FASHIONISTAS, ECOFRIENDLY AND ALL-NATURAL

"I had my first tofu birthday cake when I was 9," reminisced Natane Adcock,
an actress and model, who grew up with a mother who was a charter member of
the health-food movement. Mealtimes, she confided, used to make her cringe.
"At school I got made fun of," she said. "Finally, I stopped using anything
that had the word 'whole' in it."

But at 25, Ms. Adcock has changed her tune. A devout consumer of organic
goods, she shops at the Whole Foods Market in her Upper West Side
neighborhood, sleeps on unbleached cotton sheets, bathes in a detoxifying
ginger bath and ingests All-Zyme -- a preparation said to aid digestion --
from her medicine cabinet. Her household pharmacopeia is not much to look
at, she conceded, adding wistfully, "It would be nice to have a product
from the health food store that actually looks good in my bathroom."

These days she can have her pick. Ms. Adcock's health food store, and no
less her drugstore, furniture emporium and favorite clothing boutiques are
likely to be well stocked with wares that aim to be all-natural and very
stylish.

"Organic style," once an oxymoron, the verbal equivalent of stiletto-heeled
Birkenstocks, has become a marketing mantra to pitch everything from Hermes
handbags to Armani clothing. It has lately been adopted by high-end
fashionmakers, who once would have shuddered at being linked with a
lifestyle reminiscent of a commune.

The latest products and designs are aimed at consumers who are as committed
to living in style as they are to living "green."

"We call them 'conscious sensualists,' " said Maria Rodale, the founder of
Organic Style, a new women's lifestyle magazine that hopes to profit from
the trend. The publisher, Rodale Press, which also puts out Organic
Gardening, is betting that readers who once wanted to grow pesticide-free
spinach are eager to acquire a high-fashion wardrobe and a sumptuously
furnished home -- if the case can be made that the products are
earth-friendly. The magazine, due out next month, is for "women who want to
do the right thing for their health and the environment, but not at the
cost of living well," Ms. Rodale said.

"They don't want to sacrifice anything," she continued. "Not great food,
great clothes, nor a comfortable home that looks good. Increasingly there
are options that don't compromise on either front."

How big a market is there for organic high style?

In a Gallup poll last year, between 80 percent and 90 percent of Americans
said they participated in simple eco-conscious behaviors like recycling and
reducing energy and water usage, while 73 percent bought environmentally
beneficial products. The Organic Trade Association estimates that sales of
organically grown food in the United States was $6.4 billion in 1999, with
a projected yearly growth of 20 percent.

Many marketers are betting that this broad base of organically minded
consumers can be nudged along an upgrade curve. Already people are
responding to all-natural and ecofriendly products that are "highly
designed, with softer, more natural colors and curves that follow those in
nature," said Jody Crane, whose company, New Solutions Marketing, provides
market research and trend analysis to corporations. Packaging has become
simpler and more artful. "You may still see brown paper wrapping, but it's
going to be refined brown paper, with beautiful fibers woven into it," Ms.
Crane said.

The concept is not novel to cosmetics makers. The Body Shop and Aveda,
pioneers in the field of plant-based beauty balms, were among the first to
seduce customers with eye-pleasing packaging and rain-forest-redolent
fragrances. Many others have acted on the premise, first expounded by Horst
Rechelbacher, Aveda's founder, that "ecofriendly style need not be a
contradiction in terms."

Today that phrase has the ring of an edict, one that resounds throughout
the marketplace, from Sephora, the high-end cosmetics emporium, to
cutting-edge fashion boutiques like Kirna Zabete, a SoHo outpost for trend
seekers. It stocks Red Flower organic tea and candles, and the Jules & Jane
line of botanical treatments, which are embellished with eye-catching
black-on-red graphics. "The old hippie vitamin-store packaging just no
longer cuts it," said Sarah Hailes, a co-owner of the store.

Similarly seductive wares have insinuated their way into the home, from the
front porch, where a hemp hammock swings, to the kitchen sink, awash in
coriander-scented, biodegradable dishwashing liquid.

"People say they want products that are environmentally friendly," said
Danny Seo, 24, who has been called the Martha Stewart of organic style.
"But unless a product is affordable and appealing to the eye, who is going
to pay for it?"

In "Conscious Style Home" (St. Martin's Press), a forthcoming coffee-table
guide to stylish ecofriendly home design, Mr. Seo enjoins consumers to buy
rugs made of hemp (more durable and renewable than cotton), whiten their
fabrics with nonchlorine bleach and sip their carrot juice from recycled
glass tumblers.

The organic philosophy is "good-hearted," Mr. Seo said, "but you can't
force someone to part with their money just because the product is good for
the planet. That's what charity is for."

That message has not been lost on the fashion world, where "organic,"
"natural," and "holistic," adjectives once mostly applied to food and
shampoos, are the last words in hip.

Today the Hermes Kelly bag, the ultimate badge of luxury chic, comes in
Amazonia, a rubbery canvas coating made from the sap of the Brazilian Hevea
tree, a renewable resource, the company points out, that does not sacrifice
a living tree. The bag, a travel-size version of the classic Kelly, is
priced at $5,250 -- a long way from any back-to-the-land lifestyle.

Ralph Lauren manufactures an upholstery fabric in khaki-tone hemp. And
Giorgio Armani's jeans line, carried by Emporio Armani, which has offered
hemp apparel since 1995, is raising the fashion quotient of the line this
fall with items like a hemp military overcoat with a
cartridge-bandolier-style trim. Armani Casa offers hemp sheets.

Anne Fontaine, a Parisian designer whose pristine white cotton shirts are
sold in her SoHo and Madison Avenue boutiques of the same name, lives by
the credo "construire sans detruire" (build without destroying). True to
her word, she has her shirts stitched and embroidered with old-fashioned,
manually operated machines, to conserve energy, she says.

In recent years, the whole earth lifestyle has received the endorsement of
pop culture goddesses like Madonna, Courtney Love and Christy Turlington,
who have been among its most vocal devotees. Now Ms. Turlington is
marketing Sundari, a line of skin treatments made with plant extracts ($52
for a jar of moisturizer), and Nuala, a collection of yoga and gym togs
with a racy edge, made by Puma.

"People perceive such items as sophisticated," said Susan Kurz, the
president of Dr. Hauschka, an upscale natural skin treatment line, adding
that using the products is the equivalent of "eating mixed greens instead
of iceberg lettuce."

Mass marketers, too, have rallied to the stylishly organic. With little
fanfare, the footwear giant Nike has sought to incorporate organically
grown cotton into many of its most coveted designs, notably the Presto, its
stretchy, slip-on sneaker. Next year the company will begin to phase
organic cotton, which is grown without water-polluting pesticides, into
women's apparel, with the ultimate goal of becoming the largest purchaser
of organic cotton in the world.

Joani Komlos, a Nike spokeswoman, said that the company is hoping to appeal
to a "mainstream consumer who is becoming much more eco- conscious and
informed."

Even Target is thinking green. The national discounter is working on the
development of sleekly designed housewares made from recycled materials.
Earlier this year, according to Mr. Seo, the company asked him to create
prototypes for glass bowls, bottle openers and tumblers, the last made from
recycled wine bottles and handsome enough to grace Martha Stewart's dining
table. "If you add a design element to things that people have resisted,
they will sell," Mr. Seo said.

That view is shared by manufacturers who have taken up the cause with one
eye on the consumer's psyche, the other on the bottom line. Since last
year, when the Dr. Hauschka skincare line introduced a fancier-looking,
gold-printed package for its all-natural products, sales have surged 30
percent, said Ms. Kurz.

The objective, she said, is to persuade users "that they are experiencing
something very fine, that whether they know it is good for them or not,
they just have to have it."

Larry Grunstein, the president of the Citizen watch company, which
manufactures a line of Eco-Drive watches powered by sunlight, echoed that
thought.

"If a consumer is really going to use the product, he has to feel good
about it," Mr. Grunstein said. "But if you make the product too costly, or
ugly," a consumer might applaud its intentions, but won't buy, he added.
The newest Eco-Drive models, priced between $500 and $600, are dressed up
with diamond-set bezels and mother-of-pearl dials.

With organic products, "you walk a fine line," said Gary Esposito, whose
company, Bronze-Esposito, designs consumer goods and packaging. "You don't
want to feel generic or mass produced somewhere in Kankakee," he said. "At
the same time, you don't want a high-polished item that looks produced in a
fancy photography studio in Manhattan."

The company, which designs such ecofriendly items as recyclable paper
plates and cups sold at price clubs and supermarkets, has experienced a 25
percent growth in this segment of the business in the last two years, Mr.
Esposito said.

Organic and natural products "are in vogue," he said. "They seem to be the
wave right now, and we are going to ride it."