RISD designers put pasta, pampas grass and guitar picks on the runway

03:01 PM EDT on Sunday, May 15, 2005

BY BILL VAN SICLEN
Journal Arts Writer

Picture, if you will, a fashion runway jammed with A-list celebrities and paparazzi. Oprah is there, of course. So are Cher, Winona, J.Lo and the rest of the Hollywood fashion pack. And isn't that the Puff-Man, Sean Combs, and his hip-hop posse in back?

Now cue your favorite dance track and imagine an announcer saying: "Ladies and gentlemen, the dress you'll all be talking about this season, an outfit that tastes as good as it looks, a sleek little number that can be worn alone or paired with a light tomato sauce . . . the Lasagna Noodle Dress!"

Huh? Did someone just use the words "dress" and "lasagna noodle" in the same sentence?

Yes, they did -- or at least they will Saturday night, when the Rhode Island School of Design holds its annual student fashion show at Veterans Memorial Auditorium.

Dubbed "Collection 2005," the show will feature outfits by more than 30 young designers, ranging from fancy evening gowns to casual sportswear and children's clothes. Most will be superbly crafted, which isn't surprising since RISD has one of the top (okay, the top) apparel design programs in the country.

But as any RISD fashion-show veteran will tell you, it's often the more exotic ensembles, known as "innovatives," that grab most of the attention. Taped, glued, cobbled and stitched together using everything from Q-Tips to Popsicle sticks, the innovatives are something RISD requires of all its sophomore designers -- a couture crucible that tests both their fashion skills and survival instincts.

"At RISD, the sophomores spend most of their first semester learning technical skills such as sewing and draping," says apparel program head Mary Kawenski. "So by the end of the semester, most of them need a break from the real hardcore stuff. The innovative projects give them a chance to really use their imaginations, while exploring the properties of different materials."

This year, only a handful of innovative projects were deemed worthy of the "Collection 2005" runway. Among them: a full-length evening coat made from interlaced trash bags, a knee-length jacket made from stalks of Rhode Island-grown pampas grass and a vest and shorts made of hundreds of Fender guitar picks.

Then there's the Lasagna Noodle Dress.

"I really wanted to do something that no one else had done," explains Whitney Burr, a 20-year-old from Portland, Ore., who considered several other materials, including tin foil, paint chips and latex gloves, before picking pasta. "Besides, when you're working with food, you can always eat your mistakes."

But choosing a material is only the first step. What students do with it counts for far more of their final grade, and here Burr readily concedes that pasta, while perfectly fine cooked and tossed with a little oil and garlic, poses certain problems for the aspiring fashion designer.

Such as: How do I make this notoriously brittle material fit the curves and contours of a human body? And: Once I do that, how do I make sure it doesn't fall off?

Al dente design

Let's start with the first question. Burr says she initially tried boiling the lasagna noodles, but they came out too sticky.

"It was a mess," she says.

Next, Burr tried slow-cooking the pasta in the oven. This time, the results were more promising ("At least they didn't fall apart as quickly"), but still basically unusable.

Finally, Burr had a brainstorm: What if she made dress-shaped molds for the noodles to bake in before popping them into the oven?

Voila! Problem solved.

"That was the biggest moment," Burr says. "If it hadn't worked, I don't know what I would have done. But it came out perfect."

Having unlocked the secret of noodle-molding, all Burr needed was something that would hold the noodles together so that someone could actually wear them. Although the answer to this problem sounds more complicated, Burr says it was easier than figuring out how to shape the pasta.

First, she designed a short pouf-style skirt that showed off the lasagna noodles' ruffled edges while still being easy to walk in. Then she buttressed the inside of the skirt with a scaffolding of metal rods reinforced with duct tape and auto adhesive. A similar support system underlies the outfit's snug corset-like blouse.

"When I finally put it on a model, it actually held together pretty well," Burr says, "which is amazing, considering how fragile it is."

As a final touch, Burr designed a pair of pasta-bedecked shoes.

"If you're going to wear a pasta dress, you really need matching pasta shoes," she says with a smile. "Otherwise, why bother?"

Splendor in the grass

Another sophomore, Betsey Williamson, reached back to her roots -- literally -- for her innovative project. A Tiverton native, Williamson, 20, says she often noticed the tall stands of pampas grass growing wild near her home.

"In the summer, you see it growing along all the roads," she says. "Most of them time it's just sort of part of the scenery. But in the late afternoon, when the sun hits the very tops of the grass, it looks really beautiful."

On a whim, Williamson began experimenting with pampas grass. In particular, she was drawn to the plant's fluffy, pelt-like plume.

"It really has an interesting texture," she says. "When you touch it, it almost feels more like fur than part of a plant."

But working with the plumes also posed certain challenges. For one thing, they had an annoying habit of drying out and falling apart.

"They really shed a lot," she says. "Wherever I worked, there was always this pile of brown fluffy stuff on the floor."

Another problem was structure. Since Williamson didn't want to use a cloth lining to hold the plumes together ("That seemed like cheating," she says), she wound up pleating them together. The result -- a knee-length jacket made entirely of pampas grass plumes -- took nearly a month to finish. But Williamson is proud of the fact that the jacket holds its shape without resorting to a hidden lining or backing.

"I really wanted it to be just the grass and nothing else," she says. "It probably took me a little longer, but I think it came out pretty good."

Picky, picky

While Burr and Williamson both spent several weeks working on their outfits, the prize for the most labor-intensive entry in "Collection 2005" goes to Lisa Ziven, a 20-year-old jewelry and fashion designer from Los Angeles.

Her shorts-and-vest ensemble consists of some 3,000 plastic Fender guitar picks, each of which Ziven carefully drilled then stitched together with gold metallic thread. Ziven estimates the outfit, which resembles a suit of rock-star chain mail, took more than four weeks of six- to eight-hour days to finish.

"It turned out to be a lot harder than I thought," she says.

At the same time, Ziven is happy with the result.

"One of the things I was trying to do was explore how very small things can come together to form something bigger," she says. "In this case, you have these little guitar picks that, when you put them all together, form a piece of clothing. That's pretty cool."

"Collection 2005" takes place Saturday at 7 p.m. at Veterans Memorial Auditorium, Avenue of the Arts (Francis and Park streets) in Providence. Tickets are $50 for runway seats; $36 and $26 for downstairs seating; $36 for mezzanine seating; and $20 for balcony seating. ($15 tickets are also available for a 2 p.m. dress rehearsal.)

Tickets can be ordered by phone at (800) 919-6272 or online at www.tickets.com, or beginning tomorrow at (401) 272-4862. For more information, call (401) 454-6741.