HEMP IS BECOMING CHIC

It's not just for the stoner set. The sturdy, versatile textile has
been embraced by major designers. Plus, it's easy on the environment.

It's durable. It's versatile. And when it's used in textiles, it's
easier on the environment than, say, cotton. Yet its cannabis
connection has slowed its widespread use. We're talking about hemp,
and, by extension, hemp fashion - a concept that seems like an
oxymoron but is quietly being embraced by the mainstream as major
designers and clothing retailers take on the material that has long
been equated with burlap and granola-munching hippies.

Stella McCartney, Giorgio Armani and Calvin Klein are among the
designers who've seen through the smoke and incorporated hemp
textiles into their lines. And Whole Foods, Urban Outfitters,
American Rag and Fred Segal are some of the better-known stores
selling fashion-forward hemp brands, such as Livity Outernational,
Jung Maven, Satori and Hemp Hoodlamb, all of which exploit hemp's
various attributes in chic items that run the gamut from technical
outerwear to dresses that would hardly be the first choice of the
dreadlocks-and-doobie crowd.

"Hemp clothing has definitely come a long way," says Al Espino, the
owner of two hemp clothing boutiques called Hempwise in Santa Barbara
and Isla Vista. "Ten years ago, a lot of the hemp clothing played on
the connection with marijuana with labels saying 'contains marijuana
fabric.' There was a lot of confusion and I think it held back the
industry. Now, there are a lot of small 1/8fashion-forward3/8
companies. It's gone from a niche market with an illegal drug
connection to appealing to the organic and natural crowd."

Hemp is an industrial, nonpsychoactive plant that is part of the
cannabis family; the fibers are different and stronger than a
marijuana plant, making it suitable for textiles.

What's drawing designers to hemp textiles are their natural
performance attributes and their low impact on the environment. Hemp
fibers are highly absorbent, UV resistant, antimicrobial and long
lasting. Growing it also requires less water and fewer pesticides
than cotton. Growing hemp in the U.S. has been prohibited since the
'50s, so most of the hemp used by American clothing designers comes
from China. "It's so high value and so much lower impact in every
other way that it eclipses the carbon generated through shipping,"
said Isaac Nichelson, founder of the Santa Monica-based hemp clothing
line Livity Outernational.

Eco-chic is a rising tide in the fashion world, and the use of hemp
is swelling - aided by technological advances that have produced
appealing and increasingly refined hemp textile blends, the most
common being hemp and organic cotton and hemp fibers woven with
recycled plastic, both of which soften a material that can be coarse.

Still, hemp's illicit image is hard to shed. Two teenage girls read
the sign for Hempwise and giggled before walking into the shop on a
recent weekday to peruse the women's section, which is stocked with
slinky hemp-blend T-shirts and Capri pants, and asymmetrical
mini-dresses. All of it was set out in displays that play up the
"eco" with only the merest hint of "Rasta." A mint green Vespa was
parked inside the doorway on bamboo flooring that led to displays of
backpacks and wallets, hats and menswear - all made from hemp.

One of the brands sold at Hempwise is Livity, which Nichelson started
after a friend pointed out that the materials he was using as a
clothing designer weren't in sync with his environmental beliefs.

"I was using nylon, PVC, Teflon - every toxin known to man wrapped up
in a garment that we were putting on ourselves and dropping in a
landfill later," said Nichelson, who started to look for alternatives
and found one in hemp. Eight years later, he's running a
multimillion-dollar business that sells outdoor-wear to Whole Foods
and Urban Outfitters. On April 22 - Earth Day - he'll be opening his
first branded store on Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica, Calif., so
strong is his belief that hemp is "headed straight to the mainstream.
Eventually it won't even be perceptible. Hemp is as high performance
and functional and as cool and flashy and sexy as any conventional
product, but it doesn't impact the planet in terrible ways. More and
more, it's going to be incorporated into things where the end user
doesn't even know or care it's there. They're just reaping the benefits."