Paper prêt-a-porter, anyone?
If I’m honest, to me, the idea of a garment made purely from paper sounds a little silly to say the least. I can’t help but picture a half-hearted, naive college-student attempt at creating a piece which is more ‘fashion faux-pas’ rather than Christian Lacroix. Surely the result would just end up as a crumpled mess, right?
Well, wrong actually. It seems the fashion pack have been perfecting the art of creating paper garments for decades.
Paper clothes were all the rage in the Sixties as the industrialised world increasingly became a throw-away society. The Scott Paper Company released the psychedelic Paisley shift in 1966. Priced at a meseley $1.25, it sold over half a million in the USA! The paper dress was at the time developed to promote their toilet paper and paper tissues, posted to potential customers along with promotional coupons.
The trend grew popular in the UK 1967, when even the Beatles were wearing paper jackets!
In a similar yet far more appealing and complex fashion, Hussein Chalayan’s paper Airmail dress arrives as a letter and folds out to become a full-length garment. The paper is not ordinary paper, but Tyvek, which is unrippable. Each dress comes with a set of stickers and instructions on how to put it together. ‘It’s something you can personalise and you can also cut it up and sew it back together,’ he says.
Chanel keeps the trend alive on the S/S 2009 Catwalk…
Paper garments are the epitome of modern-day fast fashion fixes. Just don’t forget your umberella…
Paper Fashion! is an exhibition in Antwerp showing until 16th August 2009. It now owns more than 200 vintage pieces reflecting the kind of craze that took America by a paper storm in the mid-1960s. I’m hoping the exhibition will come to the UK soon!
And to finish off, beat the downturn with this recession-busting wedding dress, yours for just £5!
