Rubbish rules the runway

The Oregon State Fashion Organization held its annual Recycle Fashion Show Tuesday night, allowing students to showcase their sense of design and creativity. This year’s show theme was “Runway Rubbish” and featured dresses and accessories made from recycled metals, bags, cloth and other materials.

All designers for the show were encouraged to create garments out of 100 percent recyclable materials in honor of the recent Corvallis bag ban. With this as their only guideline, designers got creative by making outfits made out of receipts, plastic spoons, duct tape, magazines, pop tabs and even an old air mattress.

Each designer paid $5 to enter in the show, with all profits raised going to the club to help fund similar events in the future. Designers could then either model their own work or have someone else do it for them. There were even three small children acting as models for the show, which was a big hit among the audience.

The show was coordinated by Janae Brazell, a senior in merchandising management. Brazell has worked hard over the past 10 weeks with the designers and models to make this year’s fashion show come to life. Although this was her first year running the event, she says things went smoothly and everything got done right on time.

“The show was a lot of fun,” Brazell said. “It got stressful at times, but everyone stayed positive and on top of it.”

Brazell says she was pleased with the large turnout, and was excited to finally be able to show off all of the organization’s hard work.

Junior Chase Myatt emceed the event alongside senior Brigitte Hougan. Both are students in the OSU apparel design program.

“I helped out with the fashion show last year, but I didn’t enter anything. This year I decided to get a lot more involved,” Hougan said.

This was Myatt’s first year working at the Recycle Fashion Show, but she participated in the Red Dress Fashion Show, an event supporting the awareness of HIV and AIDs, earlier in the year.

Junior Naoko Gille “had a blast” being one of the models at this year’s event, sporting a dress her roommate, Nicole Chapman, made solely out of old People’s magazine scraps. Chapman is currently working on a minor in Merchandising Management.

The show was part of an ongoing series of events being held for ReycleMania, a national recycling competition held between universities each year. During the event, OSU Campus Recycling Outreach Coordinator Andrea Norris and Student Outreach Assistant Lindsey Almarode gave an opening demonstration on how to recycle around campus.

After the first week of the competition, OSU has taken the lead over the University of Oregon, 1.69 to 1.22 pounds of recycling per person. To find a listing of all of the RecycleMania events still to come, visit Campus Recycling’s webpage at recycle.oregonstate.edu.

Lara von Linsowe-Wilson, news reporter
news@dailybarometer.com