Art to Wear, With Some Difficulty

Avrio Smart walks the catwalk in a creation by designer Amy Quinn named "Rainbow Sherbert" during...

Avrio Smart walks the catwalk in a creation by designer Amy Quinn named "Rainbow Sherbert" during the "Art to Wear" fashion show at Reynolds Coliseum on the campus of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, N.C., Thursday, April 23, 2009. (AP Photo/Karl B DeBlaker)

(AP)

One found inspiration in a half-buried hay rake in her backyard. Another took to Dumpster-diving to find pieces of fur and leather for her one-of-a-kind clothing. And yet another convinced her family to wear black leotards and dance across the stage with her metal sculptures on their backs and hips.

That's right, 15 student fashion designers for the annual "Art to Wear" show at North Carolina State University did whatever was required to get their visions to the stage — using a melange of unconventional fabrics and materials in the process.

The would-be couturiers certainly did capture one tenet of the catwalks of fashion capitals such as New York and Paris: Creativity can't be limited by what one would sell at a local boutique.

Veronica Tibbitts, for example, used raw cotton and wheat to bring to life her theme of "American Dream." Her off-white evening gown that ended in a trail of cotton with the hay rake on the end symbolized hard work.

"I liked how the hay rake worked out with that," said Tibbitts, 20, of Apex. "The weight showed the difficulty of working for what you want."

She and her father dug up the hay rake, and he helped her design a cart on wheels — conveniently hidden by the cotton that starts in a slit in the back of the dress — to help pull the 6-foot-wide piece of equipment, which she estimates to weigh about 200 pounds. She used wheat as a collar on a denim dress to represent opportunity.

"Wheat and denim are both simple fabrics, but together, they're more extravagant and unusual than materials are on their own," she said. "Both are sort of plain, blue-collar materials. But I took the wheat and used an inspiration from an Elizabethan collar to work with that material and make it much more exquisite."

The student show began in 2002 as a small event for a few hundred but has grown to one that attracted about 4,000 people this year, making its home this year in the Reynolds Coliseum that's better known as an Atlantic Coast Conference basketball court than a catwalk.