Banner design
Students turn banners into wearable art
Lower Mainland high school students took the challenge of repurposing old street lamp banners into fun, stylish accessories and garments.
Challenged to turn garbage into fashion, a group of high school students found brilliant ways to transform discarded lamp post street banners into upcycled couture and in the process stretched their creative thinking muscle for the good of the world.
Twenty- one high school students from seven Lower Mainland schools created an impressive array of fashionable items out of discarded banners as part of a sustainability project organized by university students.
“They are so creative,” says Xinyan Chen, an Simon Fraser University business student who put out the challenge to the younger students as part of the Students In Free Enterprise ( SIFE) Club initiative Banner Bags.
The project began four years ago when the SIFE club brought old banners to high school sewing classes and taught them how to turn them into bags as a way to introduce them to a new way of thinking about garbage.
“Making banners into bags is a way for them to really learn why it is important to think up creative solutions to any social problem,” says Chen, adding they chose bags in past years because any student from Grade 8 to 12 could do it.
But for its fourth year, the SIFE club took the project up a notch and specifically targeted students interested in fashion and textile design.
Given the freedom to make whatever they wanted, the students came up with a fantastic collection, including two high fashion gowns with a subtle Canucks theme, a trench coat, peplum jacket and an umbrella cover.
Chen, a non- sewer, is impressed with the results. “To give them these banners and have them turn out something like this is so amazing,” she says adding they are a far cry from the bags made up until now. The student’s work will be showcased Thursday at Dale B Regehr Grand Hall at SFU’S Surrey campus. They will be judged by a panel of experts, and the top students will earn scholarships toward tuition to the fashion school of their choice.
To date, the Banner Bags team has saved more than 1,400 pounds of nylon from going into local landfills, avoiding the equivalent of 35,000 pounds of CO2 emissions, and have saved “banner” companies approximately $ 2,750 in disposal costs.