How I Wear Eco Fashion: Greenest New Yorker Kaity Tsui
On the heels of apparel giant H&M stating, “There aren’t any specific trends anymore. It’s more just personal style and how you put it together,” I contacted a number of my friends and colleagues about contributing to this new column on Eco Chick, “How I Wear Eco Fashion.” The response has been enthusiastic, so look for weekly installations of how women from all walks of life (some of them working in the green sphere, and some of them not, but all of them with a conscience about their impact on the planet) find and wear eco fashion.
First up is Kaity Tsui, AKA The Greenest New Yorker. Kaity told me of the dress pictured above, “I bought this black dress at Housing Works (Upper West Side)* for a really good price. Here I’m wearing it at a friend’s wedding, so it’s appropriate at more formal settings.” Kaity is still a fresh-faced young lady with great skin, so she doesn’t use a ton of makeup; here she sports some Burt’s Bees lipbalm (one of my faves too!), which is available everywhere, and a bit of Bare Minerals/Escentuals for sparkle.
Kaity told me that her fashion influences include movies like “…’The Devil Wears Prada,’ and fashion mentors include Tim Gunn. Blair Waldorf from Gossip Girl, America Ferrera from Ugly Betty, Christina Hendricks from Mad Men and Kimora Lee Simmons.”
When Kaity gets dressed to go out, she queues up Katy Perry, Kelly Clarkson, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, The Pussycat Dolls and of course Madonna (“Who could forget her hit song ‘Vogue'”?). One of Kaity’s fave quotes from Coco Chanel (arguably an eco fashionista herself) is: “Fashion is not simply a matter of clothes. Fashion is in the air, borne upon the wind. One intuits it. It is in the sky and on the road.”
Check out I LOVE NY’s Greenheart NY website here.
You can follow Kaity on Twitter by clicking or searching for kaitytsui. Kaity’s blog is called Diary of the the Greenest NYer.
*For those outside the NYC Metro area, Housing Works is a well-known charity thrift shop whose proceeds go to victims of AIDS and homelessness.
Starre Vartan
Starre Vartan is founder and editor-in-chief of Eco-Chick.com and the author of the Eco-Chick Guide to Life. She's also a freelance science and environment writer who has published in National Geographic, CNN, Scientific American, Mental Floss, Pacific Standard, the NRDC, and many more. She lives on an island in Puget Sound with her partner and black cat. She was a geologist in her first career, and still picks up rocks wherever she goes.
