The Ocean Debris Dress

It was on one of these walks with my friend Stephanie Fell (who also happens to be a clothing designer) that we decided to channel our global marine debris frustration into wearable art—a dress—and slowly, our inner artists took over.

Each beach cleanup is a treasure hunt filled with all possible colours, textures, shapes, and sizes of debris, from vibrant ropes and large tarps to translucent water bottles and abandoned beach toys.

We cleaned, dried, and sorted by colour. We built a base with an abandoned heavy-duty contractor’s trash bag to give the dress structure and coverage. We implemented rope, tarp, and caution tape to provide further functional support, and we created embellishments out of debris fragments.

The top section resembles the photic zone—the top 80-metre layer of the ocean where sunlight penetrates, allowing photosynthetic life to grow. For this part of the dress, we used green and red debris to represent seaweeds, kelp, and coral. We overlayed these with transparent plastic and tarp fibres, which portray ocean waves at the surface. We crafted a fish from an aluminum food wrapper with a pink nurdle (plastic pellet) for an eye, sea stars by cutting off the bottoms of plastic water bottles, and a fully functional purse from caution tape, with rope for a strap and a cork toggle to keep it closed.