I myself scour thrift stores for classic or unusual pieces that are made with care. I’m a firm believer in recycling, but once in a while I it’s necessary (or just a treat) to buy something new. Brands like Urban Outfitters and American Apparel have their thumb on the pulse of whats new and exciting, but because they are mostly selling to teens and young people who won’t make a fuss if something is poorly made they can get away with the most atrocious workmanship.

After a dress from one of these brands ripped apart at the seams after just a couple wears I decided that was the last straw. I will no longer purchase clothes from these brands, I will only support quality manufacturers that use sweat-shop free labor.

This is why I love people like the folks over at Archival Clothing, I’ve loved their blog for quite a while. They dig deep into the archives of clothing brands and come up with the best, and surprisingly contemporary feeling, items of clothing and do their best to show you where you might find these items now days. They opened up an online shop not that long ago and they sell their own wares as well as other pieces created by brands they can vouch for. Often on their blog they’ll go into great detail about how something is made or how they settled on specific design details. I for one will no longer give my money over to shoddy workmanship and abusive labor. Slow Fashion, it’s the future!

The realm of fashion becomes a viable playground for young entrepreneurs who indulge their own creative juices in the process of designing and creating trends. Style Stalwarts are creative innovators in their own right, drawing inspiration from their own communities and looking forward to cast a wider net of influence, as they explore the prospects of showcasing their work on a global stage.

Today’s Style Stalwarts are among the 14 kinds of youth entrepreneurs featured in Culture Vulture, our new quarterly trends series that offers a global snapshot of current and emerging cultural trends, bringing fresh insights from around the world to inspire and ignite new strategies for brands.

The first edition of Culture Vulture seeks to explore and understand the Entrepreneurial Spirit of Gen Y and how the youth’s innovative ideas can help stimulate game-changing strategies for brands that aspire to become more enterprising in their outlook.

Download our FREE Culture Vulture iPad app from iTunes for an overview on the global growth of entrepreneurship as well as the different behaviors that embody youth entrepreneurs worldwide, along with tips for nurturing “entrepreneurial” attitudes for brands.

Don’t have an iPad? Then download the interactive PDF . Also check out all of our 14 videos showcasing the different types of youth entrepreneurs around the world.

Interested to know more? Visit the Culture Vulture page or email culturevulture@mindshareworld.com.

The process of personalization and customization has satisfied the youths’ inherent need to mark various preferences as individuals, and this is also reflected in new concepts launched behind their own ventures. By providing a range of options to create an entirely new product, Crafty Customizers let originality shine through by catering to changing needs. It is also a testament to the very vision fueling entrepreneurship in itself.

Today’s Crafty Customizers are among the 14 kinds of youth entrepreneurs featured in Culture Vulture, our new quarterly trends series that offers a global snapshot of current and emerging cultural trends, bringing fresh insights from around the world to inspire and ignite new strategies for brands.

The first edition of Culture Vulture seeks to explore and understand the Entrepreneurial Spirit of Gen Y and how the youth’s innovative ideas can help stimulate game-changing strategies for brands that aspire to become more enterprising in their outlook.

Download our FREE Culture Vulture iPad app from iTunes for an overview on the global growth of entrepreneurship as well as the different behaviors that embody youth entrepreneurs worldwide, along with tips for nurturing “entrepreneurial” attitudes for brands.

Don’t have an iPad? Then download the interactive PDF . Also check out all of our 14 videos showcasing the different types of youth entrepreneurs around the world.

Interested to know more? Visit the Culture Vulture page or email culturevulture@mindshareworld.com.

Sticks & Stones, started in 2009 by designer Stephan Alexander, jeweler Benjamin Posin, and digital media designer Marc Ishida. Their collections bring together the world’s finest and most unusual natural materials to create wearable art. Utilizing reclaimed exotic wood, fossils, prehistoric ivories, fine metals and gemstones, Sticks & Stones breaches the present age to tell stories of time, history and the experience of earth.

Flash forward to a month before 2012 and the boys that make up this unique and highly original jewelry line can call the trendy, upscale shopping neighborhood of NW 23rd home. That’s right, less than three years after they started, with writes up in Womens Wear Daily, goodies given away in the ESPY awards swag bag, and a Sticks & Stones smart car by Gen Art these guys are all brick and mortared out.

I was thumbing back through some of my fashion inspiration images and realized exactly how much I am mooning over patterns & patterns & patterns. I’m a sucker for an exquisitely designed pattern, busy or basic. But recently I’ve been wanting to layer pattern on pattern on pattern to see what works together and what looks like a jumbled mess. This is a delicate art, pattern matching.

I’ve noticed some designers working with this fine balance in their collections and look books recently too. A few of my favorite designers have created collections that use complimentary patterns and it fun to see how they’re styled together. I always love the whimsical patterns from indy designer, Nadinoo. The gorgeous cloud patterns from Australian designers Milk From A Thistle are insanely beautiful. And the perennially spectacular Isabel Marant has also come out with some terrific patterns recently. Unfortunately, what I’ve got hanging in my closet doesn’t always want to work together in such harmony, but I try!

To the degree that I gave any thought at all to fashion as a teenager, my young-adult fashion life could best be described as a never-ending search to find the simplest, most unassuming pair of sneakers in the mall. No bells, no whistles, no logos or wings or mirrors, etc. It took me much, much longer than it should have to realize that I just wanted a pair of boots.

Once I made that late-blooming discovery though, there was no turning back, and it only took a few false-starts before I finally settled on Clarks Desert Boots, which were more or less the shoes I’d been imagining in my head all along – simple, leather, nearly featureless, but still good-looking enough that no one could accuse me of buying them by accident. Also, I’m a sucker for phrases like “Originals design from the 50s.”

While they’re not that durable, and have little to no traction on slick surfaces, I haven’t come across anything else that would lead me to consider replacing them. I do wish that fewer of my friends had come to the same conclusion though – I’m beginning to feel the same way I did in middle school, when 9/10ths of my friends all ran around in Converse All-Stars (at least we all had different colors, then and now).

Augustine Teboul is a clothing label that is on the edge between ready-to-wear and haute couture. It consists of two young international and fashionable masterminds, the German-born Annelie Augustin with subtle, minimal shapes and French-born Odély Teboul, the rather chaotic, nostalgic craftsman – of course. It‘s aesthetics arise from the conception of two contrasting personalities resulting in the 2009 founded label’s creation of a beautiful double face among the fashion world. It has already been honored with three awards both in Germany and France.

On a recent trip to New York to attend a wedding and visit some friends, I made a specific pilgrimage to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to check out the current Alexander McQueen retrospective, Savage Beauty. When I arrived on a Saturday morning, I had to stand in a 45-minute line that wound its way through the museum’s galleries, and then battle crowds within the exhibit itself.

It was worth it — not only was it one of the best fashion exhibits I’ve seen, it was one of the most creatively designed museum shows I’ve seen, period. Even my boyfriend, who tried to rebel halfway through the line when he realized we were “going to look at clothes,” left impressed.

While I am a fan of personal style and interesting designers, I wouldn’t say “fashion,” per se, is one of my top cultural interests, but the McQueen show truly pushed the boundary between clothing and performance art. Each gallery of the sprawling exhibit is arranged more or less, according to theme and by collection, with wall texts trying to link McQueen to 19th century notions of dark Romanticism. That seemed apt, what with all the ruffles and complicated layers.

But most striking were the parts of the show that were unsettling, and even disturbing. Each individual room, rather than the usual stark white gallery walls, had been done up to related effect to reflect the mood of the clothes being shown. For one particularly goth collection, for instance, everything was dimmed, the walls covered with smoky, rotting-looking mirrors. In another, body-restricting accessories were arranged in a cabinet-of-curiosity type displays. (Particularly grotesque, though awesomely so, here, was a metal corset designed to look like a human spine and ribcage.) Throughout, background music added to a creeping sense of dread.

Also arresting were videos playing throughout of past shows, which were more performance art than boring catwalk. In one clip playing in the gallery, a wounded, dazed-looking model staggered across a dais as robots splattered her white dress with paint; the resulting dress was on display as well. In another, a similarly discombobulated girl struggled with metal S&M-style restraints as she descended a staircase in an endless loop. And the creepiest of all was a clip of McQueen’s spring/summer 2005 show, in which a robotic voice ordered ghostly models around a human-size chess board.

The overall mood of both horror and the sublime stayed with me for a while after the show, and made me appreciate more the world’s loss when McQueen took his own life last year. Clearly, this was a person who didn’t just make expensive party dresses, but had an entire aesthetic yet still to express fully.

Bloodisthenewblack.com is a website and online store that I’ve been trawling recently. I’m strangely allergic to shopping so I haven’t bought anything off there yet, but I like the premise and some of the tees.

According to the about tag, which I’ll save you the trouble of reading by paraphrasing here, blood…offers emerging artists, illustrators , designers and photographers the chance to get their work on a limited edition t-shirt. Which means they get seen by more people, and you get to wear something that not everyone has. I’m sure owner Mitra Khayyam laughs herself to sleep every night with the thought that she’s curating the worlds most diffuse art gallery. Actually, I’m not sure, it just occurred to me.

Anyway, I have my eye especially on writer Patrick DeWitt’s t-shirt, that simply reads REVENGE FICTION.