadow and fly off. I don’t want to scare her. I feel like we’re in on this springtime together, both of us guarding something precious and potential, she her eggs and me my boy.

Kiss my ass, I thought when I saw the high-waisted jeans at Chloe a couple years ago. Like most women, I’d built a fine collection of denim around the idea that a dark, slouchy, skinny pair that rides the hips was about as sexy as jeans could get. Screw you, Phoebe Philo, my mind played on, half apologizing to the departing Chloe genius as my train of thought kept running. It’ll never happen.

I had a hard time with L.A. at first. At first, it was a blur of cars and parties and beaches; I was on vacation and the city made no firm impression. The second time I was supposed to visit, I didn’t go: My flight was due to leave on September 16, 2001, and though the planes were in the air again by then, I was haunted not only by thoughts of flying, of airports, of unbroken blue sky, but also by the fear that New York might not be there for me when I returned. I postponed the trip eight months, and there again, the beaches, the cars, the parties in houses with large windows facing out on barbeque backyards. I had come from a city fraught with disaster, and Los Angeles struck me like a theme park ride, everyone laughing, laughing, laughing as the world spun out of control.

Let’s get something straight: Los Angeles is not a fashion capital. A style capital, perhaps. A capital of the garment trade, yes, inasmuch as a good deal of buying, selling and producing goes on there. Increasingly, a shopping capital, boasting not only stalwarts such as Fred Segal and the paparazzi-plagued Kitson, but also a growing number of trendsetting stores like Klasse LA, Scout, Creatures of Comfort, and as of next month, the West Coast outpost of New York cool kid boutique Opening Ceremony. But a fashion capital is something different, a city whose runways set the pace not for the locals but for the world. L.A. remains mired in provincialism, hosting only a very few designers able to conceive a world where people wear things other than jeans, bikinis, spangled tee-shirts, flip-flops and red carpet gowns.

This is a big season for the eyebrow.

Scratch that, I’m starting over. Sometimes writing about beauty really makes me feel like an idiot. A big season for the eyebrow? Seriously?

Anyway. A few years ago I was a full-time beauty idiot, and in the course of sort of, well, luxuriating professionally,

Bring up the subject of L.A. beauty, and the same few keywords come up again and again: Plastic, blond, tits, Botox, “Baywatch,” fake. And indeed, there’s plenty of that Porno Barbie look flying around Los Angeles; the stereotype exists for a reason. My first few trips to L.A., however, it wasn’t the armies of Pam Anderson-lookalikes that brought me up short, inasmuch as I’d prepared myself for them. No, it was the more generalized self-consciousness of L.A. women that got to me: Everywhere I went, I had the sensation that they were looking over their shoulders at themselves, less to make sure they could see what the spectators saw than to make sure there were spectators, period. Los Angeles is a town where even the people who aren’t actors are, in a way, actors.

About five years ago I attended the wedding of a friend of mine from college. Among those at the reception was a guy who’d graduated a few classes ahead of me, someone I’d always found a little churlish. Talk turned to politics, and inevitably, to 9/11. The only New Yorker at our table, I found myself repeating, for the umpteenth time, the story of my 9/11, waking up to find that the screen of the TV I’d left on had turned blue, trying and failing to dial out on my cell phone; climbing up to my roof just in time to see the first tower fall. There’s more to it than that, but Mr. Churlish, as I’ll call him, interrupted me.

There are big trends to note from the Paris shows – abstractions of mood; news about volume and proportion. And then there are the micro-trends, asterisks on the edge of the major stories. If one of the large Parisian trends this season was, in essence, “fashion goes to the Winter Olympics,”

As long as we’re on the subject of winter sports, I’m going to admit to an obsession with Blades of Glory. Coming from a girl who’s seen Foreign Film winner The Lives of Others twice, once to watch and once to take notes, this is an odd confession. I usually take a pass on the big comedies. Moreover, I’m a Will Ferrell skeptic. Playing George W. on SNL: Awesome.

It’s vastly in the interest of the big fashion houses for me to say this, but Fall 2007 really is a major season for accessories. I say it’s in their interest because accessories are where the money in fashion gets made these days; whether that was a motivating factor for designers or not, much of the shows’ collective energy derived from fresh ideas about how to finish an outfit. It was a busy season for stylists.

Here’s the thing about winter: It’s cold. Newsflash, yeah, but for some reason I always find myself surprised and dismayed when the frigid weather rolls into town. I’m freezing, I’m cranky, I need a vacation, and so, in an act of perfect illogic,