A coffee shoe please...No, no milk..

On my perpetual wonder whether chic and sustainable can coexist...

Here I don't mean those yoga-style-souvenir shirts your mum occasionally brings you from Thailand, and nothing of a sort of textile that reminds you of potato sacks, bean sprouts and the Stone Age...But of a real-real fashion killer! An other-girlfriends'- boyfriends-killer..  

So, yeah, check out a couple of ground-breaking designs:

A pair of shoes made of coffee-beans and  pistachio shells.  Size 38 surprisingly coinciding with their designer's - Julia Skergeth's shoe size.

Entirely handmade and from recycled materials only.

Image courtesy of Julia Skergeth

Cutting the epic short: Julia had an idea of making high-heeled shoes. This followed with a fight with her local cobblers and going through trouble of painstakingly carving the boot-tree by herself. Got that yeah? She then ground a couple of hundreds of pistachio shells, made her own glue (some starch and water involved in there) and ultimately put it all into something that looks luxx, glam and caviar-like. Aka Russian goth-chick style, hence we love it.

A wood-chip corset that replicates animal skin designed and handmade by Stefanie Nieuwenhuyse, apparently borrowed for a night out by Pixie Lott, as seen in Vogue.

The idea came to Stefanie at University's workshop, which premises are also being used by architecture students to make their scale models.

Stephanie Nieuwenhuyse and her designs

She found a number of tiny wooden bits scattered around the worktables and loved their 'puzzly' character. She thinks that the rhombic shapes can be originating from the cut outs of windows. The  pieces are deemed leftovers and normally go into refuse, all materials are strictly recyclable.

Image courtesy of Stefanie Nieuwenhuyse

And what about an orange-peel bodice that required 21 bag of fruit damage by Hoyan Ip
Kinda zesty stuff , ya know ... When asked who she sees wearing the lovely ooze, Hoyan said "Lady Gaga might do".