Leigh Ann Sullivan sashayed on stage last week in a floor-length prom dress. The bottom of the dress was a rainbow of colors that complemented the gray-scale top portion.
“It's wonderful to twirl around in,” she said.
But this dress wasn't made of fine silk, velvet or even cotton. It was made of materials that filled her office: old papers, shredded into tiers of multi-color strips. “Its weight is comparable to a more elaborate prom dress,” she said.
Sullivan and six co-workers at a publications office at Cornell University made the dress to enter into the second Re-Imagine Fashion Eco-Fashion 2007 contest. As the grand prize winner, Sullivan was invited to model the dress at the Re-Imagine Fashion Show, held April 22 at the Farmers Market in conjunction with Earth Day.
The group, dubbed Coco Cornell, won a Pfaff sewing machine from Quilters Corner. Sullivan, Sally Dutko, Barbara Drogo, Dennis Kulis, Lorriane Heasley, Wendy Kenigsberg and Kathryn Seely spent about 40 hours on the creation.
Sullivan described the garment as “an elegant evening gown on a recycled prom gown base. ... It utilizes hundreds of pages of our documents,” she said.
They were inspired by the Eco-Fashion show announcement and began planning. “We had all this material at hand,” she said. So they found a dress at the Salvation Army and began constructing it, sewing the shredded paper strips onto the gown piece by piece. By stroke of luck, the dress that was found was in Sullivan's size.
“We had a specific idea of the base we wanted,” she said, and “this was the only one.”
There were about 50 entries in the contest, said design contest organizer Wendy Skinner.
“The idea of re-fashioning,” Skinner said, “is to take something that is old and dumpy and to create something new.”
Skinner said that she tries to encourage others to be more aware of clothing purchases. “I build consumer awareness and try to stop people from going to the mall and buying throw-away clothes.” Throw-away clothes, Skinner said, are clothes that are only designed to remain wearable for a short period of time.
By making your own clothes, you can be sure that you really like it, Skinner said. “The fashions look really great on people,” she said. Other entrants agreed.
Persephone Doliner called her entry a “creatively repaired item.” She created pants and a vest, covered in appliqués and buttons. Doliner said that come fall and winter, she plans to incorporate her creation into everyday wardrobe.
Doliner said that buying new items all the time is unnecessary and that she feels that too much of an emphasis is placed on commercialism. “People value trivial things over important things,” she said.
Lynn Leopold spent hours and hours on her entry. “I made a vest out of felted sweaters,” she said. “I cut them up and fashioned them into a vest.”
But she thinks that all her effort was worth it. “I've worn the vest to a couple of parties and gotten compliments,” she said.
Leopold has been involved in conserving clothing items for a while. Up until several years ago, she was involved in a now-defunct program called the Student Reuse Project, which collected items for college students living in Collegetown to resell at garage sales in the summer.
Leopold said that the use of pesticides and herbicides on cotton and poor work conditions coupled with the short-shelf life of fashion led her down this path.
“Why can't we put our minds to work on what's already out there?” she said.
The eco-fashion show further supported her belief in creating fashionable clothing out of supposed scraps. “People are really savvy,” she said.
Some of this year's fashions, as well as last year's, will be showcased at the Ithaca Festival this summer. The top entries from this year's show will be displayed May 7-19 in the windows of Petrune, a vintage clothing shop at 115 S. Cayuga St.
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