From cardboard to couture: Portland art school students design from debris for runway event

The students, all 150 or so of them, are busy with last minute details: a bustier gone bad; a weak wing; an elaborately adorned boot that, like a certain glass slipper, won't quite fit.

Their mission: to create wearable items made entirely of cardboard. No adhesives. No material fastening or adornments made from anything other than the cardboard itself. That's it. Cardboard.

One student slept only two hours the night before — such was her commitment to carry off this cardboard caper.

Most of the students appear runway ready, which is good, because the music is playing. And the show is about to begin.

So starts Cardboard Couture, an event, if not colorful — it is, after all, cardboard — then surely creative.

The assignment, complete with its grand finale runway show, is a right of passage of sorts. It was conceived as part of a 3D design course, a requirement for incoming freshman at Pacific Northwest College of Art at Willamette University. Now in its 15th year, Cardboard Couture is the brainchild of David Eckard.

Eckard, who is chair of the sculpture department at the school and who teaches the class, came up with the idea of working with cardboard as much to create a shared experience for the students as to expand their thinking beyond what many students typically consider possible.

Using cardboard to create couture "came out of a kind of respect for freshman budgets," Eckard said. "There's no risk, no commitment. We aren't carving with ebony wood," he said.

"If it doesn't work out, no problem. We just go the dumpster and find more cardboard."

The limitations of the assignment are entirely the point, Eckard said. "You really push your creativity with limitations. All I have is a razor knife and a box."

This creates problems and with that, an "inventive kind of problem solving."

It also prompts a "cognitive switch from 2D to 3D," he added.

Meghann Gilligan, assistant director of public programs & events at the school, also teaches 3D design to the school's freshmen class.

"They really learn a lot about playing with materials and thinking about materials in a different way," Gilligan said.

"Cardboard's really stiff and I wanted some movement," said Sophia Oluokun, a sculpture major who is minoring in fashion design. Oluokun, who made feathered boots and a flower belt for the class, estimates she crafted "about 12 feathers every three hours" for the boots.

"It was worth it," she said, just minutes before strutting down the runway, "because there is a bunch of movement in the feathers."

Music fills the halls of PNCA's Northwest Broadway location, where the fashion show is about to begin. Gilligan readies herself at the start of the runway, camera in hand.

"The runway aspect really adds a kind of art school drama, which we love," Gilligan said.

– Beth Nakamura