05:00 PM : Locally Grown - Sustainable Fashion @ City Hall

Fashion Flyered by Rob W.

Tonight I propose a fashion sandwich. You must get an early start though. Begin at City Hall's sustainable fashion show Locally Grown at 5pm. Finish at Holocene's Design Your Own Fashion Show. The details are below.

We have a new batch of commissioners in City Hall and they are shaking things up. Live bands on the steps. Art openings early on first Thursdays, from 5-7. This one I recommend and it's a chance to talk to city staffers about what artists need in Portland.

If you have ever visited the bins, you are aware of fashion's resource intensive short life. Cotton requires large doses of pesticides to grow while synthetics are made of who knows what. Vegans eschew wool, leather and all manner of skins too. So one approach is reuse. The artist Pipiloti Rist, in a 1998 interview, proposes people "sew labels into their clothes; on the labels they would write where the clothes had been worn, what happened when they wore them and so on. Every piece of clothing would carry with it a full record of everything it had experienced." Last summer the Red 76 art collective produced their own version of this idea. Some of the clothing isn't landfilled but ends up in Africa as detailed in "How Susie Bayer's T-Shirt Ended Up on Yusuf Mama's Back", the oddessy of a piece of clothing traversing continents by returned Peace Corps volunteer George Packer.

Portland designers who reconstruct clothing are tapping this reuse meme too.

Another approach is to use bamboo fibers or fiber mixes and this is the approach Anna Cohen and Sameunderneath have taken. So for more information, just go to the event:

Portland Designers Anna Cohen, Sameunderneath and Saffrona show clothing of sustainable fabric.

Accessories of sustainable fabrication will be shown by Entermodal, Lucina, Nora Catherine and DoubleCross Belt Co..

Artists showing work include: Roll Hardy, Faulkner Short, Miss Mona Superhero, Pasha, Mary Culbertson, Shirley Barley, Shannon Richardson , Matt Raufman, Alia Smith, Colleen Coover, Jennifer Hazzard, Brian Parnell, David Burkvan, Saska Schmidt, and Terence Healy.

They will have food and drink too.

City Hall 1221 SW 4th Between Madison and Jefferson 5-7pm Free