Sunday, April 26, 2009

Conscious Fashionistas

A couple weeks ago my friend Aldwyn planned a surprise birthday outing for our friend Golda. He brought us to this trendy coffee shop called "Coffee Shop." At Coffee Shop, a group of four women were showing a collection of clothing they had rummaged through at thrift stores and were re-selling them. If you look in the bottom right corner of the picture, you can see the racks of clothes. They call their service and company the Conscious Fashionistas. They provide a personal stylist and shopping service to people who do not have time to do their own shopping. Their twist, however, is what I found interesting. They do they shopping for you, but they do the shopping in vintage and secondhand stores. From their "Fashionesto" they state, "At Conscious Fashionistas we believe that over-consumption of material goods poses a threat, not just to our wallets, but also to the ecological well-being of the planet." They also have a designer who re-designs and re-purposes clothing.

At the time, I did not think much of what they were doing, and thought that they were doing was actually quite silly. However, after the first couple weeks of class and rethinking what kinds of things I had done to do my part in trying to "go green," clothing was not a part of that. Now with the compact challenge, I see that what they are doing is actually quite helpful to the environment as they reduce waste and reuse clothing. I am for sure not the best consumer when it comes to fashions and clothing. I read fashion blogs, magazines, and spend countless hours just looking at clothing. I can relate to the three properties of fashion as presented in Kawamura's Fashion-ology (pg 20-21). "It is up to date. It must be "in fashion" which means it must be appropriate for the present time" (Kawamura, 21). I am simply amazed by what people can do with clothes and I create ensembles with my own little twist. This compact challenge, will indeed, be a challenge for me. Although, I am excited to see what I can do with clothes I already have and see if i can do anything to bring them up to date.

Raphael Sarmiento
Blog #1

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