An upcycled ‘trashion’ show: How SLCC students are making fashion more sustainable

SALT LAKE CITY — The fashion industry produces somewhere in the neighborhood of 10% of our annual global carbon emissions, according to multiple environmental organizations.

The Fashion Institute at Salt Lake Community College celebrated Earth Day 2024 on Monday with a demonstration of how sustainable practices are well within reach and of ways the everyday person can do their part to help save the world.

The college recognized Earth Day with a daylong celebration displaying the fashion institute’s commitment to teaching students how to utilize environmentally mindful practices in their future careers.

“Fast fashion is one of the top contributors to climate change and the destruction of our planet — the fashion industry creates so much waste,” said Peter Moosman, who helped with the event and works as the school’s Gender and Sexuality Student Resource Center manager. “We wanted to engage people in a conversation about the Earth in a fashionable way.”

The celebration, titled “Earth Couture, Fashioning a Sustainable Future,” featured a student-led fashion show where Salt Lake Community College students used recycled, upcycled and repurposed clothing to create new fashion pieces. Additionally, workshops on dyeing, printing, and garment alteration were led by college staff members through the afternoon. The school even gathered racks of discarded clothing for students and guests to alter and repurpose.

“Fashion is never going away, but it’s literally not sustainable the way it is now — we can’t sustain this amount of waste and this amount of production; it’ll inevitably destroy the planet,” said Amy Royer, a sustainability and textiles professor at Salt Lake Community College.

Royer explained that students at the fashion institute are required to take a course on sustainability. She believes it’s important to imbue fashion students with the skills and the mindset to go forth in their careers to make positive changes in the fashion industry to increase its sustainability.

Students in the sustainability class this year showed off their newfound skills in sustainable practices at the “trashion” show Monday. Students were given a $5 budget to shop at a local Goodwill store and create a repurposed piece for the show, Royer explained.

Students used anything from old pieces of clothing belonging to family members to antique tablecloths to craft inventive looks all as a way to inspire onlookers to think twice before they throw out a piece of clothing or determine it to be ruined because of a stain or rip.

“A lot of this event’s purpose was to inspire creativity and to get people to think before they throw something away and see if there’s a new way that they could use it,” said Moosman, explaining how fast fashion has accelerated a habit in consumers to throw clothes away every year in exchange for the newer, trendier clothes, which in turn causes the discarded clothes to pile up in landfills.

Salt Lake Community College’s Fashion Institute and its staff members recommend that everyone look into ways of upcycling or reusing their old clothes instead of throwing them away. Clothes can be altered in a number of fashionable ways including hemming, patching and altering the length of a garment, to name a few methods.

“We want to tell people to not support these fast-fashion brands and instead try thrifting or upcycling old clothes,” Royer said, explaining that she hopes that events like these go on to inspire people to practice more sustainable fashion habits.