When Sonoma County’s Fashion Trashion Show organizer Margaret Hatcher puts items in the trash, she often thinks about what kind of fashion potential they have.
For seven years, amateur designers of all ages have transformed their garbage into wearable treasures (“landfill couture”?) at the yearly Trashion Fashion Show sponsored by the Sonoma County Community Center. This year’s show will take place at the Sonoma Veteran’s Hall on April 14 as part of Fashion Trashion Week.
“It’s certainly a way of bringing attention to all the waste we throw away,” Hatcher says.
Some participants, Hatcher says, transform their throwaways into outfits that are “fun and meaningful to them.” One year a woman fashioned “her insulin pump delivery packaging into a very chic cocktail dress.”
Besides the environmental lesson and the artistic challenge the event brings, Trashion Fashion provides the confidence-building opportunity for children to create and present their works before an audience. Sonoma Community Center has a partnership with Stand By Me Mentoring Alliance, and kids and their mentors work together to create designs for the show. Several students from Mare Island Fitness Elementary’s STEAM program will participate as well.
Fashion Trashion Week will kick off with the opening of Barbie Rescued and Reinvented, an exhibit and auction of reworked Barbies (a non-recyclable, non-resalable ubiquity) on display in Gallery 212 at the Sonoma Community Center. Last year’s exhibition included Barbies dressed as birds, hula dancers and wearing “pussy hats.”
Dogs on the Catwalk, for canine fashionistas, will take place on April 8 on the patio at the community center.
Proceeds from Trashion Fashion Week events will support summer arts programs for kids. including fiber arts, sewing camp and plein air curriculum.
Trashion Fashion Show. April 8 at 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. (Sonoma Veteran’s Memorial Theater, 126 First Street West, Sonoma. Tickets $20-$80: svbo.org or 707-938-4626 x1)
Barbie Rescued and Reinvented. April 7-15. Dogs on the Catwalk. April 8. (Sonoma Community Center, 276 E Napa St., Sonoma. trashionfashionsonoma.org)