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Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

arts

Recycled Fashion Show to present at BCT

They say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. That mantra will hold true this weekend as models strut down the runway in unusual materials that could range anywhere from cat food can pop tops, plastic straws, cork or even a Twister mat.

The 6th Annual Trashion Refashion Runway Show will take place Sunday. Students, local designers and community members have participated in the event. With no stipulations regarding experience level, anyone from the community was invited to submit a design, and the number of entries has increased each year.

Professor Jane Matranga, a faculty member in the Department of Apparel Merchandising and Interior Design and a third-year participant in the show, said she looked to old graphic T-shirts for design inspiration.

“I found the loudest, brightest, most covered graphic T-shirts they had,” Matranga said of the materials, equating them to the colors and prints you might see in comic books or the funnies section of paper.

Matranga’s designs will be featured in the first half of the show, which is devoted to pieces that are remade from already existing clothing. The second portion of the show includes designs that are produced from trash and other unconventional items.

Hunting through the racks of secondhand shops such as Goodwill and the Salvation Army, Matranga gathered several T-shirts to construct her three garments, a dress and two ponchos. An XXL T-shirt with graphics on both the front and the back was like finding a diamond in the rough, she said, explaining that she could use both sides and gain plenty of fabric from a single piece.

“I cut them up, turned them upside-down and changed them all around so they don’t necessarily look like words anymore,” she said of the several T-shirts she collected and deconstructed throughout the process.

With the event acting as an ode to utilizing reused materials, Matranga explained there are several reasons the fashion industry, and consumers in general, need to be more conscious of sustainability in clothing.

“People need to be aware that fast fashion, accumulation and consumerism aren’t going to make people happy,” she said. “It creates more junk. It’s about psychology, economy, ecology.”

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