CONDOM COUTURE
There’s more than one way to wear them
Will the condom break? It’s a worry for anyone who has ever used one, including a few Saskatchewan fashion designers.
“I feel like some are going to snap or rip when you stitch through them; I don’t trust them,” Janis Procyk said last week, early in her process of making a dress out of condoms.
“It’s latex, so if you sew it, if you perforate it, it will rip,” agreed Matthew Donnelly, who also has spent the past week fashioning prophylactics. “So we’re kind of bound to not sewing and mostly gluing things.”
The two Regina-based designers are partaking in Condoms on the Catwalk, a fashion show and fundraiser event for Planned Parenthood Regina, being held Saturday at the University of Regina.
Also involved are Saskatoon designers Laurie Brown and Sherri Hrycay, Becki Bitternose of George Gordon First Nation, and Dean Renwick and Mathieu Berthiaume of Regina.
Despite her early hesitations, Procyk did sew the condoms, which proved to be “pretty durable.”
The result is a 1920s-inspired dress. Dangling condoms create a fringe on the skirt — “like a flapper dress, kind of.”
It’s a deviation from her usual style of more casual clothing for her company, Prahsik. The colour is a shift, too.
“I was kind of hoping they were going to be beige,” Procyk said, looking at hundreds of colourful contraceptives spilling from a plastic bag onto the carpet of her home-based studio.
While her designs usually tend toward neutral (or at least solid) hues, some of the condoms faded from orange to brown, or popped in green or yellow.
Despite the “gross”-ness of the chalky-textured textile, the project is “just something fun; it’s kind of an art piece. It’s a fun change to what I’m used to doing.”
Procyk opted for a cotton base for the dress, while Donnelly went a less traditional route, using a vinyl shower curtain to “honour the latex.”
It was a “safe place to start,” since he once used a shower curtain for a past design.
However, in terms of adventurous projects, “I would say that this actually kind of tops it,” said Donnelly, who used rubber cement to attach condoms to a sheer pinkishred curtain.
“I made a dress out of a rainbow flag and anchored it onto a hula hoop, which was pretty fun. I’ve gotten to work in different costumes with other weird latexes or furs or random things. But definitely this poses quite a big challenge,” Donnelly added.
“Condoms are also pretty unstable: They naturally want to curl up and shrink up, so then to stretch them or smooth them out and some of them do have rips, or it creates little air bubbles.”
Procyk had the same trouble — “the air would get locked in, so it looked like balloon animals.”
With her dress done, Procyk’s main concern is for the “poor models,” who “will probably be sweating like crazy, putting basically plastic bags all over their body.” But it’s all for a good cause. Condoms on the Catwalk is a fundraiser to support Planned Parenthood Regina, which offers sexual health services including PAP smears, pregnancy tests and various birth control options.
“I think Planned Parenthood is a really good organization. I fully support it. I think it (fulfils) a need in the community,” she said.
“Sexual health and sexual health education and personal health is so important,” Donnelly agreed.
Fashion aside, the event is a way to encourage conversation, said Kathrine Pahl-yeo, Planned Parenthood Regina’s office manager.
“I think the whole idea of the event is to help break down the taboo of the topic of sexual health,” said Pahl-yeo.
“Right now nobody’s going to go and talk about, ‘Oh yeah, I had safe sex last night.’ … So we’re just trying to break down the barriers.”
Condoms on the Catwalk starts at 7 p.m. on Saturday at the U of R Riddell Centre Shubox Theatre. Tickets are $55 and available at picatic.com/condomscatwalkpp.