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Student rolls out a toilet-paper winner
BUTTONED UP: Twelve rolls of toilet paper and three weeks’ work went into making Emily Menzies’ competition entry, inspired by upholstery. ”It looks like a couch.”
Toilet paper is not usually associated with high fashion. But Plimmerton design student Emily Menzies, 17, has managed to transform 12 rolls of toilet paper into a winning dress formula.
She has been chosen as one of three winners of a Kleenex-sponsored competition, calling for “a glamorous, luxurious, high-fashion cocktail dress” – made 95 per cent out of toilet paper.
The three dresses will be shown on the catwalk at New Zealand Fashion Week next month.
Emily, who has been at fashion school Fashion Tech since she was 15, was the youngest of the 32 entrants. “I’d kind of been doing that positive thinking thing and I told myself I’d [win], but actually I didn’t think I would.”
Her design is now being auctioned on Trade Me, along with the other two dresses. The proceeds from her dress will be all her own, and the auction winner will get to choose the fabric and colour for the dress to be made up in.
One of the requirements was that the dress had to look soft, so Emily turned to her penchant for upholstery to provide inspiration.
“It looks like a couch.”
The 12 rolls amounted to about 42 metres by 90 centimetres of fabric, which was enough to create the dress plus trimming for the seven layers of underskirt. The dress also included lining and tulle.
It took a whole day to transform the toilet paper into usable material by ironing it to a more durable adhesive fabric, Emily said. From inception to finished product, the whole process took three weeks.
Toilet paper as a material had some unexpected benefits, she said.
“It doesn’t fray and it’s quite durable.”
However, not being able to wash it was a major drawback, she said.
Although toilet paper was unlikely to become the next big thing in the fashion world, “I think the novelty’s quite good”.
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