I’ve been waiting to write about outdoor apparel company Patagonia pretty much all my life. My parents packed me in the stuff for my first ski lesson, and ever since, I ‘ve managed to stay extremely faithful to their products. Even on a beer-burrito-bagel budget at college in Boulder where crunchy detractors were more than happy to point out my preference for “Patagucci.”

So when I finally got the choice assignment from Fast Company, you could say I was a little worried about my ability to remain objective. Heck, when I went up to meet with their sustainability team in Ventura, I was wearing a Patagonia shell and carrying a Patagonia backpack. It was like wearing the band’s shirt to the concert.

Patagonia launched the Footprint Chronicles quietly last year, short web videos that track the impact of five of their products. You get introduced to the woman who’s making your polo shirt in at a factory Thailand, and peer into the eyes of the Merino sheep who’ll be sheared for your crew in New Zealand. These videos are just the latest of these epic journeys that Patagonia loves to package for their fans. And the audience loves it. After all, this is a company that provides a guide to climbing schools on their website, a series of online essays detailing a grizzly bear’s migration through Montana, and a multimedia saga of surfer-filmmaker-brothers The Malloys driving a biodiesel truck from Bend, Oregon to the tip of Baja.

The key phrase for the Footprint Chronicles, as with all corporate greening practices lately, is transparency, and Patagonia vowed to show all of their findings, the good and the bad. But there seemed to be very little bad afoot at Patagonia. Employees Jill Dumain and Jen Rapp enthusiastically took me on a tour of an organic cotton factory where we all snapped as many photos as we wanted of the sunny, spotless warehouse blasting rock music. They hosted me for a day in Patagonia’s Ventura headquarters, a series of refurbished buildings where the bathrooms show you where to toss your paper towels for composting, free on-site day care lets employees hang with their kids during breaks, and the kitchen serves homemade, mostly-organic meals like fish tacos and cabbage slaw. If you want me to be objective, you should definitely not serve me homemade, mostly-organic meals like fish tacos and cabbage slaw. With this really awesome spicy mayo.

But after extensive mayo-free research, I decided that Patagonia is probably walking the walk better than any other company out there. Their colleagues I interviewed in the industry agreed.

I guess I’d always known Patagonia was a leader for environmental issues but I don’t buy their products for those reasons. I buy them because I don’t have to buy very many of them at all. My favorite pair of Patagonia long underwear pants—the very first thing I grab when I’m going skiing—are from 1996. And they still work great.

I knew about this last week but I swore to keep my big bloggy mouth shut:  The Curbed Network, parents of two of the best blogs in LA, Curbed LA and Eater LA, has birthed yet another spin-off, Racked LA. The blog about “shopping, neighborhood stores and the retail scene of Los Angeles” soft-launched quietly last week.

At the helm is Tasha Adams, the super-talented voice behind Blackburn & Sweetzer who succeeded in making the West 3rd district feel like the coolest neighborhood in the whole city. I must say I’m looking forward to the Sartorialist-esque Street Scenes feature. Who says men in Beverly Hills can’t wear appliqué? Welcome, Tasha!

Pop-up stores have been popping up all over New York for years but perhaps because of the perceived drive-by mentality of Los Angeles, they haven’t really caught on over here. I’d argue that if you pick the neighborhood and the concept properly, it would actually enforce that sense of community everyone likes to claim doesn’t exist. Paper had their annual storefront on La Brea in November, and although it was packed uncomfortably tight—a feeling that was enforced by Barbara Bestor’s shrink-wrapped palette interiors—it did gather most of the coolest LA art and design vendors in one sweaty place for a full 24 hours. Even Lindsay Lohan was there. Don’t worry, it was a dry event.

Two big LA pop-ups will be up and running by next month: the Comme des Garçons Guerilla Store in downtown opened in February and an outpost of the Storefront for Art and Architecture will open on Sunset Boulevard on April 11. The Japanese fashion house Comme des Garçons (I highly recommend their wallets) does this kind of thing all the time in different cities, but here they set up shop in an alley off 4th and Spring, making them the only high fashion brand to have a dedicated store in downtown (and hard to find, here are some tips). It’s the first pop-up experience for the NY-based Storefront, who will feature an exhibition that looks really cool called Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed until May 17.

When I was in Austin last week I spied the gallery showing the latest installation of Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates initiative, where he takes grassy resource-guzzling front lawns and turns them into produce-providing pocket gardens. He talks about the dozens of front-lawn gardens he’s planting across the country and his upcoming book, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn on today’s show. If you’re not familiar with him or his projects, check out Fritz’s website, and come to MOCA PDC on March 29 at 3pm when he’ll be making jam with the guys from Fallen Fruit.

Also on the show: Design writer and NY Times contributor Kimberly Stevens talks about last weekend’s CA Boom, and a tribute to the inspiring Nader Khalili, who died March 5. He was an Iranian-born architect who founded the Cal-Earth Forum, dedicated to building affordable housing with baked earth.

Check out the DnA calendar this month, freshly restocked with delicious items. If you know of any design or architecture events in Los Angeles, please send them my way. You can listen to DnA on KCRW live every 3rd Tuesday at 2:30pm PST, by podcasting through iTunes, or by streaming the audio at any time by clicking the little ‘Listen’ button underneath each show’s title on KCRW’s website.

Around this time last year I was visiting my friend Julie in Seattle and I had about an hour to kill. Naturally I went straight to the Pike Place Market because hey, if someone’s throwing fish, I’m so there.

As I was walking through the little indoor marketplace I passed a store selling a bunch of housewares in this red floral pattern I knew I’d seen a million times before. While it looked familiar, and I was pretty sure it was famous, I couldn’t quite place where I’d seen it. The bright amoeba-like petals tugged on my brain as I walked up towards the food stalls. It was a slow afternoon—there were no airborne fish—so I went back to that store with the flowers. Besides, I still had a good 45 minutes.

Captivated by the way they had beckoned to me from the window, I bought a small purse printed with those pop-art poppies. From the moment I slung it over my shoulder I realized this tiny purchase somehow made me inordinately happy. The red flowers, as I soon learned, were the signature pattern Unikko from the Finnish textile company Marimekko, designed by Maija Isola in 1964. Later that day, I proudly told the story of my new purchase to my mom, knowing she’d be impressed by my talent for re-discovering this lost gem of midcentury design. “Well of course you like it,” she said. “That fabric was hanging over your crib when you were a baby.”

While I was stunned that my still-soft skull had managed to file this rather important detail, it was no surprise that my mom had discovered Marimekko more than 30 years before. As legend has it, Jackie Kennedy bought seven Marimekko dresses during John F.’s presidential campaign, and as we all know, Jackie Kennedy only needed to buy one of your dresses to make you an unequivocal success.

As I learned today when I toured the factory, the Marimekko brand could have been anything, really. Armi Ratia founded the company in 1949 with the intention of inspiring a war-ravaged Finland to find “everyday happiness.” It just so happened her husband owned an oilcloth company, and it just so happened Armi was able to recruit a legion of savvy young designers who continually breathed new life into this technicolor universe. Jackie Kennedy (my fashion idol, I might add) wore those textiles at John F. Kennedy’s side in 1960 for same reason my mom stretched Unikko and another Marimekko pattern, Pikku Bo boo, onto canvases for the nursery of her baby girl in 1977. Marimekko symbolizes hope.

Marimekko’s press director, Tiina Alahuhta—whose personality, if made into a textile, would look like Unikko—said that as part of her job, she hears stories just like mine almost every day. Children of the 60s and 70s especially love to tell her their very specific encounters with Marimekko’s wild optimism. The vibrant textiles seem to be embedded in the subconscious of an entire generation.

My earliest memories are especially sharp; I can answer detailed questions about that house where Unikko hung over my crib, a place we moved away from when I was three. But as much as I imagine I can see them there, I can’t say I remember those red poppies at all. What I do know is that wandering the halls of Marimekko today, with these wide swaths of fluorescent fabric unfurling from the ceilings like some kind of United Nations of Positive Thinking, I realized a place has never made me so happy.

More photos from Marimekko. Sadly I wasn’t allowed to snap any of the not-yet-released prints, but I guarantee you’ll love them!

Time for Sex: An updated Sex and the City trailer has hit the internet (although they’re getting taken down faster than I can find them). Here’s the summary: Carrie’s wedding falls through, Charlotte gets pregnant, blah blah blah. More importantly: Strands of big, Like a Virgin pearls are back, drapery-as-dress is a go for spring, and—good news!—fake flowers attached to your clothing can now be twice the size of your head.

March Madness: Los Angeles doesn’t have all the magazine’s content online yet but they did manage to create a Best of LA set of interactive brackets in which we are forced to choose between LA’s best features in match-ups that are obvious, ambiguous and ridiculous all at the same time. Example: Amoeba and Disneyland face off in the first contest. Voting for the first round ends February 25. To those of you debating The Hills vs. Getty Center, why not pretend they mean the show, just to make things more interesting.

They told me they fixed it: The galactic media is abuzz over a demolished, cocaine-ridden transport vehicle driven by one Landocalrissian Butler. Apparently his hyperdrive had been disabled and he was not able to make the jump to lightspeed before being apprehended by authorities. Once a smuggler, always a smuggler, I say, and at age 27, the timing is just about perfect. Says my brother, “I feel his pain.”

Award-winning: Something must be wrong in Hollywood. The Boulevard is closed, helicopters are circling, there’s metal debris all over the place, and bomb squads are patrolling the neighborhood. Looks dangerous. Let me know if you hear anything.

The Finnish line: I’m off tomorrow to the land of reindeer, saunas and Marimekko for a little over a week. Check back for semi-regular updates between shots of glögi, and if you have any must-sees for Helsinki, leave ‘em here.

Today’s Flavor of the Week is made possible by generous gifts from Spencer Cross, Eater LA, and Laura Kate Jones.