Incredible edible dress wins fashion award

An edible dress won the Technology Innovation Award of 2021 during China Graduate Fashion Week recently. One thing is for sure: It has plenty of healthy fiber.

The dress, designed by Tang Danyang, a 23-year-old student from the Department of Fashion Design of Changchun Humanities and Sciences College, is made of fiber extracted from spinach instead of traditional fiber.

Tang began creating the new material in August and completed the dress after dozens of failures.

"With the improvement of living standards, I found that people choose to throw away some fruits and vegetables that were wilted or not so fresh" she said. "I thought it was quite wasteful. So I wondered whether I could try to make a dress from the fiber of vegetables and fruits, as I found that the fiber of some vegetables and fruits is very similar to the fiber used to make clothes," she said, adding that these clothes will be more environmentally friendly and safe because they use no chemicals when they are dyed.

Then Tang began testing various fruits and vegetables, such as apples, dragon fruit, cucumbers, carrots and spinach.

"I needed to squeeze them to get juice," she said. "Then I had to strain out the water and try to make the fiber as dry as possible."

She found fiber from the spinach was the most suitable for making clothes.

However, she met another problem in finding a suitable material to hold the fibers together. To stick to her original intention of making environmentally friendly and safe clothes, she chose syrup instead of chemicals.

In January, she successfully completed her first dress using the new material.
"It was not a perfect design, but it meant my idea was feasible," she said.
"Then I began to pay attention to the design."

After several modifications, Tang brought her fourth dress to 2021 China Graduate Fashion Week and won the award.

"I will continue my research on the subject, hoping to contribute to the popularization of more environmentally friendly and safe clothes," she said.