Danny Seo: Environmental Lifestyle Expert

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Outside Magazine March 2004

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All That Glitters Is Green (cont.)


	Mixmaster: a Seo "wall quilt" using wallpaper swatches from an old sample book (Mark Heithoff)

DANNY SEO'S MASTER PLAN turns on a rather simple idea: Create a green marketplace—clothing, accessories, home decor, food, mega-sectors in which billions are spent each year—that appeals to our desire, not our guilt.

"I see a bigger picture here," he says. "People understand that they need to be concerned about the environment, but we're asking them to change the way they live their lives. So this is really a lifestyle movement. If I can make 'eco-friendly,' you know, chic, then hopefully it can trickle down."

How to achieve this? First, you become a pop-culture omnivore. (Access Hollywood is a surprisingly good source, he says.) Danny does his own trend forecasting and plays the angles for as much exposure as he can give himself and his causes. Over the years, the media has taken note: People named him one of its 50 Most Beautiful People in 1998, and both Variety and the Los Angeles Times have recently paid homage to his eco-lifestyling prowess.

Next, spend a lot of time on the road. Danny travels between his home near Reading, Pennsylvania, where he grew up, and both coasts, charging hard on three fronts. To wit:

Fashion! Last September, he launched Veteran, his own men's clothing line, which will be carried by "e-tailer" PurpleSkirt.com and in stores in Japan. The threads represent a kind of funky Frankenstein chic—trench coats stitched together from old oxford-shirt swatches, shorts made from unbleached Home Depot canvas cloth—all culled from thrift stores and rag warehouses, sliced up, and integrated with material like Tencel, a biodegradable fabric that's made using tree cellulose.

Activism! After getting the Fur Free movement rolling, Danny designed another choice piece of conceptual agitprop—an airsickness bag stamped with the slogan WHAT'S GOING ON IN CANADA WILL MAKE YOU SICK, which the Humane Society of the United States sent out to travel agencies and college campuses this January as part of its campaign to shame the Canadian government into abolishing the harvest of fur seals.

Media exposure! Bigger than Fur Free, bigger than Veteran, bigger than fur seals even, will be his life-improvement television show (working title: SuperNatural Style with Danny Seo). The pitch: Danny inhabits a farmhouse on an organic Christmas-tree farm outside Reading, and each week we tune in to learn some new trick to take our pets, gardens, furniture, travel, cooking, fashion, entertaining, and community service to the next eco-friendly level. The final details are still being hammered out, but this much he can tell: Hearst Entertainment and Danny Seo Media Ventures will co-produce the show; the Ford Motor Company is considering signing on as the title sponsor, a nice bit of synergy timed to the summer rollout of the hybrid Escape SUV; and the initial plan is to shoot 13 episodes that will be on the air, it's hoped, by late summer 2004.

The show is Danny's most serious bid to become the Martha Stewart of the 18-to-34 set, and it's got people at Hearst excited.

"There's nothing like this on television right now," says Jerry Shevick, executive vice president for reality programming at Hearst Television. "And I thought, 'Jeez, it's such a huge movement.' It's bigger than anybody thinks. It goes from people embracing yoga to Frito-Lay launching an organic-snacks line."

Saving the planet one organic corn chip at a time is laudable, but Danny aims to go further. "I want to give people an alternative that, if at all possible, is identical to what they're already doing but better," he says. "What I need to do is, like, go in deeper to people's souls or consciousness, get in there and go, What really impacts their buying at the store?"

"He really believes the message that he's sending," says Debbie Levin, president of the Environmental Media Association (EMA), a group that works with Hollywood and the environmental community. "Which is, you don't have to sacrifice your environmental consciousness in order to be very cutting-edge. It's coming from a genuine place."

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