All The World’s A Stage!

The Guardian Angels in desperate need of a green fashion make-over!

And that’s when it dawned on me looking at Sunday’s New York Post, yet another story about Lindsay Lohan acting out for the cameras, giving a performance, on the stage of life, playing with the paparazzi, knowing full well, fully conscious, that all these images will once again splash all across the globe in gossip rags. She’s not doing anything different, consciously or not, than what Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin did in the 60′s, except in her case, her cause, is her, nothing else.

Remember the glorious 80′s when a rat pack of super models had conquered the gossip press, with all their wild antics… culminating with Linda Evangelista being quoted as saying, she wouldn’t get out of bed for less than $10.000 in the morning? It all died when the designers got fed up paying $50.000 a day for super models to walk down their runway… they killed the goose that laid the golden eggs, and slumped haute couture back into the obscurity of private salons.

It’s Toronto fashion week right now… I was just interviewed on the radio this morning by a reporter from the Waterkeeper Alliance, talking about the deteriorated state of the nuclear power infrastructure… can you imagine if instead of a tired 55 year old semi-hippie dude, some super model, drunk out of her mind, came waltzing down the runway with a No Nuke dress on, would do for the movement? It would put us on page one, or at the very least page 3… I demonstrated this already.

People have gotten too used to PeTA… nudity is beautiful, but does it really catch the eye anymore? What’s the big deal, right? Didn’t film director Robert Altman’s Ready To Wear pretty much demystify the nude as a form of social protest?

I was talking to Steampunk designer Maggie Norris last year, after the runway show she produced for the GoGreen Expo in New York where she invited professional environmentalists to walk the runway with her fashion models. We were saying we need environmentalists to become stars! Easier said than done… They need to have a je ne sais quoi, and also captivate the public’s imagination. Yet, it’s not for lack of trying, by Treehugger, Ecorazzi, Planet Green. But something’s missing.

The outrageous, the absurd, the funny, the ridiculous, the far out… the WOW factor! We love to see celebrities take a fall… get up, and walk again… just like all these America’s Funniest Videos on YouTube. We don’t even care if they get hurt or not, we laugh at their shortcomings. It’s evil, but that’s who we are.

Now I’m not saying I’d love to see Summer Rayne Oakes make a complete fool out of herself on national television to put forward the agenda of sustainable fashion… but if the whole world is a stage, then why aren’t budding green personalities not finding ways to capture the media’s attention in such a way that the media won’t let go? Aren’t there branding and marketing firms who sit in Madison Avenue lofts all day, getting paid big bucks, to come up with such outlandish schemes? Aren’t all public figures suddenly stars and made fair game? Is there such a thing as privacy anymore when every Tom, Dick & Harry can email his cell phone capture to TMZ?

I’ve noticed that many celebrities have just learned to live with it, have started to walk back into the street in public, in essence getting over it… and as this is starting to happen, the paparazzi are becoming more well behaved, respectful, as you would royalty… the cult of Dionysus, the Greek God of theatre. You see, that’s all the adoring public wants, to be entertained… so now, since we have cameras everywhere, it’s not the Truman show, where he didn’t know he was on air… it’s Sunset Beach where all the actors know they’re acting, acting at life, for an audience of millions.

That’s what I’m talking about. We are fashionistas, we love to play dress up, put on a show, act out in life… we’re also green, we beleive in a movement to repair the damage we’ve caused the planet. So why aren’t we out there flamboyant, loud, putting on a show for the whole world to see, and imitate? Why is green usually so down played and self-effacing? Why can’t our green leaders get busted once in awhile to get their names and faces splashed on Page Six?

In the 90′s club organizer Michael Alig ran Manhattan with his flash mobs! The problem was it was for no other good reason than bring attention to himself, ultimately climaxing in throwing the chopped up body of his drug dealer into the Hudson river. Back in the heyday of the social rights movement, that’s what we did… and it worked. Yet since Obama got elected, we all think it’s all going to be taken care of… that green has been quietly mainstreamed. But has it really? I look out the window, I still see a billion gasoline cars on the road, coal fired plants being built, nuclear power plants still leaking… I don’t see all that much has changed.

I think the new youth is aware of the problems, and are bringing up the rear with solutions, but the look on their face is glib, sunk inside text messaging, and pale white complexions… as if too many doses of Ritalin took their toll on their childhood psyche. A swift kick in the pants I say… sure there’s been a few global warming demonstration in DC… which barely made it to streaming video… that doesn’t move populations to adopt life style changes… the malls are still filled with young girls dreaming of that polyester prom dress, and applying gobs of cheap toxic laden cosmetics on their faces.

Yes, Saphora took a cue from Future Natural and put up an entire wall of natural products in their stores… but A&F, Hollister and Gilly Hicks, despite how cool their stores look, still sell pesticide laden clothes! The teenagers they hire have barely read a book the whole year, unless it was prescribed by curriculum… they know the Internet is there, it’s a vast expanse of knowledge, but only the creepy Goth girls digs through search engines for the secret to their sadness.

At Wetlands, we knew direct action was critical to any environmental cause… you couldn’t get the media’s attention, to get the politician’s attention, without some crazy antics, which is what the Wetlands Direct Action Collective still does in Manhattan, but with not nearly enough resources to get really noticed anymore.

I’ve been so busy networking the International anti-nuclear community, I haven’t had the chance or the time to also network the fashion community the way I should have, to bring them up the line, and we can’t do one without the other… we need for designers to come up with amazing visuals, for models to incarnate the battle, for photographers and videographers to chronicle the change that’s taking place, other than just the wonderful peaceful images gracing the pages of Organic Spa.

The hard work isn’t over out there. It can be a lot of fun to scream on roof tops, and run from the law… Green Corps puts young people as interns in the ranks of hardcore direct action organizations. Why isn’t there a reality show about this? What’s Planet Green waiting for? 2012? Or was the channel created simply to sell us caulking guns? Not that’s a bad thing, but it’s not nearly enough… we want action, we crave action… peaceful, fun, teasing, irreverent action… the kind of action that gets noticed by jaded journalists desperately looking for copy that’s going to sell more papers and advertising space.

Going green doesn’t necessarily mean that we have been successful at changing human nature, we still follow the same basic instincts, it’s just that rich or poor, mobster or good samaritan, saint or sinner, we now know better than fowl our own nest, so we’re all working together to find solutions to clean up the mess… despite the remaining dynasties still profiteering from oil, coal and nukes.

We’re fashion, we’re green fashion, it’s our responsibility to groom our environmental leaders, and make them into the celebrities we crave to read about in the gossip columns. When Curtis Sliwa formed the Guardian Angels in New York, he later admitted staging fights to get press. It must have been a hard thing to do fessing up to the subterfuge. But he established his organization that way, which lives to this day, and does great things for the City. He knew the meaning of “That’s Entertainment”… all news is.

In this country we’ve lost our edge. Greenpeace in Washington DC isn’t the Greenpeace we know, scaling walls, parachuting down, ramming submarines… there are a few direct action groups in the US, but they’re angry at fashion for putting style before substance. Why haven’t they come around yet to realize green fashion is on their side, ready and willing to help out? I can’t make all these phone calls, and send all these emails. Green fashion can no longer dissociate itself from the “movement” which has given birth to their market.

To quote Robert Kennedy Jr. on stage at Live Earth, “See you on the barricades!”