Fashion : A SPECIAL REPORT: SPRING INTO FALL : Ecowear : Throw-Away Jewelry
Lauren Grossman lives in a Seattle neighborhood where “sometimes on a holiday, people do a little target practice.” Making the most of a difficult situation, she collects the empty shells and turns them into jewelry.
Grossman, whose work is featured at New Stone Age in Los Angeles, is equally adept with industrial salvage and discarded Christmas-tree decorations. By collecting and turning potential trash into “eco-jewelry,” she and other artists are giving the word recycled new meaning. And a savvy, receptive public is buying.
New York jewelry designer Wendy Gell is another prime example of a designer making eco-jewelry fashionable. Five years ago she designed pieces similar to those carried now by Nordstrom: combinations of beach glass, bark and living bromeliads. “But I kept getting back this dead jewelry,” she says with a laugh. Store employees and customers didn’t realize the bromeliads had to be spritzed with water once a week. “Now they do,” she says.
For Remi Rubel, whose jewelry is at New Stone Age and Tops in Malibu, bottle caps are the metal of choice. She flattens them and inserts her renditions of famous art. Second-hand spoons, metal strainers and whisks are the makings of Mike Kelley’s art, including necklaces and futuristic eyewear. Made in Salem, Ore., they’re carried at Tops.
California designers Allison Stern and Carolyn Carpenter have their own bags of recycled tricks. Stern’s jewelry, crafted from electronic surplus, is at Tops. Carpenter’s pins and earrings, cut from antique-kinomo fabric, are at the Far Eastern Corner, Pacific Palisades.
Art that is “non-traditional and kind of primitive” appeals to New York artists Joanna Ruisi-Besares and her husband, Davi Ruisi. For their jewelry, available at Faux on Melrose Avenue, they create papier-mache “stones” from recycled, unbleached newsprint and color them with nontoxic pigments.
Truly primitive jewelry, such as necklaces made from porcupine quills, bird feathers and seeds collected from the floor of the Brazilian rain forest, can be found at Nature’s Own in the Beverly Center. The fledgling cottage industry is being encouraged by zoologist Roxanne Kremer of Rosemead, Calif., who says a percentage of the sales goes to the International Society for the Preservation of the Tropical Rainforest.
