From Retail To Cocktail: A Grocery Bag Dress Done Right!

A cute dress made from plastic grocery bags
This dress is for the ITAA design competition which students from my university enter every year. My goal was to create a dress from grocery bags that did not actually look like it had been made from post-consumer waste. After plastic water bottles, plastic shopping bags are the largest waste created in landfills per year. Every year 380 billion plastic bags are used and only 5% are recycled. Rather than creating waste, we should find ways to reuse it. The plastic “fabric” was created by hand from about 55 fused/melted plastic grocery bags and 6 trash bags.

Techniques: First, I asked for donations of beige colored grocery bags; it was alarming to me how many bags people had to donate to me. After gathering all of the bags, 4-6 bags were layered on top of each other and put in-between two sheets of aluminum foil. Then a hot iron was used to melt the layers of grocery bags to each other. Several sections of fused bags were then melted together to form a “fabric”. To create the lace, one layer of a trash bag was melted in between two layers of aluminum foil, then the “lace” was fused onto the beige layers. The pattern pieces were then cut out from the plastic “fabric” and sewn together. The fabric used for the lining was found at a thrift store.

Let's be honest now, I absolutely hate how ugly most grocery bag dresses are and I was determined to show that upcycling can be cute (and that I could make something better). Even though I didn't win at my university's competition, I am very proud of myself and believe that I was very innovative. I have never seen anything like what I did. It took forever and I would not advise anyone to try to do this because you will lose your sanity!