Store Owners Vow to Help the Environment
What’s a paper bridal gown decorated with household bits and pieces (phone cord,cotton swabs, plastic bags, coffee filters) doing in a boutique that normally drapes the bride in silk and lace?
Susan Lane, a determined fashion-industry environmentalist and owner of Country Elegance in Toluca Lake, hopes the dress will motivate people to recycle. It goes on display today in a store where the mainstay of the business is Victorian wedding finery for brides, including Cristina Ferrare, Lesley Ann Warren and Delta Burke, and TV brides, such as those on “Santa Barbara” and “L.A. Law.”
“I felt so guilty looking at my plastic trash bags and going to the market and bringing home more plastic bags,” Lane explains. “I thought: Wouldn’t it be great if I could use them for something else, if instead of fabric I could use plastic?
“A bridal dress is one of the most beautiful garments a woman can wear. I’ve made this one out of things that really aren’t very attractive, but they look beautiful. The idea is to get people to reuse things they would normally throw away. Years ago, people would use old bottles for candlesticks,” Lane says. “We’ve gotten away from that. We’re all so chic.”
Made from paper interfacing (the material used to stiffen garments), the deceptively pretty gown is decorated with ruffles and flowers crafted from white plastic shopping bags, pink-painted coffee filters and paper plates, cotton swabs dipped in pink paint, six-pack rings and green telephone cord. A similar scavenger-combination is used for the elaborate bouquet and headpiece.
“It’s very labor intensive,” says Lane, explaining why she will offer only unadorned paper dresses for $180 and leave it up to handy brides to add their own recycled extras.
Three years ago, Lane created her first paper garments, all from interfacing, to promote recycling for the American Paper Institute. But her latest project has affected her just as she hopes it will affect others: “I’m thinking about recycling all the time now.”
Lane now takes plastic bags back to the market and fills them with groceries. In her shop, cans and bottles are separated and sent to recycling centers. No plastic foam cups are allowed; employees have their own mugs. And her concern about the water shortage has led to new rules at home: Don’t let water run while brushing teeth; take shorter showers; don’t rinse dishes before putting in dishwasher.
At Clacton & Frinton--a bastion of English and old-Hollywood-inspired men’s wear on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles--co-owner Hilary Anderson explains she got her latest environmental nudge from the same bete noire that disturbed Susan Lane: the plastic shopping bag.
But Anderson and her friend Linda Leeds were equally disenchanted with paper bags. So they came up with a rugged canvas tote that measures 17 by 12 by 7 inches and can easily hold 28 pounds of groceries, Anderson says. The bags are available in limited supply at two food stores, Erewhon on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles and Cooportunity in Santa Monica; they retail from $12 to $14.95.
Other environmentally friendly habits for Hilary and her husband-business partner, Michael Anderson, include business cards printed on recycled paper. They also go to extraordinary lengths to use recycled materials in their low-maintenance, drought-resistant gardens. Their agave and aloe plants, for example, come from cuttings “I just picked up when people left them out in their trash,” says Michael. And their fertilizer “is manure we get from a man in Pasadena who has a horse. We’ve been doing it for years,” says Hilary.
Leeds, whose goal is “one garbage can a week for a family of three,” keeps a compost pile of grass and vegetable peels in her back yard for fertilizer and makes sure everything, including the computer paper used by her husband, screenwriter Jack Baran, goes to a recycling center. Neither Leeds nor the Andersons will buy anything that comes in polystyrene containers--or plastic, if possible.
“I preselect. That’s more important then recycling,” says Leeds. “I don’t buy anything in plastic if I can live without it.” That includes liquid bleach. To get clothes whiter, she soaks them in Borax. Hilary also uses Borax--mixed with vinegar--for a “natural” household cleanser. All of this seems natural for two women who searched long and hard for the right way to decorate their canvas shopping bags. Their choice: an engraving of a little girl deep in a forest encircled with the slogan “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.”
