By Riley Sablantura

Staff Writer

Chaotic isn’t a word most people would use to describe fashion, but a Stevens fashion design student, junior Angel De Hoyos Campos said it felt right to him while he was helping create a dress made from recycled trash bags, plastic bottles, and aluminum cans.

“It was fun and it’s a way to express myself,” said De Hoyos Campos. “I have always just loved dressing up and doing fashion.”

Campos and three other students in Christine Donovan’s practicum in entrepreneurship fashion class created dresses out of trash they found in bins behind the school and in their neighborhoods. The completed garments were part of a anti-litter public service campaign in September for the San Antonio River Authority (SARA) and displayed at the Tobin Center downtown.

The dress De Hoyos Campos made with junior Jade Gonzalez is able to be worn because the base is a gently used prom dress. In fact, De Hoyos Campos has worn the new creation. Gonzalez helped come up with the idea of making some of the trash bags into flowers. 

“Trying to make flowers out of just trash bags is pretty cool,” Gonzalez said. “I like how I can find something old and turn it into something new and beautiful.”

Nicole De La Cruz said she found inspiration for her butterfly-themed dress made of newspapers in an unusual place – the floor.

“The trash on the floor inspires me,” she said, adding that Google helped with her inspiration. 

She and Ana Roman worked together on the newspaper dress, crafting plastic bottles and straws into butterflies fluttering diagonally across the dress. They even made earrings to match the butterflies on the dress

“I feel like butterflies bring a hope of a better future,” De La Cruz said. 

The “trash” dresses were displayed on Sept. 23 highlighting the San Antonio River Authority’s “Don’t let litter trash your river” campaign. 

Donovan said her first thought was to use posters for the campaign, but then she got the idea to make dresses from trash. Most of the trash they used was truly trash that could be rinsed, but the newspapers were leftover from printing and not dirty.

The first project of the year is usually something recycled because the department doesn’t have access to its funds yet, (which) also allowed students to be creative on the cheap, Donovan said. “It’s easy to find things laying around to make something with and so it kind of went hand in hand (with the environmental message).”