Target’s “A Superhero in Every Aisle” ad campaign features The Avengers cast constructed out of mundane objects you can find in their stores. For example, Iron Man is assembled out of pencils, toys and Dr. Pepper cans.

Similarly, Mjolnir is made out of Dr. Pepper cans, toys, a toaster, radio, dumbbell and a thermos. The representations of the rest of the cast are equally creative.

As Comics Alliance points out, the campaign is unfortunately missing Black widow, the only female in the superhero roster.

What could have been just another boring ad campaign for an already heavily promoted movie instead is transformed into pop art. The ad campaign was produced for Target by Wieden + Kennedy, Portland.

I don’t want to jinx it, but it really does seem like spring is here for real in New York City. From block to block, the East Village to the Upper West Side, there are flowers blooming on trees, sun-drenched afternoon strolls and dare I say it – short sleeves. Bare legs even! I’m holding back on open-toe shoes, but it’s predicted to reach 79 degrees on Thursday, so you may find me singing a different tune rather soon…

Anyway, back to denim. I’m feeling quite inspired by these three bloggers, Sincerely Jules, Aimee from Song of Style, and Lindsey of Saucy Glossie. They each have a very different look going on here, and I want to rock them all. Let’s discuss.

-Super distressed shorts: I love how Jules has paired a bright, sharp blazer with insanely distressed boyfriend denim shorts. The wedges also add a sassy twist, as well as a helpful leg-lengthening element.

-Denim jacket as cape: This whole jacket-as-cape trend has become quite the thing in New York City, has it elsewhere? I love how it looks with a jean jacket especially – casual and effortless.  You can try this look over anything from a sweet little dress to white jeans and a t shirt to fun little shorts as Aimee has done here.

-Tuxedo stripe jeans: For the adventurous spring denim-hunters out there, try a skinny jean with a bold tuxedo stripe. These Hudson ‘Nico’ cropped skinnies or these Rag & Bone / JEAN ones are easier to wear than you might think – try them with your favorite tee and fierce pumps for a sleek-but-playful look.

A report out from Food and Water Watch this week details the efforts that Walmart has made to boost access to healthy food and incorporate sustainable practices into its supply chain and operations, and explains why these initiatives aren’t going to solve our environmental or public health problems.

Much of the report, Why Walmart Can’t Fix the Food System, covers ground that won’t be new to most TreeHugger readers: how Walmart’s focus on efficiency may be abandoned when the sustainable choice is not profitable, and its organic food supply is not necessarily produced ethically or sustainably—organic dairy cows being raised in factory farm-like conditions, for example. Michael Pollan asked this question years ago: “how exactly would Wal-Mart get the price of organic food down to a level just 10 percent higher than that of its everyday food? To do so would virtually guarantee that Wal-Mart’s version of cheap organic food is not sustainable.”

Exploiting Food Deserts

Over about the last year, Walmart has launched initiatives to fight childhood obesity and food deserts, with Michelle Obama’s outspoken support. The partnership has generated plenty of criticism for both parties—but left out of this discussion has been Walmart’s ability to exploit the very definition of food desert.

The Food and Water Watch report explains more:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines “food desert” not simply as a lower-income area with no access to fresh food, but as an area without access to a supermarket or large grocery store. A supermarket is defined as a retailer with annual sales of $2 million, and it must contain all the traditional major food departments, including fresh meat and produce, dairy products, dry and packaged goods, and frozen foods.

This requirement can generally be met only by large national grocery chains. A smaller local grocery co-op, corner store or bodega, which may in fact provide fresh fruits and vegetables as well as cycle more money back into the community, does not count under the USDA guideline, a fault that the department is well aware of. This corporate-friendly definition makes sure only the opening of a large national grocery chain can eliminate a food desert, a situation that Walmart is using to its advantage.

The report explains the difficulty Walmart has faced over the last few years in expanding into urban areas—the controversy over a Walmart in NYC has been one of the more publicized debates on this topic. It explains how relabeling the effort as a fight-food-deserts initiative has worked pretty well for them. But Food and Water Watch says the penetration of urban markets is still the underlying goal:

In July 2011, First Lady Obama made a second statement on behalf of Walmart and other large retailers when she announced that Walmart was making an official commitment to open up or expand 275 to 300 stores in underserved urban and rural areas. To the general public, this sounds like a solution that helps everyone: low-income populations in urban and rural areas will be able to obtain lower-cost, healthy and fresh foods that they did not previously have access to. But this talk of supplying good food in “food deserts” is simply a public relations tactic that Walmart is using to try to expand into urban markets, an area it has unsuccessfully tried to break in to for years…

Walmart’s model for supplying the fruits and vegetables it will sell in food deserts is part of the problem. By driving down costs at every step in the chain, the Walmart model makes farmers and workers poorer, and it increases the odds that fruits and vegetables will be produced in environmentally irresponsible ways or be imported from countries with lax standards.

Whether intentions matter or not is another discussion. The point of the report, as its title makes clear, is ultimately that Walmart will not fix our failing food system. Its initiatives may address some of the short-term problems we face, but it’s not the solution we need, not the one we’ve been looking or fighting for, and we should not pretend it’s anything close to either.

The Way Forward

The report has suggestions for ways to help communities improve access to healthy food that don’t involve Walmart—but that do involve some help from the federal government:

· Investigating the impact of Walmart’s monopoly power in the food chain and in local retail markets, including anticompetitive practices that result from Walmart’s disproportionate market share. Any investigation should look at possible anticompetitive practices in Walmart’s relationships with suppliers and impacts on local markets.

· Creating food and farm policy that re-establishes regional food systems that will provide healthy, affordable food to all communities. Federal farm policy should strengthen food assistance programs that fight hunger and improve nutrition such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Women, Infants, and Children Supplemental Nutrition Program to ensure that low-income Americans have the resources necessary to afford healthy, nutritious foods and prevent hunger.

Social media has inspired people to use their voices to protest everything from products and services to politics, and physical protests have spilled into the streets as people stood up for what they believe in. Now, ironically, social media giant Facebook was the target of a protest at its New York office on April 25, when a group of women (organized by Ultraviolet) delivered a petition with more than 50,000 signatures urging the social behemoth to add women to its all-male board before its upcoming IPO.

Curious business decision

More than half of Facebook’s 900 million users are women, and women are more active on the site than men. A Catalyst study showed that companies with more women board members performed better than companies with the least number of women board members with a 53 percent higher return on equity, 42 percent higher return on sales and 66 percent higher return on invested capital. So, for a global company with a high female consumer base and a female second in command that has vocally advocated for women to lead in business to reject board diversity, is puzzling.

The Catalyst study goes on to say that the optimal number of women on a board is three, enhancing “the likelihood that women’s ideas are heard and that boardroom dynamics change substantially.” If Facebook added three women to its board, they would constitute nearly half of the seven-person group. When asked, CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed that he promoted people to the board on merit. Period. Yet, there is not a single woman or board member of color to be found.

Perhaps the absence of women on the board explains why Facebook has come under fire for woman-related issues. Earlier this year women protested when Facebook arbitrarily took down breast-feeding photos and penalized the account holders. Women have also protested the proliferation of pro-rape and sexual assault fan pages found on the social media network. Despite running contrary to Facebook’s own terms of use, very few of those pages have been removed.

Heavy-handed tactic or valid consumer feedback?

The protesters chanted “Shame on Facebook” and held signs saying, “Facebook: Women are Good for Business.” Should consumers weigh in on how a company is run at the board level? Is this a case of strongly presented consumer feedback, or an extreme reaction to a business decision that, unfortunately, many companies have made to not have women on their boards?

Will Facebook take this action more or less seriously because it’s a group of women spearheading it? Women represent a large customer demographic for the company, but when women express anger and righteous indignation, it usually undercuts their cause and is more easily dismissed than anger in men. In the business world, female anger is equated to less competence in the eyes of colleagues and management. Will the company take the petition seriously, or issue a bland statement, sweep it under the rug and decide that appeasing more than 50,000 women isn’t important enough to change the way they do business?

When Greenpeace mounted its relentless campaign against Facebook to discontinue using coal to power their data centers, people applauded. After a nearly two-year onslaught, Facebook finally conceded, committing to building a data center in Sweden that will run on renewable energy.

How will Facebook react to this women’s action? And how should they?

I bet you never thought it would happen, but there’s an article of denim clothing I’ve never talked about before. Shoes. Yes, denim shoes. Before you roll your eyes and write me off as taking this whole denim thing just a little too far, take a minute to consider the possibilities.

First of all, wedges look great with almost anything, so you have that going for you. Next, it’s a fun alternative that can function as a neutral, when worn with all your none-denim pieces. For example, this KORS Michael Kors retro-inspired wedge sandal would look great with flirty sundresses or printed silk pants, or even white jeans rolled at the ankle. This sweet little ONE By Marais USA sandal would look darling with shorts or linen pants at the beach.

Not convinced? I’m not totally there either. As much as I love jeans and denim of all varieties, this is still something very unfamiliar to me. So let’s discuss, shall we? Tell me, would you rock a denim shoe?

Los Angeles is a city that sorely needs more open space and parkland, it ranks 17th among major U.S. cities. Park acreage in LA is just 4.2 acres per 1000 residents, significantly lower than the national averages, which range from 6.25 to 10.5 acres per 1000 residents. The LA City Planning Commission had wanted to bring more open space to Los Angeles cheaply and quickly. Los Angeles Planning Commissioner President Bill Roschen had been inspired by how fast and cost effective the construction of public plazas were in New York City’s Times Square and Madison Square Park. So with $25,000 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a design by Rios Clementi Hale Studios and the addition of lime green paint and café chairs, an underutilized street in LA’s Silver Lake district was transformed into a vibrant public plaza.

Sunset Triangle, the new pedestrian plaza, is LA’s first street-to-plaza conversion. The 11,000 square foot plaza is a one year pilot project that is placed over a two lane paved section of Griffith Park Boulevard between Edgecliffe and Maltman. The street is now closed to cars, with access blocked by a row of planters that act as bollards. The street has been painted a bright lime green with yellow-green polka dots. Moveable café tables with sun umbrellas, chairs and a basketball hoop are some of the few amenities that have been added. With these few amenities and a change of color and a change of pace, it is amazing how quickly an intersection of two streets was transformed into a lively neighborhood gathering spot.

The plaza opened on March 4, 2012. In a little over a month it has become a vibrant place for pedestrians, cyclists, coffee-drinkers, basketball players, musicians and people just hanging out. Along the plaza, there is a cafe, a vegan restaurant, a bakery, and twice a week there is a farmers market.

People in the community worked together to create and maintain the space. The plaza is part of the Streets for People (S4P) program, an initiative of the City of L.A. Planning Commission and the L.A. County Department of Public Health. Rios Clementi Hale Studios donated its time, the drought tolerant plants were donated by Monrovia nursery. The moveable bistro tables with umbrellas and chairs are brought in each night by staff from Mornings Nights Café to ensure the street furniture stays clean.

These joint efforts allowed the plaza to be built in months instead of years and for thousands instead of millions of dollars. Involving the local businesses in the maintenance will hopefully increase the sense of pride that residents feel towards the plaza and ensure the project’s success beyond it’s one year pilot span. The L.A. Planning Commission feels that with the pilot process underway, Streets for People can use the Sunset Triangle as a model to create 40 pedestrian plazas a year. This major effort would radically transform a city that has been park poor for too long.

So if you live in or are visiting L.A., stop by Sunset Triangle and welcome the new plaza. Or come by on Wednesday, April 25th at 5:30pm for a tour of this lovely transformed space with the designer, Frank Clementi and Streets for People’s Margot Ocañas and Anna Peccianti. Design East of La Brea aka deLab organized the tour, they host a variety of design events in Los Angeles.

Eco Catch 22?
It’s important to clean up the air because of things like acid rain and respiratory diseases, but under certain conditions, particulate matters in the air can reflect some heat back into space and create a regional cooling effect. It’s kind of an environmental catch 22: Either you get bad stuff caused by air pollution, or you get bad stuff caused by global warming.

That’s what Climate scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have found studying the Eastern US. They have discovered that “particulate pollution in the late 20th century created a ‘warming hole’ over the eastern United States—that is, a cold patch where the effects of global warming were temporarily obscured.” But thanks to relatively recent cuts that we’ve made in these PM emissions, the warming in this region should ramp up to match the global trend.

Of course, this is not a real catch 22, since this pollution is only masking some effects of global warming regionally and temporarily. Any benefits from this air pollution were minimal compared to their downsides, and I’m absolutely not implying that we should pollute the air to fight global warming.

Here’s the highlights from this research:

Until the United States passed the Clean Air Act in 1970 and strengthened it in 1990, particulate pollution hung thick over the central and eastern states. Most of these particles in the atmosphere were made of sulfate, originating as sulfur emissions from coal-fired power plants. Compared to greenhouse gases, particulate pollution has a very short lifetime (about 1 week), so its distribution over the Earth is uneven.

“The primary driver of the warming hole is the aerosol pollution—these small particles,” says Leibensperger. “What they do is reflect incoming sunlight, so we see a cooling effect at the surface.”

This effect has been known for some time, but the new analysis demonstrates the strong impact that decreases in particulate pollution can have on regional climate.

The researchers found that interactions between clouds and particles amplified the cooling. Particles of pollution can act as nucleation sites for cloud droplets, which can in turn reflect even more sunlight than the particles would individually, leading to greater cooling at the surface. [...]

Since the early 20th century, global mean temperatures have risen—by approximately 0.8 degrees Celsius from 1906 to 2005—but in the U.S. “warming hole,” temperatures decreased by as much as 1 degree Celsius during the period 1930–1990. U.S. particulate pollution peaked in 1980 and has since been reduced by about half. By 2010 the average cooling effect over the East had fallen to just 0.3 degrees Celsius.

Every year, 27 billion gallons of raw sewage gets dumped into New York City’s harbor. That’s a lot of waste, even for a city the size of New York. And it’s not supposed to happen. But whenever the city’s sewer system is overloaded—thanks to heavy rainfall, flooding, or overuse—the Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) open up and spew out the excess waste.

Obviously, regularly dumping billions of gallons of untreated sewage into a body of water (even one as polluted as the NYC harbor) is a major environmental hazard. Enter Lief Percifield’s ‘Don’t Flush Me’ project. Percifield is a design student at Parsons, and after a project left him up close and personal with the horrendous water quality of the Gowanus Canal, he decided to dedicate his skills to developing a system that could help New Yorkers prevent the needless discharge.

I met Percifield last week on a tour of Brooklyn-based projects that have raised funds using ioby, a neighborhood crowd-funding and volunteering platform (they just went national, by the way, so check their database for projects in your backyard). He’s got a working prototype in operation in the Gowanus Canal, and he explained how it works.

“I want to enable residents to understand when overflows happen and reduce their wastewater before and during overflow events,” he said. “If we know when the sewers overflow, we can warn them.”

To do this, he has installed remote sensors that monitor water levels at the CSOs, which transmit data via a cell phone. When the water level gets dangerously high, it sends an alert to anyone using the system, text messages to those subscribed, or tweets to followers of @dontflushme.

“The bigger picture is to get the information out there, raise red flags in social media,” Percifield said.

Eventually, he imagines the signal activating a small ambient light device that you can plug into your bathroom, which would alert folks that it’d be best to hold off on flushing. He showed us a prototype for that light device:

He has other ideas that compliment his basic aim, too. One is what he calls the Flush Capacitor (nice, I know), that employs an LED light to monitor how many times you flush the toilet per day. It changes colors depending on your flush activity, and sends the signal to an online database:

Percifield has already put Don’t Flush Me into action. In other words, it’s up and running right now, sending out alerts whenever there’s significant rainfall or CSO activity. If you’re a New Yorker interested in keeping 27 billion gallons of raw sewage out of the harbor, follow @dontflushme to know when to lay off the lavatory.

What will the future hold? It’s hard to say, but here are ten entities, industries, or trends that will impact it in various ways.

In the past several years, we have all felt out of control of our lives. We have been hit by economic hardship, rising cost of living, plummeting home values, stagnant salaries, and waves of layoffs. Even as things slowly rebound, there are still many factors that affect our lives that we might not be able to control, but we have found ways to communicate our opinions and, in some cases, make a change. Our society is tackling new and old problems, setting new trends and following a new path, and in many ways, this is a tipping point where the decisions we make now will have a ripple effect far into the future.

Who are the people making these major life decisions for us? You might be surprised.

1. Pharmaceutical Industry

Although prescription prices went up in 2011, Americans are veering away from both doctor visits and excessive prescription use. At the same time, new government healthcare regulations over prescriptions that some women do want to take stirred up debate and crossed boundaries into local government, religious and business realms.

2. Oil & Gas

After the BP spill and the continuing aftermath, no one could fail to see the impact the oil and gas industry has on our lives. Prices have continued to rise and all indications are that they will not go down again for any significant length of time. Car companies have even come to the realization that we need transportation improvements and new higher mileage, hybrid and electric vehicles are emerging onto the market. Unfortunately, they only account for a small percentage of the vehicles on the road but they are gaining in popularity. Alternative energy solutions have become the next big thing, but we are still teetering on the edge of a precipice where we are consuming more energy than these solutions can meet, so oil and gas are still necessary evils. For how long, no one knows. While they still dominate, consumers will not only bear the financial costs, but environmental, political, and health costs as well.

3. Banks

Even before our economy hit a wall in 2008, many mistrusted banks and lenders and feelings deteriorated even further as the situation worsened. The financial landscape is changing. People are becoming more aware of the benefits and pitfalls and are speaking up. When Bank of America saw fit to tack on an arbitrary fee, account holders noticed and protested. After a storm of bad press, Bank of America canceled that fee scheme, but now they are looking to impose more.

The recently passed JOBS Act will also affect small businesses financially in ways we can’t see yet. Now that the gates have opened for people to crowdfund small businesses, this could enable organizations who might not have been able to get traditional or angel funding. Small businesses currently account for 65 percent of new jobs. Perhaps it took a major fall in order to make a change.

4. Supreme Court

We don’t think of many Supreme Court decisions as affecting our day-to-day lives, but recently the Court has weighed in on some pertinent issues. The justices pushed back against physical GPS tracking of a suspect, but the argument exposed the bigger issue of individual privacy. Justice Sotomayor articulated the future concern of eroding personal privacy, pointing out that “physical intrusion is now unnecessary to many forms of surveillance,” which puts into question freedom of expression online, information sent in email and data stored in the cloud. The laws as written by our founding fathers cannot keep pace with the speed of our technological innovations and our society’s increasing dependence on virtual communication, so this issue is sure to come up again.

5. State Government

While the Supreme Court makes decisions felt across the nation, state governments have been flexing their power lately. States have passed a number of measures chipping away at Roe v. Wade and imposing limitations and requirements on abortion that vary state to state.

Arizona went further and crafted legislation that would allow employers to opt out of covering birth control as part of their benefits package. If women wanted reimbursement for prescription costs, it then proposed to compel them to justify to their employers that if they are using birth control, they were using it for reasons other than preventing pregnancy. Using birth control for its intended purpose could be grounds for dismissal.

The legislation (in that form) failed, but this trend of state interference in personal and medical privacy seems to be gaining momentum.

6. Work

The job landscape has been a tough one. The last few years have seen layoffs, stagnant salaries, and overworked employees who had to take on the tasks of vacated roles. New opportunities lean toward freelance or contract work and fewer permanent positions with benefits, while our nation is still known for its culture of overwork.

However, mobile tools are giving rise to more work-at-home arrangements to cut down on commuting, eliminate the need for expensive, wasteful office space, and encourage more work/life balance. Will work weeks get shorter? Will more people without location-based jobs (doctors, teachers, etc.) work remotely? The current tide is toward leaner work infrastructure and roles, so expect remote work arrangements to continue to be popular, but as for Americans working fewer hours? It’s a future hope, but not likely to become a reality soon.

7. Utilities

The utility bill is a growing part of monthly budgets, factoring in landlines, smart phones, tablets, cable, internet, as well as basic heating/cooling and water. We use more energy and spend more money, while the big utility fish are gobbling up the smaller ones, so we have fewer choices. If that wasn’t troubling enough, Verizon recently decided to follow in Bank of America’s footsteps and have added an additional fee onto their customers bills. And again, people noticed and protested. Will the future improve people’s abilities to read and comprehend their cell phone bills? Probably not, but hopefully conservation and alternative energy solutions will lessen our utilities’ control over our energy, and impact on our budgets and our planet.

8. Food

Hundreds of emerging books and blogs examine the content of food on the supermarket shelves and have found much of it full of unsavory ingredients. Despite the higher prices, organic food is gaining popularity and gardening has become cool again. Consumers are more food savvy than ever before and are scrutinizing their fare. The demand for healthier food is a positive trend, but it may come at a price, putting it out of reach for many that are still recovering economically or live in a food desert. How consumers shape this industry now will set the tone for the future.

9. Water

It’s easy to forget that water is precious. For most of us, it comes out of the tap when we need it and goes down the drain when we don’t, but water shortage is fast becoming one of the biggest issues of this century. Businesses are realizing how much water impacts their daily manufacturing processes and their profits. Lack of water can shut down a factory for days, while floods can impact crops and cause materials shortages and price hikes.

The price of water varies by region and abundance, but even here in the U.S., wars over water are becoming more intense. In the future we may see prices rise or simply see availability fall. CDP Water Disclosure Project’s Chris Hedemann believes that people will only start to care about conserving water when a water crisis hits.

10. Consumption

As our economy slowly recovers, many facets have changed. Consumer consumption and excessive waste have fallen out of favor, and frugality has spawned a new, sharing economy, also called the access economy. Companies like Zipcar and Airbnb promote swapping and lending, while anti-waste crusader Annie Leonard is seeing her dream of community and sharing start to come true. We’re replacing shopping bags with reusable cloth totes and borrowing from our neighbors rather than buying an item we may only use once or twice a year. Our economy has been hit before during the Great Depression, inspiring a generation of savers. Perhaps this economic disaster will inspire future generations of savers, lenders and borrowers.

Take some sumptuous high court style mixed with a streak of dandy equestrian chic, filter it through a romantic lens of soulful Deep South and what do you get? The dreamy designs of eco-fashion auteur Jeff Garner, the man behind Prophetik.

Garner’s “Courtly Love” collection for Fall/Winter 2012, which closed Eco Fashion Week in Vancouver, was as much cotillion as it was hoedown. As a hemp “carpet” was unfurled down the runway an opera vocalist took to the mic. A movement of classical music was played before a bluegrass trio heralded in the first princess-model to float down the catwalk.

What followed was a succession of hems and trails sweeping the floor, perfectly executed tiny pleats spilling obediently from tight bodices, ruffles both grand and petite portraying a perfect balance of flirty and coy. There were prairie dresses and empress waistlines, kilts and flouncy skirts, waistcoats and pocket vests, jodhpurs and riding boots, peplums and plaids—many of the looks accented with vintage riding boots and dramatic jewels fit for a tsarina.

Garner started his Prohetik label nine years ago in Franklin, Tennessee. His signature nods to the horse set and historic costume are all imbued with down home southern comfort. Since the beginning, he has maintained his focus on unusual natural fibers and earth-based dyes. In fact, he grows his own dyestuffs in a community garden in Tennessee.

The way in which the hues take to the hemp-silk blends in many of the pieces sets his work apart from the others, eco-friendly or not. And his dedication to sustainability runs deep.

Garner joined a small group of us for dinner (and a hike atop Vancouver’s snowy Grouse Mountain, but that’s another story) before the show to talk about his approach. He sees “sustainable” as starting with fabric. He stays away from over-abundantly used cotton, even organic, and instead opts for linens and flax, which he notes, just feel amazing (as he offers the cuff of his lilac, ruffled linen sleeve for a touch). He is also constantly pushing the envelope with other fibers. Garner said,

I like cactus silk and seaweed fabric, which is like linen—it holds color beautifully, it’s a little stiff, but can work really well. Hemp is my favorite. It holds color 10 times longer than other fibers. It doesn’t deplete the soil. And it’s very durable. I ride my horse in hemp pants, they last a 100 times longer than stretch riding pants.

For this collection he used hemp-silk blends for a number of the garments, and introduced a new hemp-wool plaid. And to watch his fabrics drape and swish down the runway, one immediately senses that Garner is on to something. To see the earthy, textured textiles pleat and flow so beautifully was refreshing. And true to his word, the way they hold color is obvious, as evidenced by how saturated yet luminous the fabrics appear.

The designer considers each element of his work with sustainability in mind. Whether incorporating heirloom textiles, like family quilts, or extensively sourcing eco-friendly components, like naturally-shed ostrich feathers, every last bit is thoroughly thought through. Of his many tricks, one of the coolest is his use of substantial, industrial zippers, which run up the backs of many of his dresses. While many eco-designers rely on reusing vintage nylon zippers, Garner goes for new heavy-duty metal fasteners. How is that sustainable? Not only do they look great when played against sumptuous, shimmering natural fabrics, but as Garner points out, “Industrial zippers last longer. These days if a zipper breaks, people will just throw the garment away.” Of course!

The final dress of the show (above center, with the designer) was a long, strapless looker, inhabited by the designer’s muse, southern girl Morgan Bradley (who, by the way, can hike effortlessly and contentedly through snowy mountains, in four-inch pumps…without stockings). The black and white dress was crafted from peace silk, one of his grandmother Lola’s aged quilts, a vintage pocket watch, and the aforementioned naturally-shed ostrich feathers.

Although seemingly destined for the closet of some fairytale countess, the ostrich dress will soon be delivered to the Smithsonian American Art Museum as Garner’s contribution to the 40 Under 40: Craft Futures collection.

Grandma Lola would be proud.

The collection was sponsored by the conservation-driven Lawrence Anthony Foundation. Prophetik can be found in high-end boutiques around the world.