greenporno.com

Green and sex certainly aren’t a common word association pairing, but hey, why not? A natural rebellion to its National Geographic predecessors, actress/model Isabella Rossellini is back for a second season of her seriously bizarre TMI series Green Porno on the Sundance Channel. Essentially the anti-Animal Planet, Rossellini uses her intelligence, sharp wit, and role-play to penetrate (pun so intended) the sex lives of oft-overlooked insects, invertebrates, and other creepy crawlies. If you slept through most of your science classes, Rossellini’s cooky costumes, copulation, and creatures – who are all played by one hilarious Rossellini – might teach you a thing or two. On May 5th, the scientifically accurate two-minute shorts are back to reign on as viral sensations. While the series may be too raunchy for the classroom, we promise you haven’t laughed as hard at the words “penis” and “vagina” since middle school.

Photography Courtesy of Raquel Allegra

Even your ex-boyfriend’s tattered tee, with its stains and faint smell of Old Spice, can’t tell a story like a Raquel Allegra garment. The Los Angeles-based designer makes her couture using shirts from the County Jail, weaving tales from a dark but quintessential reality of the city. “It definitely felt strange at first,” says Allegra, “but I took to recycled prison shirts out of necessity. I’m a textile shopper — when I shop I touch everything. So I was just hunting for that perfectly distressed feel.” Oddly enough, her meticulous sense of touch led her to the clink.
    As remarkable as the personal stories behind the shirts themselves, Allegra’s intricate handpicking, hand dying, and thread-by-thread deconstruction process can take weeks to complete. But for Allegra, the resulting piece — more reminiscent of cobwebs than prison garb — is worth the painstaking effort. Her labor of love seems to satisfy customers who, like herself, have a taste for clothing made with originality and thought. So it’s not surprising that tastemakers have gravitated to the brand of draped, sexy shirts, dresses, and scarves. Each item different from the next, Allegra’s creations are given new life by the wearer in a unique convergence of past, present, and future.

wonderland-sheffield.co.uk/

Recycled clothing usually connotes trips to Goodwill or hand-me-downs, and recycled couture typically has its shining moment walking down a red carpet. But over the past three years, London scientist Tony Ryan and artist/design professor Helen Storey decided to tackle our notions of ‘recyclable wear’ and turn it completely on its head, making couture gowns from dissolvable textiles. The duo’s Wonderland exhibit ups the ante on both couture and sustainability – which, let’s be honest, have been pretty mutually exclusive as far as aesthetics go. The exhibition of their “disappearing gowns” gradually lowers dresses into large bowls of water, where they dissolve to create “vibrant underwater fireworks.” The Wonderland team hopes to introduce their “practical solutions to current ethical issues,” to the masses, interpreting their ideas into ingenious uses. Their developments (like intelligent packagings that dissolve into a gel in which seeds can be grown) have garnered numerous awards, and could revolutionize the issue of plastic waste. You really have to see it to believe it, so if you didn’t make it to the last stop in London, check out the video by Nick Knight on the Wonderland site. Super sci-fi.

Photography Courtesy of Olsenhaus

Growing pocketfuls of designers have taken on the challenge, but it still takes a lot to impress on the green fashion front. Eco-friendly fashion has found a worthy competitor in Olsenhaus, a new line of vegan shoes that definitely don’t sacrifice aesthetics for ethics. Designer Elizabeth Olsen’s artful metallic paint-splattered booties, pumps, and flats make reducing your carbon footprint that much more stylish while still providing shopping addicts with a little (enjoyable) guilt. Olsen draws inspiration from her own vegan upbringing to make designs concerned with “consciousness, purpose, function, and art,” she says. One hundred percent ‘cruelty-free’, and made with high standards in both animal and human rights, Olsenhaus declares “the revolution will be accessorized.” With shoes like these, we’re ready for that revolution.

Photography by Kyu Che

Many of us like to get out of the city and enjoy the nature that remains. San Francisco based Architect-Artist Kyu Che’s sustainable Lifepod looks a lot like an iPod dock turned camping tent, but it’s Che’s artistic interpretation of the traditional Mongolian ‘ger’ or ‘yurt’. An environmental enthusiast, Che has recently improved upon his 1997 design of a highly portable capsule for nomadic living. In what could eventually be prime real estate, the futuristic prefab uses advanced nautical, automotive, aeronautical, and RV technology, allowing it to meld with nearly any environment and provide a perfectly off-the-grid nature-dwelling habitat for any wide-eyed wanderer. With the option to add screens or glass doors, this capsule has the potential to function as a backyard retreat or an outdoor office.

Photography Courtesy of Drone

Playful party frocks aren’t what you’d expect from a Brooklyn-based label littered with images of “a lot of vomiting and decay,” but irony helps the Death by Drone medicine go down. “Vomit is a representation of the soul,” say designers Tiff and Deb, and, metaphorically speaking, the Drone upheaval is comprised of cakes, cookies, and green-tea icing. This Drone ideology definitely teeters on emo, and that might be attributed to the duo’s love of music. After an admirable attempt to explain through various sounds, and words like ‘fuzz’, Tiff and Deb concede: “Nobody gets Drone,” (the music-term and label’s namesake) “but it helps us do the weird stuff we do.”
     Once stifled by traditional education, they took to the class-time doodling that runs heavily throughout the line. “They don’t let you draw stick figures in art school,” Tiff says, “and said our printing process would never work.” But they made it work anyway. The best thing they got from their time at Parsons? “Each other! We met in the dorms.”
     While Drone may be darkly whimsical, don’t call it morbid. Says Tiff: “It’s not morbid, it’s poetry! One day we’ll do a kid’s book for adults.” But until then, it’s pretty clear: Death by Drone is bringing daydreams back.

Photography by Zandy Mangold

Let’s face it, not every “club kid” even has a résumé, let alone one that includes YSL, Calvin Klein, Francisco Costa, and Narcisco. Since moonlighting as one-third of the infamous costumed club troop SixSixSick, designer Feng-Feng Yeh (appropriately pronounced Fun-Fun Yeah) has struck out on her own to produce a stunning Spring collection for her debut label Savant.
     Inspired by “medical braces at the turn of the century,” the collection plays beautifully with metaphor, a fleshy palette, ribcage-inspired looks, resin buttons molded from Benadryl tablets, and a bold necklace that mimics a jawbone with pearl teeth. From beneath the neon party flier abyss, Yeh has emerged as the talented party-monger-cum-fashion-designer to watch. While learning the trade through myriad internships, Yeh credits her experiences abroad with teaching her to channel out-of-the-box thinking into her work. Though she studied at FIT, it was her studies abroad at Polimoda in Italy where Yeh did “projects I probably never would have done in NY.” Curriculum vitae aside, boasting Leigh Lezark front row and Ben Cho as mentor pretty much makes you the coolest chick downtown, right? “I’m glad I partied,” Yeh says of her nightlife past. “I had fun, but also networked with a lot of creative people who are helping me now.” With her first collection still riding high from rave reactions, Yeh’s thoughts are drifting to the next. “One of the inspirations next season is black-figure Etruscan pottery — I can’t wait to play with that.”