Vancouver EcoFashion Week fundraiser this Friday

Credit: Flickr / kdon

kdon by Kim Cathers

Fundraiser promises cutting-edge style, high-energy performances and a bright future for Vancouver’s ecofashion industry

OMG! OMG! OMG! A dedicated EcoFashion Week in Vancouver? It almost seems to good to be true.

And indeed it’s still a pipe dream. But with your help (and $$) an annual Vancouver EcoFashion Week could become reality…

This Friday, February 19, join Granville magazine in attending EcoFashion Forward at Vancouver Public Library Promenade. All proceeds from the event go to support the fashion week in April as well as the David Suzuki Foundation. The goal is to make Vancouver the ecofashion Mecca of the world.

Running concurrent with the Vancouver Winter Games, this event puts sustainable, cutting edge fashion on the world stage, with models trotting down the runway wearing Vancouver’s brightest ecofashion designers, including Nixxi, Adhesif, Ashley Watson, Dotted Loop, We3 and kdon designer Kim Cathers‘s new line, kim. cathers. elements., made entirely of recycled fabric and constructed locally.

“It’ll be a sneak peak of the new line,” says Cathers, who’ll show six outfits on Friday. “Each piece is totally 100 percent unique, each dress one-of-a-kind using all recycled fabrics from Our Social Fabric… Designing this way really puts the art back into making clothes for me.”

A contestant in last season’s Project Runway Canada, Cathers has high hopes for Vancouver EcoFashion Week, predicting a major shift in the eco-textile industry in the next few years, as mainstream designers start to satisfy a growing hunger among consumers for more sustainable fashion.

“I think EcoFashion Week has a really bright future,” she says, “I’m really excited about what [founder Myriam Laroche] is doing. Hopefully it’ll become EcoFashion Week everywhere—I’d like to see it go worldwide.”

In addition to the runway show, expect performances from Canadian chanteuse Jill Barber as well as Adam Thomas with the Mike Allen Quartet, “gypsy soul” musician Vince Vaccaro, and Vancouver collective Soldiers of the Underground founder DJ Phoenix Olivia. Plus, perfectionist hyper-realist artist Caroline Weaver will be live art-ing throughout the evening.

Come out for EcoFashion Forward and support creative, ethical fashion in Vancouver—and around the world. It’ll be a blast, and it’ll support a fledgling industry that has a lot of potential in this city.

Pictured: From kdon, Spring/Summer 2009