Japanese designer Pico has combined her love of cats and handbags to create a line of highly realistic faux feline purses. The bags are shaped like furry, adorable kitties complete with individual markings, whiskers, and tails. Each cat-bag is priced at about $500 to $700, but buyers don’t seem to mind the steep pricing at all. In fact, the designs are taking social media by storm with thousands of admirers scrambling to buy their own. Each bag is hand-made by Pico herself – she sews the white faux fur together and then airbrushes the completed cats with acrylic paint to give them individual markings. Her most popular design is the black, white and caramel colored cat-bag with yellow eyes and a pink nose. She sells them at 83,000 yen ($685) apiece. The grey cat-bag, resembling a British Shorthair, is slightly cheaper at 66,000 yen ($545). She is currently working on a black cat design with a masculine face. Read More »

It seems like the elderly are embracing fashion like never before. After Gunther Krabbenhoft, who charmed the internet with his sense of style, and Baddie Winkle, the coolest-dressing grandma online, we now have 80-year-old Liao Dezhong – an amateur designer who models his own eccentric dresses. Dezhong, a widower from Sichuan Province, has designed over 10 garments so far, including a long white dress and a cotton print dress that went viral. His tryst with design began after he lost his cellphone to a pickpocket. He then tried to stitch additional pockets and zippers into his outfits, and eventually started designing clothes himself. Loose, flowing dresses with plenty of pockets are now his trademark style. Read More »

Kristen Alyce is an eco-conscious designer who converts all kinds of trash, like discarded drink cartons, leaflets and concert tickets, into fashionable outfits for women. Her quirky designs include all sorts of clothing – right from cocktail dresses to floor length gowns, made under her label ‘Garbage Gone Glam’. Kristen said that she started dreaming about recycling garbage into garments when she was still in college, after realizing just how much trash we humans produce every single day. “I realized as a college student living with three girls, we created so much waste it was incredible,” she said. “So I started saving the mass amounts of plastic bags, magazines, boxes and packaging we went through on a daily basis.” Read More »

Japanese designer Kiyoyuki Amano has combined fashion and technology to create futuristic short skirts that illuminate the wearer’s thighs. Aptly named ‘Hikaru Skirt’, which means ‘Shining Skirt’, the garment comes equipped with LED lights and the miniature gyro sensors on the inside. So the skirt lights up, and the color and pattern of the light changes every time the wearer moves. Amano said that he first placed light bulbs inside a skirt on a whim, and that’s when he noticed that it created a pleasant illumination of the thighs. So he worked on the design some more and soon created a whole line of LED-illuminated minis. The Hikaru skirts, he said, are meant to bridge the gap between everyday fashion and cosplay. Read More »

Israeli artist Maor Zabar’s creations look deceptively delicious, but they are meant to be worn not devoured. He uses felt, plastic and wire to create incredibly realistic models of delicious dishes and incorporates them into fashionable headgear. Some of his clever designs include a berry pie beret, an outdoor picnic fascinator, and even a salad sombrero. 36-year-old Zabar began designing the hats a couple of years ago, when he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. “When I discovered I had Crohn’s disease, I was forced to start a special diet and was unable to eat many of the foods I have always loved,” he revealed. “So instead of eating them, I created them out of felt and fibers and made them into beautiful fascinators.” And although he’s cured of his illness now, he still loves adding new designs to his Food Hat Collection. Read More »

‘Haute Butch’ is an up-and-coming fashion line developed by Napa Valley designer Karen Roberts. It caters to women and who prefer a masculine edge to their clothes, but have trouble with the fit of men’s clothing. Roberts, who studied fashion merchandising before enlisting in the U.S. Navy, had always found herself disappointed with the sartorial choices available for butch women. “I knew I was really good at what I did but what I wore really ate away at my confidence,” the 52-year-old said. During the time that she worked in real estate, she would often dress herself in rolled-up men’s blazers, rolled-up slacks, and a rolled-up dress shirt. Everything she wore just felt awkward and wrong when compared with her female colleagues’ chic business casual attire. Read More »

Doris Carvalho, an entrepreneur from Tampa, has come up with an original way of combining her two greatest passions – veterinary science and fashion. She recycles dog hair that’s left over from grooming, converting it into high-end designer purses.

Doris loves her new job so much that she hopes to convert it into a business – she’s currently running a Kickstarter campaign to raise $15,000 toward that exact purpose. That’s just enough money to make her first line of 30 purses and pay for marketing.

“These handbags prove that high-end can be made eco-friendly from your pet for you,” she pointed out. “I turn this groomed dog fur that would be garbage anywhere else in the world into these handbags. I sterilize and I use them to make the thread, the yarn. It’s reused, recycled.”

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This white wedding dress is so elaborate  and stunning that you’re never going to believe what it’s made of – toilet paper. The one-of-a-kind dress was created by art student Olivia Mears, from Asheville, North Carolina. She used only 11 rolls of toilet paper, 100 ft. of tape and lots of glue to put the whole thing together.

The dress was made for a local event called the Annual Cheap Chic Toilet Paper Wedding Dress Contest, sponsored by Charmin, a toilet paper company. “I learned about the contest with only a few weeks to prepare the dress,” said Olivia. So she worked on the project for about 20 hours, and came up with a real winner.

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Artist Kirstin Bunyard has managed to blend her two great passions – fashion and dissection – into a morbid yet intriguing art form. Kirstin makes high-end, elegant jewelry (rings, bracelets and necklaces) using natural bones. In 2009, she started her own label called Ossuaria Jewelry, through which she sells her handmade accessories. She personally selects the bones for each piece and fashions them by hand to create ‘bold and dramatic adornments’ that are meant for ‘people with a bit of an eccentric side’. Kirstin has a background in criminology, but she was always interested in fashion as well. “From the time I was 10 years old, I knew I wanted to be a fashion designer,” she said. Her dream was to ‘take on the world of punk culture and high fashion’. She sketched all the time, waiting for the day when her creations would be displayed on the runway. But by the time she got to college, her life had taken a different course. After college, Kirstin worked for a short while as an autopsy assistant and attended several autopsies and embalmings. During this time she developed a great admiration for bones – the structures that support the body. She found them so elegant and alluring that she began to believe that they deserved a more prominent place outside the body. That’s when she seriously began to consider shifting her line of work. Read More »

Richard Schaefer is a talented costume design major at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles, but he’s also a huge fan of Disney fairy-tale characters, so he spends a lot of his time creating real-life costumes of princes and princesses. The young Disney costume maker is also quite androgynous, and he knows it. So in addition to creating the costumes, wigs and accessories of all his favorite characters, Richard is also very capable of showing them off on himself. In fact the popularity of Ariel’s Grotto, his Tumblr photo blog, went through the roof after photos of a prince to princess transformation starring Richard as the model were picked up by popular media outlets like Buzzfeed. He used a lot of makeup to slip into the skin of Disney princesses, but the result is nothing short of impressive. One could say he does a better job playing the princesses that he does the princes. Read More »

Lisa Dickinson, owner of Manchester florist Venus Flowers, and her team of four florists spent over a week planning and working on a magnificent dress made entirely of flowers. The blooming gown was worn by Boss Model Eleanor Davies during the opening of  this year’s Dig the City festival. We’ve featured a variety of unique garments in the past, from the prom dress made of homework to the fur coat made of chest hair, but few of them were as lovely as the flower dress created by Lisa Dickinson. When the organizers of  Dig the City, Manchester’s urban gardening festival, asked her to create the unique garment, Lisa admits she felt the task daunting, but once she started planning it became fun. “The challenge was to keep the dress looking fresh for as long as possible, the trick to making the dress endure was to use flowers that wouldn’t wither and die after a few hours, so I made the full skirt of the dress out of wax flowers—which is a really tough shrub—but with delicate sprays of flower heads,” the talented florist explains.

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Canadian actress Jori Phillips spent months tearing pages out of an old thesaurus and gluing them together to create an awe-inspiring strapless paper dress. After uploading photos of her wearing the unique garment to Reddit, she garnered more attention than she had ever hoped for. Two years ago, Jori Phillips was asked by a committee member for the Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival if she could design a bookworm costume to greet visitors during the four-day event. A bookworm herself, Jori decided the best way to do it was to make a dress almost entirely from book pages. So she started scouring thrift stores for the perfect book for the job, and finally found an old thesaurus. Although she doesn’t remember exactly how many hours she put into making her stunning dress, the aspiring actress says she through two full seasons her favorite television show, How I Met Your Mother, tearing, folding and gluing pages. Lined with fabric and featuring a bodice for body support, Jori’s recycled dress is completely covered with hundreds of yellowed pages from thesaurus sections A through O. “It feels quite comfy actually,if not a little hot, although its hard to move without ripping it,” Jori says. “The parts that are scaled are actually the parts that don’t move. It has pages bunched up on the parts that stretch so they sorta inchworm out when it moves.” Read More »

Spanish fashion designer Manel Torres is the man behind the world’s first spray-on clothing, which is applied directly on the body and can be washed and worn again just like your regular clothes. It may sound like something out of a futuristic film, but Manel Torres actually patented his amazing spray-on clothing back in the year 2000. He came up with this original idea while studying for his MA in Fashion Women’s Wear, at the Royal College of Art, London. Torres was aware of the slow process of creating regular garments, from weaving the actual fabric to dyeing it and tailoring the clothing items, so he tried to come up with “a futuristic, seamless, quick and comfortable material.” I’m sure most of you can come up with even more outrageous concepts than a spray-on fabric, but the Spanish designer was determined to make his a reality. Since he had no real knowledge of chemistry he sought the help of scientists at the London Imperial College, and after years of research and testing, Manel invented the spray that turns into a wearable second skin in contact with the human body. Read More »

If you’re looking for a pair of comfortable designer gloves, stay away from Sruli Recht’s pain-inducing mitts. The Australian designer used an inner lining made of basking shark skin, which features thousands of hook-like scales. From the outside, Sruli Recht’s Lasting Impression looks like a nice and soft basking shark skin glove, but there’s a thorny surprise waiting inside for would-be wearers. The eccentric designer decided to fit the interior of his creation with thousands of sharp hook-like scales, all directed inward. That means the gloves are easy to put on, but literally a pain to take off. “Should you put your hand in, you will discover that the thorns, all directed to slant inward, will lock your hand in place in the manner of ten thousand fishhooks. Should you attempt to remove it, the thousands of thorns will bite into the skin. You can put the gloves on, but to remove them would mean to cut them off. Gloves for life, or for one wear – the ultimate and final commitment,” Recht writes on his website. Of course, you could always cut it off to avoid experiencing the excruciating pain, but then again, you would be throwing a good $950 right off the window. I say pull the hand out! Yes, you’ll probably faint from the pain, but you will have ripped off most of the spikes, and ended up with a nice, comfortable glove. Plus, you’ll feel like a real man… Read More »

Australian fashion designer Stephanie Wilson married her high-school sweetheart in a unique dress made from 100,000 plastic bread tags she had collected over the last 10 years. Stephanie Wilson and Will Wapling met and became friends while attending Belmont High School in Geelong. After completing Year 12, the two became a couple and moved in together. Stephanie remembers there was a pile of bread tags on the window sill of their home which they kept adding to. She and Will used to joke that when there were enough tags to make a wedding dress they would get married. It may have been a joke to them, but as soon as people found out about their plan they started collecting bread tags and giving them to the lovebirds. At one point, they were getting so many that Stephanie had to get bigger jars to store them in. Then, 10 years later, they realized their idea wasn’t so crazy after all, and decided to go through with it. Having dozens of jars full of plastic tags sitting in their home, Stephanie and Will were sure they had enough bread tags to make the dress. It turned out they were wrong, but luckily the groom-to-be had a baker cousin who came to the rescue with rolls of fresh tags. Read More »