Clothing with Conscience: Garbage Goes Glam
Foil palm fronds, plastic spoons, and packing peanuts hit the runway Saturday night as part of a most unlikely procession of socially conscious designer-wear, thanks to a group of nine students doing an independent study with art professor Cyndi Gusler.
"We have become a society concerned with having the right things with the right label. We are a society so concerned with the pace of our lives that we make our purchases based on convenience, at the expense of creating excessive non-reusable byproducts of those purchases. …This is a series of outfits…that contains no label value, no social status, and is more beautiful because of it."
Emcee junior Frank Ameka finished reading the artists' statement and took a seat as Jesse Lucke dimmed the lights and cranked up the house music in the old gym. One by one, ladies and men glammed out in garbage strutted their "stuff" for students, parents, profs, and even President Swartzendruber.
Fabric remnants were a common element in many outfits. Plastic bags, also common, found their way into shirts, skirts, and even a headband or two. Other garments included a sexy lace-scrap shirt, a red rug vest, a lampshade skirt, necktie bell-bottoms, and a vinyl chair mat tank top. Juniors Kurt Rosenberger and Joelle Hackney wore foxy foam dresses accented with bicycle innertubes. Junior Carol Buhrman wore a strapless dress made entirely of discarded black and white photos.
The designers accessorized their models with glued-on broken CDs, pop-tops, and used index cards, to name just a few. First-year Jess Hostetler wore a bubble-wrap hat; first-year Becka Rankin carried a pink flamingo handbag; junior Jason Rutt's headdress was so full of plastic cups and forks that it could have come straight from the trashcan after a church picnic.
Whose dirty idea was this, anyway? When Gross, a second-year art major, brainstormed creating trash fashion with Gusler last semester, neither knew how big the production would end up being. But word spread, and the independent study grew to include Rosenberger, Ameka, Horst, junior Liza James, and sophomores Marsha Lewis, Raquel Schlabach-Ortiz, Liz Syre, and Kaytea Thompson. Each student was required to put together at least two outfits entirely out of post-consumer materials, and to find their own models for the fashion show.
Gross ended up putting in over 50 hours quilting a wrapping paper outfit modeled by Rankin. "Most of my stuff was based around packaging and wrapping," she said, "and what we put around objects and gifts to make them beautiful or keep them safe, and how much waste goes into that."
Another creation of Gross's was one of the audience favorites. Clad in a shower curtain gown with a toilet-cover bustle, sopohomore Brenna Beck wore a necklace of shower curtain rings and twirled a toilet brush.
Gross isn't sure what will become of the transformed trash now that the show is over. "A few of the items I'll be able to wear," she said. Some of the outfits are currently on display in the Campus Center greeting hall.
A dazzling Gusler, wearing a scarf of orange curlers, vinyl tablecloth boots, and a proliferation of blue plastic newspaper-binding strips, invited the audience to make donations to the Blacks Run Greenway cleanup project in response to the show.
Judging by the success of this event, EMU students have been inspired to continue carrying out creative responses to ecological concerns. As the saying goes, one man's trash might turn out to be another man's…dress.
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