Donna Karan

I stumbled into my first class in Environmental Politics at SUNY/Buffalo in the Fall of 1975 and first went to work for the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1977, and if you told me back then that thirty years later they would replace pickles and blintzes with eco-fashion on the Lower East Side—I would have thought you were nuts. I also would not have had the slightest idea what an eco-fashion was.

Fortunately, Sara Schonhardt, a graduate student at Columbia University, joins me on this piece, and helps explain what it means to shop green.

It turns out that New York City is fast developing a green shopping district. To learn more about green commerce in New York City checkout the Green Apple Map.

Venture into many of the small shops between East Houston and Delancey and you’re likely to find a new world of environmentally friendly fare, from leather-less shoes to organic stockings to dairy-free cheesecake.

As Jill Fehrenbacher, a green-design consultant and graduate of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning, told us by e-mail: “I live in the lower east side, and I think my little neighborhood is the center of the universe for eco-friendly shopping. Within a three block radius we have three eco-friendly clothing boutiques – Kaight, Ekovaruhuset and Organic Avenue; a vegan shoe store, Moo Shoes; Whole Foods Market; and tons of vegetarian/vegan restaurants, including Teany, Tien Garden and Babycakes.”  read more »

An animal rights group that calls itself the Paint Panthers painted the words "Bunny Butcher" outside Donna Karan's home in the Hamptons. [NY Daily News]

The Lower East Side still hates yuppies, apparently (a little self-loathing, no?). An activist tells Page Six that everyone is so pissed at Bruce Willis for opening his Bowery Wine Company on East First Street, that they are going to get a pig and name it Bruce. [P6]  read more »

In the middle of a trunk show held Saturday at her Madison Avenue store, Donna Karan peered at the half-eaten mini-cupcake that her 4-year-old granddaughter, Stefania, had just pressed into her palm.

“Why don’t y  read more »

When New York Fashion Week starts on Friday, Feb. 1, many will promptly begin anticipating its climax seven days later, when Marc Jacobs is scheduled to show his fall 2008 collection at the Lexington Avenue Armory at 7 p.m.—an improvement over last season’s 9 p.m. start time, which turned into 11 p.m. Mr. Jacobs had emerged from a stint in rehab tanned, honed and—after a thorough drubbing from a normally tolerant press—kinda defensive.  read more »

At last week’s 7th on Sale event at the Armory on Lexington, designer Donna Karan and über-model Kate Moss were seen in the midst of a long and intimate conversation. According to WWD, the two had a lot to catch up on. Ms. Moss was recently photographed for DKNY’s spring collection. Leaving her many DKNY runway stints in the past, this year marks the naughty cover girl’s first ad campaign wearing Ms. Karan’s wares.  read more »

Last night at Guastavino’s The Daily Transom found Donna Karan in the mood to wax metaphysical.

“I’ve been to Africa many times already, and once you get bit by an African bug, there’s nothing like it in the world. You know what it is—did you hear the drumming?” Ms. Karan asked, gesturing to a group from Children’s Storefront School in Harlem, who had earlier in the evening entertained guests with a traditional African dance performance.  read more »

History was made at the Golden Globes.  read more »

Last night at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium, Parsons dean Paul Goldberger conveniently recited a line from designer Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth: “Don't be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black.” Wearing black pants and a button down shirt, Mr. Mau burst out laughing. "I know, I'm in a rut."

For almost 90 minutes, Mr. Mau discussed his collaborations with architects Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry (most recently on the InterActiveCorp. headquarters under construction in Chelsea), obsessive typography, Rotterdam, public space, and the catastrophe in New Orleans. There is a webcast available, but here are a few highlights:

BM: [Design] is a marginal activity. You need only go to Rotterdam to see what happens when it’s not. Suddenly, every building is attractive, and it’s terrible…. You end up with a kind of screaming ordinary, which is not very pleasant. Each building is just desperate for a 90 degree angle.”

BM: We have to get to a scale of design that we are a little bit reticent of. In Massive Change, we talk about what we are actually doing. It’s not utopian and it’s not futuristic. It’s what we are actually doing, and how we control the world now, and how we control nature and it’s capacities--sometimes successfully, sometimes catastrophically, and sometimes accidentally…. We certainly have an ambition that is comprehensive and universal.

BM: This happened with us in Seattle, which was a disaster. When we talked to Rem about how we would work, we had a fabulous… PG: The library? BM. Seattle Public Library. We had a fabulous and exciting, open collaboration about the future of the library in the 21st century. And we worked for several months on that basis. At some point, we met the people at the library who were very enthusiastic…. But they hired a managing firm. The managing firm came in and said, “We don’t have a line item for ‘open collaboration.'"  read more »

Parsons’ conversation series continues in the spring with fashion designer Donna Karan and architect (and “power geezer”) Michael Graves.

-Michael Calderone

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