Illustration by John Ritter

My 15-year-old daughter has tastes in television that... well, let's just say they don't always coincide with my own. But one recent evening she prevailed on me to watch a few minutes of Bravo's megahit, Project Runway. The aspiring fashion designers were dispatched to a waste-management site in New Jersey (when did a fashion designer last go to New Jersey?) and told to collect bottle caps, waste paper, and other assorted detritus, which they would then turn into a garment. The results were... interesting.

But more was happening here, it seems, than a one-show gimmick. The fashion industry, so long a paradigm of self-indulgence, seems to have embarked on a green makeover. The Spanish fashion industry, already renowned for its decision to bar skeletal models from last summer's Pasarela Cibeles show in Madrid, has now partnered with Greenpeace to showcase "nontoxic clothing." In this country, activist-model Summer Rayne Oakes has just launched a trade magazine, S4, to "address sustainability issues in the apparel sector." The theme of the inaugural issue is clothing made from bamboo (or Moso, as the ultrahip like to call it). Old-time environmentalists: Off to your closets to get rid of the hemp and the Birkenstocks.