The 'trashy' look

Chip bags, old bottle caps take on new life with fashion student

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Next time you finish noshing on some Fritos, Doritos or Lay's potato chips, you may wish to consider that the lined foil bag could be put to a greater use if you sent it to Corina Romero instead of popping it into the trash can.

The 24-year-old Sunrise Manor resident is a fashion design major at the International Academy of Design and Technology in Henderson and recently presented a colorful statement in a runway show -- a complete, and very colorful, flouncy outfit created from empty snack packaging.

Now she's finishing an array of eight pieces, including three swimsuits, with a bottle cap motif. One is reddish and decorated with dozens of Budweiser caps, and a green Heineken outfit is on the way.

Romero made it clear that these are showpieces. It's not likely, even on the Strip, that you're going to see someone strolling along like an animated collation of corn chip wrappers, and the bathing suits are definitely not for actual swimming. "They'd probably sink in the water," Romero said, laughing. "The Budweiser is really heavy. Well, not really heavy, but heavy enough."

One piece will be a denim dress, with the entire skirt arranged from bottle caps. "The others are very costumey, but they involve bottle caps, too," the Las Vegas native said.

Romero earned her associate's degree in fashion design at IADT's Tampa, Fla., campus, and is now working to finish up her bachelor's degree by March.

She came to fashion early on, when she was active in her high school Distributive Education Clubs of America club. "They had a fashion category," Romero said. "I won state competitions twice in two years, and I was in the top 10 nationally in 1999. I like fashion, but I'm really into costume design. No boundaries, no rules to abide by."

To Carolyn Thomas, program chairman for fashion at the Henderson school, that is the whole point for students like Romero. "This is the only time in their career when they can really expand their thoughts, use unusual fabrics. They don't have to sell it, so they can create," Thomas said recently as several students worked in the fashion design lab, cutting out their ideas on brown butcher paper among tables with industrial-strength sewing machines and seam sergers and hangers suspending muslin mock-ups of their designs.

Romero said she and a friend in Florida were just chatting about some of their fashion thoughts when the idea of using food wrappers as fabric came up.

"I clean them, put them on top of the stove, and they shrivel up to the size I want them to be," she explained. When finished, the bags feel somewhat like hard, vulcanized rubber. "When they were dry, I hand -sewed them into a skirt."

While her ideas aren't going to show up in stores, Romero said they may lead to advertisement use, productions for television, or even the movies, which is a direction in which she'd like to aim. "I definitely want to do internships in the movies and see how I do," she said.

Earlier in life, Romero was thinking about careers other than fashion. "My first dream was actually to sing," she said, "up until I was 14. I actually got to sing on a friend's album about 10 years ago."

But the inspiration toward fashion had been there all along in the form of her grandmother Emilia Sataray. "She's a seamstress in Mexico," Romero said. "She always used to do all my mom's clothes and my aunt's clothes. She's more of an inspiration. She'll measure you by looking at you and with her hands. She doesn't draw a pattern, she goes right to the cloth. She'd done it for so many years, she has her own techniques."

Creating the bathing suits, with each bottle cap hand drilled and sewn on, took about two to four days apiece, while producing the finished potato chip bag skirt was a more complicated task on which she spent about two weeks.

"A lot of people asked me, 'Did you eat all those chips?' No way," Romero said. "The 'potato chip girl,' yeah, that's all right."

"This one's unique," Thomas said of Romero's efforts. "I haven't seen this."

Thomas said Romero's next project will be a town around the bottom of a dress. "She's going to have her skirt, and the buildings are going to stand out from the skirt," Thomas said.

It is not going to be a simple task, and Thomas said they have been trying to match fabrics that will allow for the project to reach fruition. "Design is problem-solving," Thomas said. "That's where the creativity comes in."

"We actually bought some fabric in Los Angeles," said Romero, who refers to the upcoming project as her "Broadway dress."

The pieces will all enjoy a New York motif, complete with a battery pack and electric lights in the windows.

Asked just how many chip bags went into the design of her food-wrap pieces, Romero tried to estimate, and then admitted, "I never counted."