Jesse Kamm's Got Hot Wheels

Off we pedal. Designer Jesse Kamm leads the tour in a shorts-and-top outfit of her own design, on a freshly painted white cruiser, trailed by one platform-wedge-wearing writer on a tiny BMX.

She stops to point out a fry oil barrel in a restaurant alleyway. ("This is a good one!") She's already siphoned it for her biodiesel Benz.

She immediately rattles of the benefits of her ecoautomobile. Ease and thriftiness are at the top (hipness not mentioned). Lovecraft Biofuels converted her car in one day (for $750). She hasn't paid for gas in eighteen months. Label it socially conscious living, but it's just how she rolls: cognizant, thrifty, aware, and enthusiastic about spreading the news.

The easy-breezy Kamm is willing to let her creative impulses take her anywhere -- from sculpture to safari dresses to Bocas del Toro, the Caribbean of Panama, where she and her husband and a bunch of friends are building solar homes with composting toilets and surf breaks in the front yard (feel envious here) -- and is comfortable with the idea of her clothing design days being finite.

But are we?

Five things Jesse Kamm digs these days:

1. Jacques Cousteau (and the process of planned obsolescence)
2. Claire Ellen Oswalt
3. Her Allyson Mellberg drawing, which she collected on a recent trip to Cinders Gallery in Brooklyn
4. Spending all her money on art (see 3 & 4)
5. The lovely Chapin Sisters (new album release: March 18)