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'Living dress' wins Eco-Chic sustainable fashion contest

When Elena Marshall is done showing off her award-winning “living dress,” she’ll bury it in her backyard.

The dress, a chic design with a strapless bodice and flouncy skirt, is made of recycled burlap and trimmed with real grass from chia seeds.

Marshall, a fashion design major at Arizona State University, won the Eco-Chic Design Contest and Showcase last Friday, a student-run event that featured sustainable fashion designs made by eight ASU students.

The show, complete with models, a runway and music, displayed sustainable fashion entries that included knitwear made with no waste, a dress made of vintage doilies and nonplastic vegan-leather bags.

Marshall’s “living dress,” which she sewed herself, was decorated with dried flowers that she collected from momentous occasions, such as her parents’ wedding and her graduation.

“It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for awhile and it’s so meaningful for me,” said Marshall, who won $1,000 in the contest.

“The dress is completely biodegradable so I can bury it outside when we’re done.”

The Eco-Chic Design Contest and Showcase was the final project of three students in the Sustainable Fashion Humanities Lab course this semester — Latrice Ciricillo and Mario Violi, both Italian studies majors, and Somaly Jaramillo Hurtado, a graduate student in sustainability.

The Humanities Lab at ASU is a center that offers semester-long courses in which students research and address complicated social issues in a transdisciplinary way.

The class, which had 34 students, divided into groups to research aspects of sustainable fashion and then create a response to the problem. Besides the fashion show, one of the other student projects was a webinar with top fashion experts.

The students learned how the fashion industry is a major contributor to water pollution, microplastics and exploitative labor practices, and how profit margins can affect sustainability efforts.

At the fashion show, the Humanities Lab students described the problem and one solution — designing beautiful clothing in a sustainable way that consumers want.

“It doesn’t have to be Birkenstocks and T-shirts,” Ciricillo said. “It can be elegant clothes that people want to buy.”

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