A model takes the stage, aglitter in a silver dress fit tightly to her torso then flaring out in a pouffy skirt.
As she moves out onto the runway, those in the audience either gasp or giggle when they realize the skirt is made not of fabric but entirely of wire whisks. There are 100 of them, give or take a few, strung together in two cascading layers on a chicken-wire belt.
The dress's upper half is fashioned from sparkling paillettes of heavy-duty tinfoil, pieced together into a shape vaguely like North America. The apron-type front is held on in back with three whisks -- two across, one down.
This dress by Adriana Chaves Chinchilla represents one extreme of the fashion continuum. A cooking utensil, so practical in the kitchen, becomes practically ridiculous on the runway. Sure, the skirt was trendy, using the fitted-at-the-hips, flared-below silhouette that's everywhere this spring. But a girl would be hard-pressed to sit down in this outfit.
Chaves Chinchilla, though, doesn't have to worry about who will buy her dress. She's an apparel-design student at the Rhode Island School of Design, and she created her dress, "Whipped," for the sophomore innovative-design project, an assignment to create a wearable garment using a material other than fabric.
At RISD's spring fashion show last weekend, Collection '04, the always crowd-pleasing innovative-design numbers were laced in among other projects. There was a gladiator-like tube-top-and-skirt ensemble made entirely of bobby pins, and dresses made of sale tags and Starburst wrappers.
Christy Lee managed to make cardboard appear positively soft and fluffy in "Beyond the Box," a halter dress with a long, flowing, puffed skirt that flounced as the model walked. "It's very soft, and it's really durable," Lee said. "You could, like, dance around in it."
The crowd's favorite was a peacock ensemble by Carina Grenier, a bodysuit of green tufts of moss, with real peacock feathers at the shoulders. (Conveniently, Grenier's friend has a peacock farm, and gave her the feathers when the birds molted.) The headdress, too, was feathered, as was the tail the model dragged behind her, then raised to display using fishing line strung over her shoulders.
Also captivating was Nicole Daniels' wedding dress made of glue from a hot-glue gun. Daniels floated melted glue in a thin layer in a bathtub full of water. When the glue cooled, it formed a transparent sheet. Daniels bunched the sheets together in frothy puffs, but the result still was a bit risque, a la Madonna in her Like a Virgin video. The bride, wearing bold, smudged, red eye shadow, stepped onto the stage, assumed a prayerful pose, then flounced down the runway. When she reached the end, she tossed her bouquet -- glue-lace flowers, with glue sticks for stems -- into the audience.
Kristin Sorensen made a voluminous Barbie ball gown, in a delectable candy-pink, from insulation she bought at Home Depot and encrusted with rhinestones.
True, most of these designs were more Halloween costume than wardrobe staple. The designers will need to be practical and consider the bottom line when designing for a living, as opposed to designing as an academic exercise.
But fashion is more than just the clothes we wear; it's art. The RISD show celebrated the way fashion enables a woman to buy into a mood, a concept, a designer, or a story.
The culmination of a year's work, the show included the best of the students' fall and spring projects. Besides innovative designs, the sophomores made garments using printed fabric made at Cranston Print Works. Junior explored knitwear and made jacket ensembles. Each senior expressed her personal style and vision in a thesis collection, and created an outfit featuring a coat.
Even when using more traditional materials, the students used inventive techniques.
Junior Constance Small indulged a fascination with Catwoman and made a black dress simple in shape, but so sheer it needed another dress underneath. Small took a technique called lacing, commonly used as an accent in knitwear, and used it to make a whole dress. The resulting ladder effect looked like runs in nylon stockings. "I basically thought of it as a cat having scratched at the dress," Small said.
In her senior thesis collection, "Cnidarian" (the Latin phylum name for jellyfish), Rachel Burt had the ocean in mind. Burt wrapped synthetic fabric around a spoon and baked it in an oven to create "a crinkled, tentacle-like form," she said. In her three-piece eveningwear collection -- three dresses in cream, khaki, tan and beige -- the tentacles hung in tatters, floating like seaweed suspended in water. The effect was soft, ethereal, and natural, like human hair cascading in spiral waves.
Everything from movie musicals to mathematical concepts provided inspiration and stretched viewers' imaginations.
A yellow sweater-dress with a braided blue belt knit into the garment, worn off the shoulder with white tights and Asian-inspired flat sandals with electric-blue straps, is junior Ricky Katowicz's tribute to the video game "Tetris."
OTHER SOURCES of inspiration included topographical maps, Alice in Wonderland, hummingbirds, the artist M.C. Escher, dried kombucha mushrooms, the mathematical concept of Fibonacci's golden ratio, and art collector and patron Peggy Guggenheim.
Senior Kassie McDonald linked the pieces of her "Automata" thesis collection together through performance. She began with a song, a synthesized electronic piece based on the melody of an old music box.
McDonald aimed to design clothing that would break women out of any wardrobe rut, by allowing them to wear the same piece several different ways. For instance: an A-line skirt with cords running down its length, so the skirt could be worn long and slim, or with gathers around its width, like a 19th-century woman gathering up her skirt to expose her petticoat. Cargo pants could be worn full-length or scrunched up as capris.
Her models had the red-dotted cheeks and narrow lipsticked mouths of music-box dolls. They moved stiffly, as if on strings, mirroring the way strings were used to manipulate their clothing.
In her thesis collection, "Satin Sashes," Lauren DeCesaris of Cranston designed a pair of satin dresses that evoked Jackie Kennedy and Audrey Hepburn: simple, elegant and sophisticated, with fresh details. A black satin dress had baby-pink straps that started narrow at the chest, then widened as they arched over the shoulder to the back, culminating in an exaggerated pink bow at the small of the back.
Senior Rachael Becker matter-of-factly informed the audience that little girls and bondage were common themes in her work, and she decided to combine them for her thesis collection.
Her "Plastic Purgery" collection included patent pleather, Converse high-top sneakers, fingerless gloves and an hourglass-shaped halter dress with zippers running down its length. Unzipping transformed the dress into an A-line silhouette.
When the seniors came out to take a bow, each walked hand in hand with a model -- except Becker, who was linked to her model with a pair of handcuffs.