Baby Turns Blue Vegan Accessories: The Edgy Veggie

By Chere Di Boscio

Some may associate vegan fashion with hemp wearing, granola loving hippies. But Baby turns Blue is set to change that stereotype forever.

Baby turns Blue is a PETA Approved vegan brand led by women for women. The label uses bio-friendly materials with zero waste techniques to create vegan accessories with an edge. In fact, you could say – with a bit of kink!

Sure, there are ‘regular’ belts and bracelets, but you’ll also find chokers, collars – and even harnesses!

Designed and handcrafted in their Paris based atelier, Baby turns Blue’s vegan accessories are for the bold woman with an unabashed sense of sensuality – and sexuality.

When we first discovered Baby turns Blue, it was love at first sight! In fact, we put them on the cover of our 20th edition in paper, which you can see here, and also featured the label in a fashion spread.

But I wanted to learn more! So interviewed the founder of this edgy veggie label, Milena Walter. Check out our conversation, below.

Meet The Edgy Veggie: Baby turns Blue

What inspired you to launch Baby Turns Blue?

Although the brand is young, (I started to work full time on Baby turns Blue with my partner less than a year ago), the journey actually started a while back. I’ve been into leathercraft pretty much since before my studies in fashion design at La Cambre.

I’ve always loved other brands offering similar accessories. But they were all either luxury accessories – so way too expensive for me – or affordable but obviously designed with a strong BDSM purpose and feeling.

I felt something was missing in the market, as I am definitely an accessories person. I wanted great quality products I could wear outside on top of a dress or a simple pair of jeans, but I wanted them at a fair price.

Of course, I also wanted them to be vegan and respectful of our environment. Hey, it’s the 21st century, right? But nope, I just couldn’t find that brand. So I created it.

What first steps did you take to launch the company?

I started designing and crafting accessories (mostly belts and collars) for myself, in upcycled leather from old black jackets. People around me quickly started to show interest in what I was wearing. I later got in touch with a supplier of vegan leather and everything went ahead very fast after that!

What has the public’s reception of the brand been like?

I am quite confident to say today that the outside world understands how important it is that a brand allows itself to sell only genuinely vegan products. This isn’t something you do only for a capsule collection, just to say “we can do it as well”.

I am also happy to think that our customers see the touch of cuteness and femininity we try to incorporate in our designs and our image, and this is a great satisfaction for me, of course.

Tell us a bit about the materials you use

We exclusively use apple skin vegan leather in 100% of our collections. It’s an amazing material, I honestly can’t even emphasize enough how good it is! It’s a compound developed especially for fashion.

Some customers even ask us when they receive their first products if they are “from the vegan collection”, as they really think it’s leather. You just can’t tell the difference in touch and feeling when the product is lined with another layer (we do it on the totality of our accessories, as a quality requirement).

I can even say with confidence that it looks and feels better than animal leather while outperforming it on many very obvious aspects. On top of that, we also try everything we can to lower our footprint during production (we do everything ourselves in our own atelier): We use water based glues and edge paints, and package our accessories in recycled materials as much as possible.

These accessories are a bit daring. What inspires their design?

Cities. I’m a pure Parisian product and love architecture. I think it’s quite easy to understand how my love for real world geometry bleeds back into Baby turns Blue.

You’ve already made the cover of Eluxe! What other hopes do you have for the future of the brand?

Despite all of the shitty events of 2020, it’s actually a very promising year for us. We just opened a secondary office in Brussels. The main objective was to meet a lot of new people (photographers, stylists, models, future partners).

We only recently could start doing it – we had to wait for the end of the lockdown. But we are already working on setting up collaborations with great artists on many creative levels.

And ah and yes, we will also be launching a new collection in September.

Follow Baby turns Blue vegan accessories on Instagram here.