MIT Trashion Show
The MIT Trashion Show is an annual fashion show focusing on sustainability, featuring designs created from upcycled trash: like dresses made of bottlecaps and faux-peacock feathers made of discarded weather-stripping. I heard about the show through a mechanical engineering classmate, Khanh Nguyen, and we decided to design piece together for the runway.
At the time I was working part-time as a shop monitor at the MIT ACT staff, where I helped graduate students from MIT’s Arts Culture and Technology program learn tools and realize their art projects. Due to the shop’s sheet metal and welding capabilities, it generated a large amount of scrap 10-16 gauge mild steel, so we came up with the idea of making pieces out of manufacturing scrap. We also needed a fabric-like material to tie the undesigned metal pieces together, so we reached out to local CNC-knitting startup ministry of supply, who had plenty of extra fabric scrap.
We sketched a few designs and made subscale demonstrations of some of the sketches we liked. We had two major concepts we liked: both used sharp triangles folded out of the scrap steel mounted on the fabric; one using asymmetrical lapel and hip decals, and the other creating a ‘high collar of doom’ and opposing skirt decals. Over the long thanksgiving weekend, the time we had free to manufacture the project, we derusted, brushed, cut, bent, and welded the mild steel scrap, died the scrap knit, and tied it all together into complementary male and female parts.
We were awarded Most Innovative Materials and Second Place out of more than 30 designs! We were also featured in physical and digital copies of the school newspaper!
Khanh and I receiving the two awards
Full page image in the physical newspaper
““Duo et Machina” (by Khanh Nguyen and Ryan Gulland) featured clothing made out of actual sheet metal which was impressive enough to win Most Unexpected materials and second place overall, but also struck a small twinge of fear in me when they got a bit too close to other people.”
Note: this was created in 2021: it is backdated to consolidate content from the original webpage: https://rgulland.com/trashion onto this blog