A New Fashion Line on Display at Galleria Dallas is Made Almost Entirely From Trash

Plastic grocery bags and bottle caps create a ruffled and youthful look — it’s Topo chic, if you will. Old CDs, video cables and flash drives create a statement floor-length gown. The saved-from-the-garbage garments transform one man’s trash into another man’s high fashion.

Eight designs, created from at least 90% reused and repurposed materials, are on display at the annual TRASHion Show at the Galleria Dallas. The exhibit is produced by HKS Architects and Designers, headquartered in Dallas, and designs are submitted by the firm’s branches scattered across the world. The masterful looks will remain on display on the first level of the Galleria Dallas from May 4-28.

The TRASHion Show allows the fashion-curious to experience innovative fashion through sight and touch, offering inspiration for the crafty and creative to embrace sustainability. This year’s theme, ‘Avant-Camp,’ is all about over-the-top gala madness.

The TRASHion Show began in 2019 as a way for architectural design teams to draw on their varied skills with unconventional materials and apply them to fashion. The initiative emphasizes the company’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) push, an effort adopted by businesses to reinforce social consciousness in decision-making.

Teams from HKS branches in Atlanta, Denver, Mexico City and more submitted their designs. The Austin branch submitted the bottle cap vestment. A team in San Diego created a mosaic gown from retired technologies, using old receipts to create ruffled layers hung like feathers.

“This year’s Avant-Camp theme invites our designers to push creative boundaries through bold experimentation and theatrical expression,” Leanne Doore, art director and TRASHION co-chair, tells the Observer. She encourages participants to think about their consumerist footprint and be more conscious of their effects on the world.

A glorious, over-the-top cape titled “Spectrum of Abundance: The Illusion of Plenty” was designed by Doore’s Dallas team. She was inspired by food scarcity and inflation. It took about three months to create, and six months to gather the materials. Her team used everything they could find to create the seven-layer piece, including cardboard, business cards, cloth banners, food packaging and tissue paper.

The Fort Worth branch created “Cowboy Camp,” an eye-catching chaps-and-vest combo made from chip bags, paper bags and packing paper. The team of nine designers and architects had to indulge in some overabundance to get enough chip bags to create their piece. 

“We forced our office to consume, we were like, ‘Eat more,'” says team leader Michelle Walker. “The office staff guzzled down 225 bags of chips, about 45,000 calories to fulfill the material demand.”

With an old Western design pattern from a fabric store, healthy appetites for chips, a whole lot of sodium and the sewing machine skills of design team member Mackenzie Crews, the recycled wardrobe fit for the team from Cow Town was born.

In a way, TRASHion Show is creating a statement about consumerism, ironically, in a setting where rampant consumerism is part of the design model.

The Galleria, the exhibit host, won the Institute of Real Estate Management Foundation’s Jackson Control Sustainability Award in 2025. The award and the exhibit are a step forward for the future of fashion and design. Indulging in contemporary wardrobe choices can be balanced by reviving old garments with a burst of creativity, giving them new life. Frankenstein fashion has outlasted decades of fad. Vintage styles return again and again. Utilizing unconventional materials just may be the next fashion-forward phenomenon.

Participants on the design teams felt invigorated by the projects and will push forward with other creative projects utilizing recycled materials.

“I will be keeping my sewing machine out, and I’m keeping my eye out for scrap materials just to play around with,” says Crews, the architect of the chaps. “Maybe I’ll make myself another pair of pants.”

These fantastic feats of creative conservation make for a wonderful spectacle, and suggest that the future of fashion is just over the trash horizon.