Shape Changing Dress From 25+ Recycled Plastic Food Boxes (Paco Rabanne Style)

Designer Paco Rabanne (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paco_Rabanne) is known for using unconventional materials such as metal and plastic in his futuristic clothing and costume designs.

This piqued my interest, as I would like to try using different materials for clothes, especially recycled materials such as plastic. I started with a design more like a costume, with a wilder look than normal clothes.

Scouring Paco's website for Paco’s design, I noticed that some characteristics of his main style:

(1)  Repetitive, non-overlapping patterns,

(2)  Patterns made up of similar looking metal or plastic pieces. (https://fashiongtonpost.com/paco-rabanne/)

The patterns reminded me of tessellations. Tessellations are a form of geometric art where an infinite area is tiled with the same shape. Of course, Paco’s design is not strictly a tessellation, as there are small gaps for connection and flexibility reasons. You can see many tessellation patterns here (https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Tessellation.html)!

Throughout this Instructable, I will refer to each shape ready to install into the piece of clothing as a “unit.”

And without further ado, here's my costume design project in Paco Rabanne's tessellation style, made entirely with recycled materials. 

• Used clear plastic food containers. We used croissant boxes from Costco, as they have a lot of flat area. In this project, we used 25~30 croissants boxes altogether! I've had to thank the whole family for their support in eating croissants all year long!
• Mini paper clips (15mm in length). We needed 1200+ for the dress! We first used 10mm jump rings for the vest, but paper clips are more convenient, faster, and more secure.
• Zip ties (for dress only)
• Spray paint
• Scrap cardboard
• Belt (for dress only)
• Pop tubes (for dress only)
• Optional: Dress model/Female Mannequin. We made one quickly with egg cartons, zip ties, skewers, and a broke floor lamp.

Tools

• Awl
• Pliers
• Scissors

We first start with a relatively simple vest design.

Cut the flat sections out of your plastic box. The curved sides can be further cut into strips as shown. For Stage One (The Vest), we use the flat sheets. Save the curved strips for Stage Two (The Dress).

Spray paint the sheets. We chose to use silver and black.

In the vest design, we would like to use an octagon shape for the unit. 

We can fit around 6 of these octagons on a sheet of paper (see image 2). Print the octagon diagram out, then trace and cut out sturdier templates from scrap cardboard. With these cardboard templates, we can then trace octagons on the flat plastic sheet. Cut out as many octagons as you can.

Next, drill holes near each vertex as shown. This will allow us to connect the octagons to each other.

The reason we choose to use octagons is:

(1)   They can be connected with many different shapes and in many ways, like circles, but are easier to cut out than circles.

(2)   It has no sharp corners.

Lay out the units with a pattern of your choice: we choose to make a silver-to-black gradient.

Now connect pieces with jump rings/mini paper clips as shown. We made two front sections and two back sections. This process will take a lot of time.

Finally, connect the four sections.

For this vest, we used a total of 112 units, which is 6 croissant boxes saved!

Tip: Jump rings are hard to close tightly enough, and they can easily break off. That's why in the next stage, we decided to switch to mini paper clips.

Cut sections of the egg carton to make layers of the body as shown. Connect them layer by layer with zip ties.

To support the egg cartons, we used a broken floor lamp, but any sturdy and heavy pole should work. Drill holes in the center of each egg carton layer so you can poke the floor lamp through.

Add and connect arms and a head.

I'm not going to add too many details of making this mannequin in this Instructable. Leave a comment if you want to see a full Instructable of the mannequin!

After making the vest, we are left with tons of wavy, curved side pieces. What can we do with these? Maybe we can make an ocean themed dress? It could be painted various shades of green and blue with flecks of gold that will pop out beautifully. 

We also wanted to have some interesting features for this dress. We decided to use widget toy pipe tubes to attempt to allow the dress to change shape. It might not be as strong as the metal wire in crinoline, but it is more flexible and easier to use in our case.

When putting units together, there are multiple assembly options:

[1] Follow the tessellation pattern to leave almost no gap (as we did for the vest in Stage One).

[2] Intentionally leave some gaps. This is mostly done when the units are attached to an existing dress, net, or structure. It is not applicable to us.

[3] Overlapping assembled pieces.

We decided not to use a layered pattern due to material and weight restrictions.

Spray paint the sides of the boxes and the pipe tubes (fully extend them to make sure you get everything!) in shades of blue and green. Add a bit of gold paint here and there.

Cut the curved strips into units of width 2”. Each croissant box can produce a total of 36 pieces.

For each piece, cut the corner flat to avoid sharp tips.

Sort the units by color.

Connect every 2 pipes to get a support pipe.

The height of each unit is about 2.5”. Poke a pair of holes along the support pipe (still expanded) every 2.5” so you can attach the units one by one along the support pipe. This will be around 32 holes.

Tip: even if you drill the holes perfectly, the number of holes you drilled on each support pipe might not be the same due to the difference in length when each support pipe is fully expanded. This is okay and will be handled later during assembly.

Poke through the pipe at one end of the support pipe, then secure the support pipe to the belt with zip ties. 

Repeat 8 times, so you have 8 support pipes. Install these side support pipes across the belt.

The support needs 128 units in total.

We wanted to make an A-Line dress and started to attach units from the waist down, in between each pair of support pipes.

The space between every two support pipes differed, starting with either 1 or 2 units at waist level. We would like to make 15 levels, assuming that each support pipe has around 16 units. Each section between two support pipes then requires either 71 or 86 units.

(A) 1+2+2+3+3+4+4+5+5+6+6+7+7+8+8 = 71

(B) 2+3+3+4+4+5+5+6+6+7+7+8+8+9+9 = 86

It turns out we have 5 A-type sections and 3 B-type sections. So, in total, 613 units were used to build those sections.

We also used extra units for the last couple of levels so the dress would have more of a concave shape. Remember that the number of units on each support pipe might be different? The units in the last couple of levels are attached only vertically as shown, with 1 or 2 units so that the support pipes with an extra unit don't stick out. That requires at least 67 units, and we used around 100.

So altogether for the dress, we used around 841 units.

841 units is around 24 boxes, which is a lot of croissants eaten! It took a long time to collect these boxes, and it surely took a long time to make this dress!

The top of the dress requires some special consideration. This is unlike the vest, which can be loose fitting, especially since it has an open front. However, the dress's belt helps with adjusting the waist.

For the dress top, we want to have some built-in flexibility. To do this, we folded the flat sheets into simple valley and mountain patterns as shown. This design helps makes the dress fit more tightly, but allows the top to be expanded as needed.

Spray paint with some darker green and blue shades.

I tried to experiment with different color combos and chose the one I like best.

One of the styles I tried but gave up is to paint the folded sheets in a lenticular printing form, so that the dress would appear green from the left and blue from the right. However, it didn't look good placed on the dress.

We cut each flat piece into 8 rectangles, each about 2” wide.

For this fitted dress top, we assemble a bit differently.

We first connected pieces horizontally into strips as shown (orange arrows). Loop the strips around the upper body. Connect the ends (red arrows) to close the loop at the back of the dress model.

The dress top required 5 loops of different sizes to accommodate the body shape.

At the waist, we added triangular units to accommodate the expansion at the hip.

Connect all the loops vertically (blue arrow).

Next, add extra pieces for decoration and to cover up any gaps (purple arrow).

Done! You can now play around with the dress's shape by contracting or extending the support pipes!

I hope you enjoyed exploring the possibility of using recyclable materials to make costumes, and with these experiments, we can see there are some pros and cons of this costume.

Pros:

1] This design allows flexibility of size. We can add or remove pieces as we grow or lose weight.

2] We can add personalized decorations by connecting them to the dress, just like Crocs.

3] It is breathable, as there are gaps between the units.

Con:

1] It is made piece by piece, so still very time consuming!

2] It is not comfortable at all. We could consider using other materials like bubble wrap, but then the concern is breathability.

Specifically with the dress, the support pipes didn't work as well as intended. The dress is much heavier than I expected, so the support pipe can't actually hold many random/special positions. However, stretching or collapsing the pipe does effectively change the dress's shape.

It's probably too time consuming to collect all the plastic boxes, let alone actually try making this dress. But I hope you will enjoy this ffexperience I shared!