Apparently the greenest thing about Portland Fashion Week is actually its DJ. Opening night of PFW was off to rough start with some rather ambitious music mixes by a DJ one can only guess was some executive’s little brother. Check out the musical stylings at Vigor Industrial, and you will see what I’m talking about. Ouch!

Sadly Defyance was not the only designer suffering from DJ trainwreck hell. Sportswear line Icebreaker was murdered by the tasteless 90′s classic “Ice Ice Baby” crashing into some whimsical Indie Rock jam. And then, WHAM!

Sorry to do that to you, the innocent reader of In The Loop. Thank goodness WHAM was there to finish it off. I never realized how soothing George Michael could actually be.

Please leave a comment and let me know what you think. Am I crazy or does the whole situation just make you go, “WTF?! Just pay a professional DJ!” Sorry to go Perez Hilton on you, but it’s fashion week y’all. C’mon.

The designs of Paloma Soledad perfectly embody the steampunk aesthetic of the Portland underground. The materials for Soledad’s custom corsets and animé-inspired costumery seem to harken from a hundred years ago: lambskin, velvet, silk taffeta, steel spiral boning. Her expert construction of whimsically macabre costumes have earned her design positions with avante garde dance companies and the set of the meticulously-styled film Coraline.

Kristi Turnquist of The Oregonian recently gave the rundown on Paloma’s ideas on bloodthirsty pin-up girls and her early suspicions of nice people in the land of milk and honey…

Paloma Soledad
Age: 31
Hometown: Los Angeles; the family moved to Oahu, Hawaii, when she was 4

Experience: Graduated from the California Institute of the Arts; designed costumes for the movies “Cabin Fever” and “Hostel”; did costumes for the Portland dance troupe tEEth; worked in the costume department on the stop-motion animated feature “Coraline.”

Design visions: Soledad’s mother was a seamstress. “She would have me thread the elastic through her waistbands when I was little.” Youthful discovery of “Conan the Barbarian” and Alberto Vargas glamour-girl illustrations also formed her aesthetic. “It’s like a 1940s pin-up dancer — she’s going to dance on the table, and then jump down and slit your throat. We all have the power to be as sexy as we want to be.”

Signature pieces: Custom-made corsets, mixing sumptuous silks and velvets with leather and metal details, for a mix of masculine and feminine influences. “The boning is flexible, so you can eat in it, you can dance in it. It’s like a piece of art.”

Why Portland? “I was living in L.A., and the energy there’s so manic, it just makes you really crazy. My mom lives in Northern California, and she said, ‘You should check out Oregon.’ I moved here in 2006. When I first got here and people were nice to me, I thought, ‘What do you want from me?’ This is the land of milk and honey.”

Read more of Local Designers Take Over The Catwalk at OregonLive.com…

For years, the crème de la crème of American foodies have feasted on locally-raised dishes presented by “farm-to-table” restaurants around the country. These leaders in gastro-sustainability have cut out the middlemen and gone straight to the farmer for the best selection and pricing on organic local produce and meat. The Farm-To-Table movement has bolstered the number of American family farms while ensuring the highest quality product for culinary connoisseurs. In 2009, this trend is actually spreading from a culinary circles to catwalks.

At the upcoming Portland Fashion Week, eco fashion eminence Anna Cohen will be presenting an entirely new concept for both the worlds of fashion and sustainability: Ranch-To-Runway. Through her visionary partnership with the Imperial Stock Ranch in Shaniko, Oregon, Anna Cohen is bringing the highest quality sustainable wool to her fashion-forward clientele while enriching the lives of ecologically sound local ranchers.

Though fashionistas and farmers make a unique juxtaposition, both stand to benefit grandly if Anna’s concept catches fire. Perhaps we’re right around the corner from Cavalli cattle ranches and Comme des Garçons cotton farms. If not, we’re at least that much closer to being right around the corner from where our clothes come from, thanks to Anna Cohen.

The Imperial Collection by Anna Cohen will premiere Sunday, October 11th at 8pm at the Vigor Industrial Shipyard; arrive at 6 for the pre-party.

If you’re interested in experiencing your own version of Ranch-To-Runway, take a gorgeous 2-hour drive through the Oregon countryside for a stunning tour of the Imperial Stock Ranch before hitting Anna’s show on Sunday night.

Last Friday the Greenloop, Lü magazine and a host of other great sponsors and media partners quietly kicked off Project Green Search, our first national green model search with finals held on the runway during Portland Fashion Week October 11th.

The green bloggosphere is starting to pick up on it, so hopefully our contest will come to the attention of models everywhere who aspire to shift their career in the same direction they have taken their personal lives.

We’ve been written up on Eco-Chick, the Daily Green, Mother Nature Network, Elephant Journal, Ecorazzi, Kaight, Greenopia, GreenGirlsGlobal, LiveEarth, Sustainablog, Inhabitat, Magnifeco, Christy Coleman and Treehugger. Friends of Lü and the Greenloop are telling all their friends on facebook, Model Mayhem, MySpace and other networks.  

We have on board with us some terrific people. Photographer Courtney Dailey, who helped launch CocoEco magazine with publisher Anna Griffin and Emma Pezzack of Future Natural, is building an all green photography studio in downtown LA’s fashion district. She will be on hand with her green make-up and styling team to photograph all the contestants.

Portland Fashion Week in its second year of “sustainable production”, wrap up this Sunday the 12th, Fashionably Natural, an exclusive runway event presented by  Gen Art and SOYJOY, also took place on Thursday the 9th at the Peterson Automotive Museum in LA.  Preceding LA Fashion Week, running October 12th through the 16th at Smashbox Studios, the event was hosted by the beautiful Maggie Gylenhaal, and featured four of LA’s top, emerging sustainable designers, Brigid Catiis, Popomomo, The Battalion (recently featured on the new 90210), and Velvet Leaf, four designers working exclusively in all – natural and environmentally responsible textiles.