LEWISTON, Maine — At the start of the school year in September, Sloan Phillips, a student at Bates College, began scrounging.
“All of my cardboard I found in the dumpster behind my house,” Phillips said. “I got to take it all apart, shred it into little pieces, and build it back up.”
This is not how most college students spend their time.
The planning and preparation would pay off when it came time in late November for the "Trashion Show" at Bates, an annual event in which students, faculty, and staff design, make, and show off imaginative outfits made of discarded materials.
"I love that I pretty much get to create something out of what was pretty much nothing," Phillips said.
Some of the outfits are made from just one source. "Gift cards. Or during Covid there were masks," Bates Sustainability Manager Tom Twist, said. "So just finding stuff is challenging."
Professor Kirk Read wore a tunic made of laminated ID badges he’d collected during his 33 years at Bates. Why on earth did he save them?
"I leave it to you to wonder,” Read said with a laugh.
The event is goofy and lighthearted, especially when the contestants strut down the runway, flaunting their outfits in front of a few hundred cheering spectators. How could you not smile at Bates student Miguel Pacheco, who walked from one side of the room to the other on stilts, all while encased in the cardboard costume so carefully made by Phillips?
But it’s not all silliness. The Trashion Show also has a serious purpose: to spread a message in our throwaway culture about the importance of recycling and sustainability.
In the end, Pacheco—the unlikely combination of cardboard and stilts—towered above the competition, literally and figuratively, and emerged as the winner.
“My feet hurt,” he said after learning of his victory. “But I feel amazing.”