Who says "sustainable style" is an oxymoron?

Style, Naturally shows us we can have our organic cake, and eat it too

By Kirsten Kilponen
Published: February 19th, 2009 | 4:54pm

How could you not trust eco-friendly fashion advice from someone with the name Summer Rayne Oakes? After reading the first three sentences of Oakes' childhood story, it's easy to see that this model lives up to her tree-hugging name – you can almost picture her catching butterflies as a child whilst her hippie parents fed her granola, and taught her how to make her own compost heap in the backyard.

When Oakes became a model she caught her first glimpse of the dark, unsustainable side of the fashion industry, and her nature-loving internal monologue soon unfurled into Style, Naturally: The Savvy Shopping Guide to Sustainable Fashion and Beauty. In Style, Naturally, Oakes cleverly uses her modeling background as a golden gateway to interviews with conscious clothing designers and organic cosmetic lines. Her first hand activist experience gives her some serious compassion cred, too.

Do not judge this book by its cover — it is ugly. With its orange-hued glamour shot of Oakes in the woods juxtaposed with four randomly chosen fonts, it looks like a guide someone's poncho-wearing mom got from a crystal healer in the'90s. The cover, however, is the only bad thing about this book.

A colossal three hundred and forty-four colored pages of head to toe environmentally friendly fashion and beauty, Style, Naturally features sections on shoes, bags, pants, dresses, jewelry, makeup, and even your unmentionables. Each chapter has heart-warming stories of designers turned compassionate clothing-makers. Like the story about Safia Minney's organization, People Tree, who gave the woman of Swallows, a small isolated village in Northern Bangladesh, the tools to begin weaving clothes to generate an income for their families after they were left with no husbands or older sons after the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971. If that's not enough to get you to buy Fair Trade frocks or thrift-store duds, the cringe-inducing facts (Eva Longoria's placenta-based face cream is "derived from the uteruses of slaughtered animals") about the production of your clothes, jewelry, and even your deodorant will make you think twice about not-so-eco-friendly shopping habits.

A 53-page resource guide of eco-friendly fashion websites, organizations, and retailers all over the world — from Los Angeles and New York to Paris, New Zealand, and Japan — makes it easy for readers to take action. Style, Naturally is the perfect book for anybody that loves style, but can't stomach the thought of underpaid children in exploited countries crafting this season's cage-heeled ankle boots.

Kirsten Kilponen is a Venus Zine editorial intern.