This story originally appeared in The Centre County Gazette.
Third-year Penn State student Irena Potochny merged her love of fashion design with sustainability to create a fashion show that included only sustainable pieces of clothing. Potochny’s “Conscious Couture” fashion show hit the runway on Wednesday, July 24, at Schlow Centre Region Library.
Potochny, a material science and engineering major with a minor in sustainability leadership, created “Conscious Couture” as her capstone project for her minor.
“When I first started at Penn State, I wasn’t sure what to do with my major, but I knew I wanted the sustainability leadership minor,” she said.
At the end of Potochny’s second year at Penn State, she realized she wanted to go into textiles.
During the fashion show, Potochny displayed eight looks, each with one or more sustainable items. Throughout, Potochny provided videos of her creating each piece and explained how each look was sustainable.
The pieces varied in style and in level of formality, from reconstructed sweaters and patchwork jeans to a prom dress she created for her senior prom and a floor-length skirt made from a fitted sheet and a curtain.
One piece displayed in the show was a shirt made out of an airline blanket. She created the top using a three-cut pattern, which allowed for minimal product waste.
Potochny’s last look was a skirt made from a SCOBY — a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast. SCOBY is typically used to make kombucha. The look also featured a purse made from mycelium, which is a network of threads or hyphae.
Potochny started collecting the SCOBY in May from Moody Culture Kombucha, which sells its products at various locations in State College. Moody Culture passed out free kombucha during the event.
“They were willing to just give me the SCOBY since it’s a byproduct of kombucha and they would just throw it away,” Potochny explained.
Potochny then let the SCOBY sit out after rinsing it with water and applied a mixture of wet beeswax and coconut oil on it.
The purse featured in the look was made of mycelium, which Potchny had grown for her in a lab at Penn State.
“You kind of put it out and take it out of the freezer, propagate a few spores and just let it grow from there,” Potochny said. “You have to process it in a solution for a few hours and it was able to create this darker leather.”
Potochny interacted with the audience throughout the show, prompting the audience to tell the people next to them where their clothing was from and how many times they had worn that article of clothing.
“Every second, a garbage truck full of textile waste is being thrown into a landfill,” one of Potochny’s slides stated.
Audience members were also asked to bring an article of clothing to the fashion show for a clothing swap.
“I wanted to teach the audience how easy it can be to make more conscious decisions, and it was a great opportunity for them to start immediately after the show,” Potochny said.
Potochny shared facts and statistics regarding how not being conscious of our clothing is affecting the earth.
She also shared how she realized that individual action could affect climate change after a trip to Belize with the Green Program, a sustainability-focused study-abroad opportunity.
“These women started the LeSean Women’s Seaweed Farmers Association, where traditionally seaweed is only grown by men,” Potochny said. “Meeting those people, at the end of the trip, I realized that individual action does make a difference.”
She discussed how she wanted to provide that same feeling for Centre County. “I really think we could benefit from viewing new ways to use and wear our clothing,” Potochny said.
