To conserve electricity, Beneke didn't use a sewing machine, instead making an elegant pink evening gown by simply cutting the fabric and securing it with a purple sash. Other attendees showed their support for ecological fashion by participating in a clothing swap that featured fuzzy scarves and lots of fluorescent caftans (it was in Berkeley, after all).

"I made sure everything I was wearing tonight was sustainable" - as in purchased at thrift stores, said Abraham Kneisley, the gallery's spokesman.

Even though "aWear," an event put together by Beneke, was sparsely attended, it points to a growing area of fashion interest among those who aren't just obsessed with having the latest looks from the hottest designers on the pages of glossy magazines. Instead of labels, the focus is on limiting the impact clothing has on the environment.

"Fashion is a really fabulous part of our culture. It's enlivening; it helps us to participate and communicate with people," said London designer Kate Fletcher, who wrote "Sustainable Fashions and Textiles: Design Journeys," to be released in the United States in March. "One of the big problems with sustainability is that it tends to throw the baby out with the bathwater: Get rid of fashion. But of course, it's really central to who we are. So we need to attempt to keep the glorious bits of fashion and the fast, communicative bits, and also underpin it with slow, high-quality fashion with improved labor conditions."

Fletcher is famous for her "no-wash" shirt, which looks like something out of the closet of a cyberpunk hipster. The armpits have cutouts so the shirt doesn't get stinky with sweat, and the front is covered in vinyl, which can be wiped clean. Fletcher says she wore it for five years without laundering it once.

It's not just a matter of buying a T-shirt made of organic cotton, but rather rethinking the infrastructure that goes into making clothing, as well as what happens to the clothes after they're bought, worn and discarded. For example, in manufacturing, a pair of jeans takes 1,800 gallons of water to make, from the growing of the cotton to the dyeing and rinsing process, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. That's not even counting all the water used as they are washed.

Because Bay Area residents tend to be tuned in to recycling and other aspects of green living, it's natural that fashion experts here have taken the lead in promoting greater sustainability. Several fashion schools have added classes dedicated to the topic. Five and a half years ago, California College of the Arts brought in adjunct Professor Lynda Grose to teach sustainable fashion design - a studio class that encourages design students to come up with stylish solutions that address the ecological problems of fashion. She now teaches the same course to fashion students at the Academy of Art University as well. (Neither the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York or Parsons New School of Design offers a studio fashion design class that focuses solely on sustainability.)

A designer at Esprit in the late '80s and early '90s, Grose developed that company's E-Collection, which used alternative dyes, organic cotton and non-electro-plated hardware and was sold between 1992 and 1995.

"Once you go up the supply chain and scratch below the surface of fashion and realize its impacts and design around those impacts, it's really engaging," Grose says. "It's more than just changing the style. Once I had done that, I couldn't consider doing anything else."

Grose is working with the Sustainable Cotton Project, a nonprofit focused on reducing the chemicals used on cotton farms. One concept Grose emphasizes in her class is "slow fashion," akin to Alice Waters' Slow Food Movement, in which consumers buy fewer high-quality items that are fashionable longer, instead of snapping up trendy clothes and then quickly discarding them.

"When the students research why people keep things, it can be because it was a classic style, and it can be worn over and over, or it was an investment piece or a collectible piece, like vintage, but there's also a lot of sentimentality," Grose says. "Or it can feel fabulous, like it's your favorite hoodie, and it's the cheapest thing in the world, but it's worn in. So if you know those emotions exist, you can design a garment with those kinds of qualities and emotions in them."

In the classroom, Grose instructs her fashion design students to consider everything from the waste and pollution of manufacturing and packaging to how long the item will be kept, how many uses it has and how often it needs to be washed. Just as important, she says, they must remember why people buy clothing: to express individuality, to have variety and comfort and to be stylish.

"I knew there was lots of negativity and bad practices in the industry, so I was really craving to learn about this," Paloma Broadley, a third-year student at CCA, says. "This class has been like a side-sweeping bulldozer effect, to the point where I'm really questioning everything I do. To really design into that consciousness is a whole other perspective to me."

Sasha Duerr, who participated in aWear, will teach a class in natural dyeing techniques at CCA next semester that shows students how they can color clothing without pollution, using cabbage, onion skins, rusty nails, turmeric, hibiscus, chamomile and other nontoxic items from the refrigerator or pantry.

In May, she founded the Permacouture Institute with Katelyn Toth-Fejel, inspired by the '70s permaculture movement, which was started in Australia to impart holistic systems thinking into agriculture. Her nonprofit, sponsored by the Trust for Conservation Innovation, is working on a fiber and dye education program for schools. She also hopes to expand the organization into a think tank for exploring alternatives in the textiles and fashion industry.

Duerr says she's fascinated by regenerative fashion - like biodegradable clothing that puts nutrients into the soil, paper diapers with seeds in them and garments that put oxygen into the atmosphere - as well as biomimicry, as in studying how spiders make fiber stronger than steel with no waste in the process.

"It's dire times, ecologically speaking, but it's also an exciting time for the creative potential that's approaching as we deal with all these issues," Duerr says. "Limits build creativity. How do you as a culture, as a community, as a city start to think about better ways of producing for yourself? There are a lot of interesting solutions people are coming up with."