Soy replaces silk in the world of sustainable fashion

Ms. Valenti, who designs the line out of Brooklyn, N.Y., didn't set out to make ecofashion, and only a few of the stores that sell her clothes are "green" boutiques. Yet each season, 50 to 75 percent of her designs are constructed from sustainable fabrics including bamboo, soy, and recycled soda bottles. Her martini dress, an ecofriendly take on the traditional black cocktail dress, is a hemp-silk blend.

Like Yuan and Valenti, designer Carol Young says she doesn't want a customer buying a piece from her Undesigned line "just because I'm making it out of hemp or bamboo."

"For me that's great," she says. "But it's icing on the cake."

Fashion-savvy shoppers agree. "I'm always attracted to the clothes first, and then the material is a nice little extra," says Layla Delridge, a fashion student and one of Ms. Young's loyal customers, who has also modeled for the Los Angeles designer.

At Greenloop, a boutique devoted to sustainable fashion in West Linn, Ore., most of the customers who wander in are drawn by something in the window that catches their eye.

"The environmental aspect is added value," says owner Aysia Wright. And she says she's delighted to "convert" customers who "haven't found they fit into the category of hippy."

Her online store (thegreenloop.com), however, is trafficked mainly by people deliberately searching for ecofashion. The lines that Greenloop carries, including Valenti's Nature vs. Future and Young's Undesigned, are "the cream of the crop," says Ms. Wright. "They are painstakingly made by designers who are "building a brand not just on sustainability but on image."

Prices are about what you'd find at a high-end department store such as Bergdorf Goodman or Barneys: T-shirts cost between $17 and $180, jeans run from $70 to $200, and cocktail dresses and suits sell for up to $400.

Wright says she gets some strong reactions to the high prices. "There are really angry, upset people who feel like we're preying on their guilt to swindle money out of them," she says.

For smaller designers, the biggest challenge in working with ecofabrics also may be cost. Using organic rather than regular cotton can cost a designer up to 30 percent more, which is why so few are able to make their lines 100 percent ecofriendly.

At the forefront of the second wave of ecofashion when it launched five years ago, Loudermilk has successfully created and marketed itself as "luxury eco," a category it created. The label continues to experiment successfully with some of the most unusual fibers available. Last year's collections included pieces utilizing fabric made from soybean oil; a Japanese leaf called sasawashi; lenpur, from a sustainably harvested pine wood pulp; and recycled plastic bottles.

This year, in addition to bamboo, Yuan is working with ingeo. In October the company plans to open a flagship "eco hub" housed in a green building on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles.

For those constantly on the lookout for the new black, green may be it.

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