A talented Japanese art student has created a mantua-inspired life-size dress exclusively out of thousands of plastic senbei wrappers.

The mantua fashion of the 17th and 18th century Europe was one of the most flamboyant and elaborate in human history, but that didn’t stop one very talented art student from recreating one such life-size dress using only “Happy Tour” plastic senbei wrappers. It’s unclear how long Twitter user @nokyo spent collecting and piecing together the 4,000 or so wrappers used for this unique dress, but he clearly put a lot of time and effort into the project.

Photo © @nokyo

Kyo posted the photos of his amazing plastic wrapper dress on Twitter on January 18, and they went viral almost instantly. That’s not very surprising, considering the material used and how cool it turned out. Before long, the dress was featured Japanese online pop-culture portal Kai-You, and from there it was picked up by major outlets like Yahoo! and Livedoor.

The meticulous designer told Kai-You that he loves the taste of Happy Tour senbei (traditional Japanese rice crackers), but couldn’t source the necessary 4,000 individual plastic wrappers himself. He asked for help from friends and family, who were more than happy to assist him by feasting on the tasty treats. In total, about 150 bags worth of senbei wrappers were used for this project.

But it was the nature of the wrapper that inspired Kyo to create this amazing dress. Usually, people just care about the treat inside the packaging, so the tiny wrapper is usually discarded without a second thought. The dress is the artist’s way of giving the humble plastic wrapper a chance to shine for a change.

If you’re squinting to see where Kyo used sticky tape to link all the wrappers together, you’re wasting your time. The young artist used a heat-sealer to heat-bond the wrappers together without any adhesive.