EcoFashion: Urban fashion scavenger hunt

Five Vancouver fashion-philes comb the racks of the city's consignment boutiques, from Main Street to Point Grey, to recreate a Nicole Miller runway look

Glamour, inspiration, expression. High fashion on and off the runway offers many things: a feast for the eyes, fodder for the imagination, an eloquent expression of the contemporary cultural climate, a nifty diversion. But because the price tag of the craft’s most elevated examples (namely, haute couture) is often as breathtaking as the design, and its knockoffs (hello, H&M!) are anything but sustainable (i.e., low-wage labour, fossil-fuel-heavy transport, low quality that breeds high waste, and so on) most of us must resign ourselves to hankering from afar.

Or must we? Surely there’s a way for us to make designer style statements that are kind to our wallets and the planet?

Photo courtesy Style.com and Nicole Miller

To put this into action, we assembled a team of local fashionistas and enlisted their help for our first-ever urban fashion scavenger hunt. The team includes a fashion blogger, a local designer/boutique owner, a fashion student and Granville Online’s editor and ecofashion editor.
 

The challenge:

To reinvent, according to our individual styles, an upscale designer look with either locally designed pieces or items available in vintage and consignment stores.
 

The inspiration:

(Pictured at right) This comfortably elegant winter ensemble from Nicole Miller’s pre-fall 2009 ready-to-wear collection suggests boho chic and casual sophistication. Extrapolating from items currently featured in the Nicole Miller online store, this outfit—with the knit beret, patterned sweater tunic dress, black tights, leather tote and wedge pumps—would retail for approximately $900… Not exactly affordable.

 

The look book: