ARMAGH — Fashion was totally trashed last Friday at United High School.
The school hosted its inaugural “Trashin’ Fashion Show” with students modeling their own creations of haute couture — all made of discarded items and recycled materials.
The student response to the event was overwhelming.
According to Aaron Steinly, assistant principal at the high school, who spearheaded plans for the event, the response surpassed expectations, with 83 projects entered by 143 student designers.
“The entries were far bigger than what we had imagined,” said environmental studies teacher Bob Penrose, who was also involved in planning. He said organizers had hoped for 20 entries. “We had so many kids excited now about what they can do, realizing that they can do little things to make a change,” he said. “There was some really neat stuff.”
“This came out of a desire to make our students more environmentally conscious,” Penrose said. He said the event’s panel of judges “worked with us in one capacity or another to help us to educate our students on how they can make a difference in our environment.”
Helping Penrose plan the event was a core group of students from his first semester of classes: Jessie Bruckhart, Kim Busch and Rachael Andrasik.
“They came up with the basic idea,” Penrose said.
He then enlisted the aid of his current environmental studies classes.
“They took it and ran with it,” he said. “They did the decorations, they put together the program, helped put together the list of sponsors. They really did all of the work for it.”
The competition was open to students in grades 5-12, on a volunteer basis.
The students were allowed to compete as individuals or in teams of up to four, and they had a little over a month to design and develop their “green” garb.
There were four categories of competition: accessories, school spirit, informal wear and formal wear.
Each category had a winner in each of various age groups. A grand prize of $200 was awarded to the student or team with the highest point total, with prizes of $45 going to the winners of each age group in each category.
Event sponsors also donated gift certificates and prizes for the students involved in the planning, which were distributed through a raffle.
The students were instructed to use as many different types of recyclable materials as they could, with the intention of using their trash to create fashion. The only other stipulation was that the costumes had to fall within the school’s dress code.
“Accessories were popular because they were easy to make,” Penrose remarked.
Four people involved with United’s various environmental endeavors were chosen as judges. They were: Father Gabriel Zeis, president, St. Francis University and a United High School Green Advisory board member; Dr. Janet Blood, professor of fashion/fashion merchandising at Indiana University of Pennsylvania; Beth Bollinger, professor of environmental education at St. Vincent College and coordinator of the Winnie Palmer Nature Reserve there; and Renee Cambruzzi of Pittsburgh’s Phipps Conservatory.
Cambruzzi also acts as high school programs coordinator and director of the Fairchild Challenge, an environmental outreach program in which United School District is involved.
The judges based their decisions on a variety of factors, including creativity, use of materials, wearability and difficulty. The original plan was to announce the winners at the end of the show Friday, but the judges were so impressed and overwhelmed by the entries, they requested more time to decide. The announcement of winners was held off until Monday.
“I was so impressed by the creativity and use of recyclable materials,” Cambruzzi said. “Things like twine, milk cartons — things I didn’t think they would use.”
“It was amazing,” Bollinger said of the show, “so many different designs you would have never thought of, but things that were useful.”
The winning outfits will be sent to Harrisburg, where the Department of Education will display the ensembles in its building for the entire month of April.
Taking the grand prize of $200 were the brother and sister team of Devon and Kristen Walker. Devon, a sixth-grader, and Kristen, a fifth-grader, put their heads together to come up with materials they could find around the house.
“We tried to think of old stuff we could get to easily,” Devon said.
“We were going to use an old tablecloth (as a shirt), but then we decided to use an old deck of cards to make a vest instead,” Kristen said.
They then cut and cleaned a pile of aluminum cans they had lying around the house, folding the sharp edges under and stringing them together to create a skirt.
Adding some accessories to their ensemble, they strung together pop tabs around the cut-out bottom of a pop can. A newspaper ruffle attached to an old headband created a nice headpiece, but one of the crowning achievements of the outfit were the shoes.
Newspapers, folded accordion-style, were attached to an old pair of rubber flip-flops. Then, fitting cut aluminum cans together, they glued them to bottoms to act as makeshift “heels” for the shoes. Though they proved hard to walk in, according to Kristen, the effect was worth it.
With help from parents Joe and Shannon Walker, the pair finished the project in under five days.
They plan to split their winnings evenly. Though Kristen hasn’t yet decided what she’ll do with her half, Devon hopes to put his share toward a pair of new cowboy boots.
The Walker said they learned a lot about recycling during their project. “You can make clothing out of almost anything,” Devon said.
A team of seventh-graders — Claire Thompson, Haley Torok, Mattie Weaver and Emili Spaid — took the top prize in the informal category for their age group.
They fashioned an entire outfit out of recycled cardboard milk cartons from the cafeteria. With help from teacher Laurie Deem, they cleaned the cartons then tied them together with strips torn from plastic bags.
Seventh-graders Kristen Mack, Lyda Bartlebaugh and Cady Griffith won the school spirit prize in grades 7-8 with garbage-bag garb adorned with tissue paper in United’s blue and white colors. A large “Lions” paw print, for the school mascot, was featured on the back.
Gaige Gleaton and Frank Berkavich, both in seventh grade, were tops in the accessories competition for their age group. Using colored paper and newspaper, they shaped a shirt, adorning the front with a vintage cutout from an old United Lions sweatshirt. The sleeves were taken off the sweatshirt and attached to the paper shirt with masking tape. Shoes were created from old cereal boxes and tied together with leftover Christmas tree tinsel.
Eighth-grader Santana Meyers, with help from ninth-graders Molly Young and Brandon Baird, won the formal category for grades 7-8. The dress they made was composed of recycled newspaper with a bodice fabricated from cereal boxes and tied together in the back with old license plates.
Danielle Evans, a junior, and her team — juniors Wade Evans, Jenn Silvis, and senior Corri McGinnis — took a more organic approach to their project, which netted them the top prize in their age group in the informal category.
Coming up with an exotic Hawaiian theme, they “grew” a grass skirt from burlap sacks filled with newspaper and grass seed. The tufts of grass blossomed through the tiny holes in the burlap, creating a living, green grass skirt.
The rest of the outfit was contrived of binder twine braided together to create a weaved and fringed top, earrings with paperclip fasteners, and a necklace and anklet. Shoes were cut out of cardboard, with recycled rubber soles and braided string.
The competition was often close, according to Penrose, with one point frequently standing between first and second places.
That was the case with Leah Skedel, a ninth-grader, who took her inspiration from the fairy-tale ballgowns popular today, and missed winning the formal category in her age group by one point. The prize instead went to Katie Mehalik’s CD dress.
Working alone, Skedel searched online for design ideas and came across the delineation for her dress.
The bodice she constructed of leftover wrapping paper, while the massive bell-shaped skirt consisted of scrunched-up newspaper arranged into a three-foot train in the back. The dress itself was adorned with other recyclable materials — pop tabs replaced sequins, and wrapping paper scraps and two-liter soda labels acted as ruffles.
The dress was held together by duct tape.
The entire ensemble only took Skedel less than two hours to put together.
What she took away from the project was, “It’s just as easy to recycle stuff as it is to throw it away,” Skedel said.
Model Jamie Montgomery and friend Katie Robson, both juniors, made their dress from scraps cut from gardening magazines and catalogs.
“We found all of the magazines, and they had all of these pretty flowers,” Montgomery said. They thought cuttings from the magazines would be the perfect “green”-themed “fabric” for their formal dress design.
“Katie came up with the idea,” Montgomery said.
Using paper-machŽ, they fabricated the clippings into the shape of a form-fitting, calf-length dress, a process that took them a few hours over two days.
Also competing in the high school formal category was Bill Boring, a senior.
His prom-ready garb was highlighted by a vest made of cut-up and flattened Mountain Dew cans. “We had some cans lying around at home and I thought it would be cool to make a vest,” he said.
For pants, he used old feed sacks that he sewed together. His shoes, made of recycled car tires, he obtained with help from his woodshop teacher, Charlie Kerekes. The ensemble was completed with a tie made from scrap cardboard taken from the school’s recycling bins, and a cummerbund fashioned from a piece of old carpet that was replaced in the school’s auditorium.
Fifth-grader Caleb Walls modeled in the school spirit category with garb he fashioned with his brothers, Levi and Noah Walls, and teammates Josh Roof and Matthew Dill, all in fifth grade.
Within two weeks, the team had assembled a Lions-themed get-up, with a T-shirt adorned with a lion photo, plastic garbage bag pants — complete with a lion paw print on the back pocket — a hat made of a recycled plastic container, cardboard shoes, and the finishing touch, a necklace constructed of string threaded through bottlecaps.
“It was hard to drill through the bottlecaps,” Roof acknowledged.
Opening the show on Friday, Steinly informed the audience that he has grown tired of hearing how students today are indifferent, that “‘They’re not the same as they were 20 years ago, that they can’t make a difference.’” he said. “I haven’t seen more excited kids than the ones here at United,” inspired by the fashion show.
Master of ceremonies Marissa Rigatti, a senior, amused the crowd with a constant stream of commentary while herself adorned in cardboard suspenders bearing the names of the event sponsors.
During a pause in the walkway show, the audience was entertained by a group of four students, dubbing themselves the “Environmental Sirens.” They performed a version of Paramore’s “Decode,” but with altered words reflecting their concern for the environment.
The event was a hit with both students and faculty alike, with many “oohs and aahs” from the audience as the students took to the catwalk.
“It was really cool to see some of the creativity that these guys put into their projects,” Penrose said.
“I didn’t know so many people would do this, but our school really came together,” Robson remarked.
“There were so many great ideas,” Montgomery added.The show turned out so well, in fact, that Steinly said United is planning an even bigger event for next year, hoping to include schools from around the county and hold the show on a Saturday. “We want to show other schools what can be done, how they can teach kids about recycling, energy conservation and natural resource conservation,” he said. “You are truly going to make a difference here in Pennsylvania,” Zeis told the United students. “Schools around the world are going to be looking at what you’re doing. You’re setting the stage. You’re setting an example.
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