It's Not Easy Mocking Green

Barneys New York is going green for Black Friday.

For the holiday season, the luxury retailer has launched a nationwide environmentally friendly "green" campaign: themed store windows, shopping bags, and a catalog with some environmentally friendly products.

Note the word "some."

Inside the cover saying "Have a Green Holiday," are not only green items like the recyclable Goyard shopping tote made from natural materials retailing at $1,065 (now there's a lot of green), but also obviously less green products like an ostrich-skin handbag and leather-bound set of poker chips.

Anyone who thumbs through must ask, "Are they serious?"

Not Nobel Peace Prize serious. Simon Doonan, creative director at Barneys New York, says: "I think people would be taken aback to have a dept store or fashion store get preachy and scientific with them. You know what I mean? That's not our role. Our role is distraction, self-indulgence, and so if we're going green it has to be done in context and in an appropriate way, and for me that's with a light touch and a bit of humor."

One of the store's windows depicts Santa's Fair Trade Sweatshop. The Barneys green version of The 12 Days of Christmas includes six compost toilets.

In an Internet video hosted by Doonan, he jokes about sequins made out of tofu by blind lesbians. Seriously.

"Our motto is 'Taste, Luxury, and Humor'," says C.E.O. Howard Socol. "We thought it was time to add a little charm and levity to this important issue."

Traditionally companies presenting themselves as environmentally friendly put out quite an effort to appear authentically green.

Kevin Wall, founder of Live Earth, a day of concerts held around the world this summer to increase awareness about the environment, said in an interview last August:

"When companies go from just being a consumer product company to a company that says they are sustainable or they're green or that they're socially conscious, I think when you start to get into that area, you can't be green washing ... Credibility is key if you're going to use it as part of your messaging to move forward that agenda."

Barneys, on the other hand, is admittedly not green.

"We're a luxury retailer," a Barneys New York spokesman says. "So we're not a green company, but our buyers have put a lot of effort in really scouring the universe for really great green product."

But they are putting a green Manolo-clad foot forward.

The holiday shopping bags and catalogue are made from 30 percent recycled materials and printed with soy ink. The retailer plans to plant 25,000 trees in support of the nonprofit American Forests.

Barneys has also teamed up with organic cotton label Loomstate to establish the Loomstate for Barneys Green brand clothes—a first in Doonan's 21-year history at Barneys of such a tight product tie-in for the holiday theme.

So when you purchase your $95 Vacavaliente recycled leather piggy bank be sure to recycle the receipt.

by Willow Duttge