Designer Brings Eco-Awareness to Wedding Dresses

Fashion designer Lee Kyung-jae has carved out a special niche by creating bridal gowns using environmentally friendly materials and also making other props for weddings with green ingredients.

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"Do you know how many wedding dresses are thrown away every year after being worn just once?" she asked. "More than 1.7 million".

Lee (32) opened a wedding service called Sewing for the Soil in Yeongdeungpo, southeastern Seoul in 2008.

She started off making wedding dresses out of nettles, corn starch and traditional Korean mulberry-tree paper and eventually expanded into a broader range of wedding products, such as bouquets made out of flowers with intact roots that can later be grown in pots, and invitation cards from recycled paper printed with soybean oil ink. She has also started making eco-friendly clothes for children and hospital gowns.

After majoring in fashion design at university, Lee started work as an assistant designer in the costume department of a broadcasting company. Her job was to make costumes for actors or guests on variety shows. "The work was fun, but I started wondering if that work was really right for me", she said.

Then she came across a night class at Kookmin University on environmental issues and started studying the subject. "One of the projects was to create an environmentally friendly product, and I used my fashion design background to make a wedding dress", Lee said. "Every time I saw a lavish wedding I thought it was waste of money and resources, and that it would be a good idea to make an affordable and eco-friendly wedding dress".

She put photos of her creation on her blog and was surprised to get a request from a woman to make one for her too. "I politely turned down her request, saying my dress wasn't for sale, but the customer was very persistent", Lee said. She started out making just one eco-friendly wedding dress at a time and eventually it became a full-time job.

"I don't make a lot of money doing this, but I wanted to show that fashion designers can protect the environment too", Lee said. At first, she got only one or two orders a month, but now she gets between 30 and 40. Her dresses cost only 30 to 40 percent of an ordinary wedding gown, and young brides who also care about environmental issues come knocking on her door.