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Usually when someone talks about recycling their clothes, they mean they’ll wear them again or perhaps donate them to someone else who would find use with them.
But to 10-year-old Alia Manetta, whose family is a Laguna Beach residential customer of Waste Management of Orange County (WMOC), recycled clothing means just that: utilizing reusable and recyclable materials from around her home, she’s created four fashionable outfits out of what might otherwise be trash.
A fifth-grader at Top of the World Elementary School, Alia took on the trashy fashion project as an entry for her school’s talent show in February. Last summer, she sketched out ideas and patterns for her outfits, and began collecting materials to bring them to life.
“I usually find cool metals and stuff around the house during the summer, but I wanted to do something for the talent show,” she said. “For the outfits I mostly found stuff around the house, but I had to eat all of the candy to make the purse so I would have that.”
Such details are characteristic of Alia’s designs – the purse, covered in brightly-colored candy wrappers, accessorizes the “Liberty” ensemble, with a dress made from plastic grocery bags and accented with miniature candy boxes, lace-up boots out of bubble wrap and cardboard and a headpiece fashioned from paper towel and toilet paper rolls.
This and the other pieces – a flapper dress made from newspaper and accessorized with a hat of yogurt containers; a wedding dress from newspaper, cardboard, bubble wrap and accented with a plastic spoon and straw corsage and a hat made from packing material and egg cartons; and a spring dress made from Target shopping bags, cardboard packaging and topped off with a hat of soda cans – were modeled by Alia and three friends at the school’s talent show. She said the other students really liked the fashions and while her friends enjoyed wearing the dresses for the show, some logistical challenges, such as the inability to sit down in the wedding dress or the fact that they had to be stapled or taped into the fashions, made these particular designs somewhat impractical for daily wear.
“It is a practical idea [to wear recycled material clothing] and people should use it in the future. Some people are too normal and wouldn’t wear it, but most people like it,” Alia said. “But not to wear to school – it’s too fancy.”
WMOC community relations manager Michelle Clark read about Alia’s recycled fashions in the local newspaper and met the family at a community event. She is in the process of purchasing Alia’s original fashions for another hot commodity: an Apple Video iPod.
“Alia’s creativity and ability to reuse things that most people see as trash is amazing,” said Clark. “It’s important that we encourage young people like Alia, who wants to be an electrical engineer or inventor, to think about other uses for materials before they throw them away. I’m excited I’ll have the opportunity to share her trashy fashions with other young people in the local communities.”
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