An artist has fashioned an elaborate wedding gown using nothing but 11 rolls of toilet paper, 100 ft of tape and a hefty quantity of glue.
Olivia Mears, an art student based in Asheville, North Carolina, built her creation for the annual Cheap Chic Toilet Paper Wedding Dress Contest, sponsored, naturally, by Charmin.
‘I learned about the contest with only a few weeks to prepare the dress’, she tells MailOnline, estimating that she probably spent around 20 hours working on it.
Ms Mears, who says she creates a lot of Victorian and fantasy inspired pieces as part of her artworks, wanted to incorporate the same magical theme into the dress.
‘Based on Victorian ball gowns I decided on a tiered train, embroidered corset style bodice, and the layers of roses and ruffles’, she explains.
‘But to make it more contemporary I dropped the sleeves, let the bottom drape down naturally, and opened the front of the dress.
The resulting gown is certainly a spectacle to behold; an eruption of frothy frills, built around a sturdy bodice and finished with intricate weavings of gold tape.
Fragile as it may appear, Ms Mears says that the inside of the dress was reinforced with packaging tape, so it wasn’t too much at risk of ripping, although it did require ‘a lot of wiggling’ to get into it for the photographs.
Her sharp-clawed feline friend, on the other hand, posed obvious risks.
‘I sacrificed a roll of toilet paper to my cat before starting on the dress, and he took another while I wasn’t looking. He was occupied with that for a while’, she says.
The dress didn’t win last year’s Charmin contest but it came 15th out of more than 1,400 entries, and Ms Mears plans to re-enter this year, with a lot more preparation time to play with.
Currently, she is a student at Western Carolina University for Art Education and considers fashion and design as more of a ‘hobby’ for now.
‘At the moment, I’m just enjoying teaching art to young students and inspiring them to create their own unique pieces after seeing what I do’, she states.
Still, she dreams of one day going to Los Angeles to become a costume designer, and making a career out of her nifty skills. One she’d be do very well in, if her unique take on a Chic Cheap wedding dress is anything to go by.
Source: Daily Mail