Oh, fashion! It can seem like such a fickle thing, with hemlines rising, jeans getting skinnier, and popular colors fading. But it can also seem like the same fashions keep coming and going. Am I the only one seeing girls wearing those loopy plastic chokers again? The ones we all threw out after sixth grade?
Sometimes people take fashion into their own hands and create something unique and unexpected. Using the age-old form of the dress as the base, these designers and artists created breathtaking gowns out of all kinds of crazy material, from pastries to plates.
Video Dress
Turkish designer Hussein Chalayan created this dress, which shows a time-lapse video of a rose opening and closing by way of 15,000 LEDs incorporated into the fabric itself. Chalayan is known for creating fashion that features technological elements like mechanical switches and electronics. Watch a video of it in action below.
Tax Form Dress
Singer Britt Savage created this dress out of old tax forms. She created a pattern by having her husband wrap her in duct tape and then cut her out of the resulting form. Innovative!
Condom Dresses
Brazilian artist Adriana Bertini created these condom dresses to promote HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention. The condoms she used are all expired or defective, so they weren’t usable for their original purpose anyway. Bertini dyed the condoms and created these dresses to express the need for direct information about safe sex—something often considered taboo and “hidden”—and to state that condoms must be as available and universal as clothing. Bertini once used a record 80,000 condoms to create a dress.
Bird Cage Dress
This is a fully functional birdcage made of brass over a fabric underdress. Designer Kasey McMahon created this with many hours of painstaking soldering, clamping and drilling. The first exhibition saw the dress full of doves, but the choice of avian accessories changed the feeling and themes of the piece as performance art. The concept of this dress stemmed from McMahon’s perceptions of the simultaneous distance and closeness humans have to nature and technology. Just don’t let this one near the dress coming up next.
Cream Puff Dress
It’s a dress with leftovers! Pastry chef Valentyn Shtefano, well-known for creating stunning baked goods in the western Ukrainian city of Uzhhorod, outdid himself when he created a wedding dress for his bride-to-be. Out of cream puffs. 1,500 cream puffs, to be exact. Even the jewelry and bouquet are edible, made out of caramelized sugar. His now-wife, Viktoriya, was a good sport about it, even though it weighed 20 pounds, and said that after she got used to the stares, she didn’t want to take it off.
Skittles Wrapper Dress
Craftster user Theperilouspopsicle decided to save some money and make her own prom dress in 2008. She took interest in using something bright and unconventional, and settled on Skittles wrappers. The dress won her first place at her school’s film festival for best costume–and she hadn’t even entered the contest.
Mood Dress
By measuring the changes in body temperature, heart rate and sweat levels, the Bubelle Dress changes its color and pattern based on the mood of the wearer. The dress can be programmed to turn a certain color for desired results, so you can not only let people know how you’re feeling, but customize what your versions of calm or agitated look like. Philips created the dress as part of their SKIN project, a focus on the development of technology that reacts to human skin for emotional sensing.
Sundae Dress
Okay, it’s not edible, which means for this list, it’s pretty tame. Artist and designer Joy Kampia O’Shell creates crocheted garments and accessories. Some of her creations take inspiration from food, like donuts and hamburgers.
Porcelain Dress
Li Xiaofeng, via Virginia Miller Galleries
Artist Li Xiaofeng creates garments out of fragments of ceramics from the Song, Ming, Yuan and Qing Dynasties. He meticulously sorts each shard by date, color, and shape, and then affixes them to a leather undergarment so that these pieces are ready to wear. He uses ancient artifacts to create modern-looking garments, evoking the way China’s rich history influences its contemporary culture.
Artist Li Xiaofeng creates garments out of fragments of ceramics from the Song, Ming, Yuan and Qing Dynasties. He meticulously sorts each shard by date, color, and shape, and then affixes them to a leather undergarment so that these pieces are ready to wear. He uses ancient artifacts to create modern-looking garments, evoking the way China’s rich history influences its contemporary culture.
Willow Branch Dress
Robin Barcus Slonina created this 15-foot dress out of woven willow branches. Slonina then floated the dress on Lower Piney Creek in Wyoming as a performance piece. Slonina’s dresses are site-specific pieces, meaning they reflect something about the place of creation, and come from materials found in or evocative of their location. While many of her creations use natural materials like grass, corn husks, lily pads, and flowers, past creations included cassette tape, garbage bags, and plastic Easter eggs. Slonina models her creations herself.
Tent Dress
Artists Adriennce Pao and Robin Lasser collaborated to create a series of tent dresses, each with a specific theme. This “Russian Camera Obscura Dress,” was for an art and photography exchange between sister cities San Jose, USA, and Yekaterinburg, Russia. Check out the artists’ websites for more tent dresses.
Phone Book Dress
Kelly Murray created this dress out of pages from a phone book. She created all the pleats and sewed and glued everything together by hand. Amazingly, this dress is wearable. Just make sure it doesn’t rain.
Wooden “Curtsy” Dress
Bent wood pieces and a couple of bolts hold this dress together. The “skirt” is actually concentric rings of wood held together with cables. When the cables fully extend, the rings hang lower, giving the illusion of a long skirt. By pulling on the rings up on the bodice (you can see those up by the model’s armpits), the rings rise, allowing the wearer to curtsy. We don’t know about sitting down, though.
Toilet Paper Dress
Susan Brennan of Orchard Lake, MI, entered Cheap Chic Toilet Paper Wedding Dress contest (yes, that is a thing) with this dress made of Charmin-brand TP. While the durability of this dress remains questionable, Brennan’s weeks of painstaking work, such as the stitched details, paid off. She took first place and a $10,000 prize.
Zipper Dress
This is the most normal dress here, and it’s pretty innovative. Korean designer Lee Joo Eun created a line of dresses with an adjustable size and fit via a series of zippers. With the zipper open, the dress expands and reveals a colored panel adding to the design. This allows wearers to have a custom-fit dress that can still be mass-produced.
Kind of makes your new fall dresses seem so passé, right?
