Today it's possible to walk into a trendy boutique, flip through the racks of hangers, and find, mixed in with the usual wool suits and silk skirts, a pair of wide-legged pants sewn from bamboo, a funky shirred shirt constructed out of corn, or an iridescent tank dress made from wood pulp.

It's a far cry from the early days of environmentally friendly but drab organic cotton, and hemp that resembled burlap. While those fibers, often blended with luscious organic silks and cashmeres, have become a staple of sustainable fashion, the newest materials – including corn, seaweed, and soy – seem somehow better suited to a dinner plate.

Well aware of the frumpy stigma that dogged sustainable fashion's first wave in the early '90s, a new generation of designers is as interested in creating fabulous clothing as good stewardship. With these new materials as their canvas, they're putting the fashion back in ecofashion.

Trumpeting slogans such as "eco can be edgy," green designers and boutiques are promising both "style and sustainability." And they're delivering.

"Oh, my gosh, it's so beautiful." That's the reaction Hellen Yuan is hoping for when someone sees one of her line's diaphanous blouses or fluidly draped pants. Ms. Yuan, the senior designer for Linda Loudermilk in Los Angeles – perhaps the best known and most successful high-end designer of ecofriendly fashion – wants people to recognize the environmental benefits as well. But if they don't, that's OK, too. Their textile choices make a difference, she says.

True to fashion's cyclical nature, it was around 2001, about a decade after Esprit first launched its Ecollection, that ecofashion staged a return. Since then, environmentalism has become more mainstream, and fashion magazines now devote regular small spreads to sustainable fashion. In May of this year, Elle was the first to devote an entire issue to green fashion, printing the magazine on recycled paper.

But even five years ago there were only 10 or 20 designers who "were doing interesting things," says Summer Rayne Oakes, a model and environmental activist who blogs about fashion for eco-chick.com.

Today, there are hundreds. She's compiled a list of at least 500 ecodesigners worldwide, including those using ecofabrics but not overtly marketing themselves as green.

Nina Valenti of Nature vs. Future is among them. Without reading the label, a shopper who picks up one of her neutral tops, shirred across the chest, or a boldly geometric shirt dress might never know they were made of ingeo, one of the buzzier new fabrics derived from corn sugar.

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