Top: Susan McCaslin's shift dress, made from discarded issues of the New York Times and sumi ink. Bottom: Fraser. Lucy Gellman Photos.
On the Tuesday morning Rebekah Fraser opens the door to 63 Audubon St., the temperature is already in the high 80s, and only climbing. Outside, the air is still and heavy, the kind of humid that sticks to one’s skin like shrinkwrap. Inside, the mannequins are quiet, as if they have been sleeping.
When the lights come on, their clothes come alive: a vest fashioned from an old target bag makes conversation with a dress that was once a shiny plastic tablecloth. A pair of lopsided button eyes and construction paper fangs turn an upside down bottle of laundry detergent into a face. A dish scrubber has been reborn as a fascinator hat, with little bits of old costume jewelry that sparkle in the light.
None of these objects are among the 92 million tons of clothes that are creating more hot, humid days like this one. Instead, they are part of a “Trash To Fashion” movement to encourage upcycling—reusing fabric, fiber, and plastic otherwise bound for the landfill—among New Haveners as the world wrestles with an overconsumption epidemic.
It might be small, Fraser is the first to say, but it’s doing something at a moment when overwhelm can lead to apathy.
Trash to Fashion’s mission is to create zero waste events, which means touches like reclaimed food from Haven’s Harvest, composting from Peels & Wheels’ Domingo Medina, donated glassware from Goodwill and pieces of clothing that would otherwise be trash.
Top: Tea Montgomery, Hooded Raincoat/Dress, made from an old vinyl tablecloth lined with stretch fabric. Bottom: Faustin Adeniran, Mask with wire, aluminum and plastic bits, and old scrubbing pads.
Their first home, the exhibition Trash To Fashion, runs through August 17 at 63 Audubon St. in New Haven. Their second home, dedicated entirely to “trashion,” will take place October 11 at Bregamos Community Theater, during New Haven’s inaugural Trash to Fashion Workshop & Ball. Tickets will be available soon; more information is available at the organization’s Substack or on Instagram.
It is the brainchild of Fraser, a climate writer, visual artist and novelist who is extremely thrifty in her own life. Collaborators include designers Donald Carter, Tea Montgomery, Soule Golden, Faustin Adeniran, Susan McCaslin, Ragnar Seidel-Zieher, Derek Faulkner and Catherine Cazes-Wiley.
“This is about building community,” Fraser said in a recent interview on WNHH Radio’s “Arts Respond,” rocking earrings made from upcycled window screens and miniature rubber ducks that she found in Edgewood Park. “What we’re really trying to encourage is a sense of exploration in community. Like, let’s build skills together, let’s explore, let’s come and let’s celebrate.”
That’s been years in the making, she added. Growing up, Fraser was crafty by design, with an interest in tinkering that bloomed into a bent towards the visual and literary arts. As a kid, “I would take apart the radio and put it back together,” with a knack for storytelling that is now clear in her novels. She liked to crochet miniature clothes for her Barbie dolls, tiny shirts and dresses that now feel way before their time.
She didn’t always make the connection between the clothing she wore, the products she used on her body, the clothes she bought and the climate crisis. Then in the 1990s, she learned about organic food for the first time. It opened her eyes to the impact that chemical pesticides and practices like monoculture farming have on not just human health, but also the health of the planet. She began to think critically about how her own choices as a consumer were affecting the place that she, with millions of other humans, calls home.
Top: Soule Golden's raincoat. Bottom: A vest fashioned by Derek Faulkner, from a repurposed target bag and bottle cap buttons.
Over a decade later, she was working as a climate reporter, and landed an assignment on land mines in coffee growing regions of the world. As she was reporting the story, one of her sources pointed to Indigenous populations in Colombia and Nicaragua, whose relationship with the planet is one of kinship, rather than extraction. “These people view land mines as a rape of the earth,” they told her.
The words stayed with her, and so did the subject. From that initial story, Fraser took on assignments that explored how humans were actively destroying the planet, from electronic waste to food waste to inadequate composting efforts. Where she could, she applied what she was learning to her own life, cutting down on unnecessary plastic use (she now recommends shampoo bars, which New Haveners can find at Edge of the Woods) and turning would-be trash items into clothing.
“We are putting things into landfills that are actually resources, and so there tends to be a lot of scarcity mindset in the culture,” she said. “Like, ‘Oh, I don’t have enough of this. My refrigerator’s only half-full, I need to get more food.’ Well in Connecticut alone, households throw away 1.06 billion pounds of food a year. And that food … very often, it’s perfectly edible.”
“All these choices that people make without thinking about it, that come from these stories we tell ourselves that are just like … we could tell ourselves more helpful stories,” she said.
Top: A trashion dress from Fraser, made from a polyester tablecloth, plastic packaging and fruit netting. Bottom: Soule Golden's wrap.
Trash To Fashion, which is both an exhibition and a fiscally sponsored project, grew out of that. For years, Fraser had a blog called “Conscious Cow,” that was dedicated to “interesting ways to keep things out of landfills.” She thrifted. She attended clothing swaps. She worked on her sewing skills.
She also started giving would-be pieces of trash—old credit cards, hole-riddled linen tablecloths, discarded lace, window screens, extra insulation, food wrappers—new life. An old, sat-on pair of heart-shaped glasses became a pair of earrings. A car’s cracked mirror transformed into part of a skirt. Used teabags, bits of costume jewelry, discarded lace and empty plastic jugs transformed into pieces of headwear.
This spring, she and members of a Trash to Fashion team presented their work at the 2025 Yale Innovation Summit, where the pitch soared. The show at 63 Audubon St.—an unexpected gift, Fraser said—opened just months later, when the space offered her a month-long block of time during the summer. In lockstep with the mission, Fraser has held a series of workshops, from “Think Like A Trashionista” with designer Deb Wolff to a “trashinator” (yes reader, that’s a fascinator made of trash) workshop and fundraiser at EcoWorks at the end of the month.
“It’s about learning the process and practicing as a group, in community,” Fraser said. “Having fun with it.”
Designs by Carter (top) and Montgomery (bottom).
The objects, of which there is a growing collection, tell that story in real time—and encourage their viewers to take the trashion narrative into their own hands. Just beyond the building’s heavy glass doors, McCaslin has designed a vibrant, finely detailed shift dress from discarded newspapers and sumi ink, with large white polka dots that stand out from the paper.
Look closely, and the magic is in the details: text scrolls across the chest, the neat and narrow hips, the skirt, with those huge serif letters reserved for headlines scattered throughout. A woman’s upside-down face, suddenly painterly, looks out from the collar. The stitching is so neat that it takes a second for a viewer to realize that the fabric is paper, the same kind they or their friend or colleague may have tossed in the trash hours earlier.
Others, like Carter’s refashioned jeans and a long denim coat with bright, blue-green button trim, are a powerful reminder that clothes, so often discarded for small rips or tears, can and should have multiple lives. In the U.S. and across the globe, textile waste—exacrebated by fast fashion and online shopping—pollutes water supplies (while also using huge amounts of fresh water), increases the presence of microplastics in our bodies and in the world, and accelerates climate change.
It’s not just poisoning the planet, it’s poisoning us: fast fashion brands like Shein and AliExpress, period panties like Thinx, water-resistant materials in our raincoats and synthetic fibers like polyester all have higher levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances—those forever chemicals you’ve probably been reading more about—and often dozens of other chemicals that have been added during the production process.
As Fraser looked over the exhibition Tuesday morning, that sensitivity to what we wear—and how we care for the earth—was fully on display. Not far from the entrance, a refashioned skirt peeked out from beneath a cereal bag “glamour wrap” from Golden, its tiered design catching in the light. On a layer of denim, Fraser had looped in a belt made from old headphones and a charging cord, the space beneath it encrusted with the old, shattered mirror of a car. It was, instantly, reminiscent of the glittery, rhinestone-studded designs that were popular in the early 2000s—except without the waste.
Beneath it, a spray of “credit card confetti”—tiny, perfect circles punched from old credit cards—beckoned atop a band of white fabric (Fraser is also working on a flapper dress designed from old credit cards). On a purple tier below, Fraser had scribbled the words Do you feel/ The Vibe? in sharp, breezy letters. Together, there were over a dozen items saved from the trash, from old jeans and a polyester table runner to a phone charging cord that had lost its function.
These magic moments are sprinkled throughout the show, mixing the heavy, sometimes overwhelming realities of textile and plastic waste with responses that live outside and beyond despair. Beside a video that discusses textile and food waste, for instance, Golden has fashioned a fascinator hat with used prescription bottles, a wire coat hanger, rogue window wiper and plastic odds and ends. It’s instantly whimsical, so reminiscent of a mobile that it’s hard not to touch.
Top: Carter reimagines denim and buttons, and Seidel-Zieher gives scarves new life with the “Cottage Core Lace and Silk Dress.” Bottom: A mask from Soule Golden.
So too across the small gallery, where Seidel-Zieher’s “Cottage Core Lace and Silk Dress” beckoned with a sheer, gauzy white top and flowing skirt designed from scarves, discarded and then sewn together. Like their crocheted “Picnic Cup Cake Dress” on the other side of the gallery, the dress is ethereal, full of grace and whimsy: a viewer can imagine slipping it on over a slip or bodysuit, and taking a romp through a lavender field before a night out on the town.
On the other side of a low wall, there was a bright, flashy raincoat made entirely from plastic grocery packaging—party-sized pretzel bags, instant ramen wrappers, a pack of organic granola fashioned into a crinkly, rain-resistant hood that caught in the light. Across from it, a mirror beside Montgomery’s “bed linen jumpsuit” asked plainly: What story are you wearing?
It’s a question that the Westville-based designer himself, who has been sewing for almost a decade, thinks about frequently (the jumpsuit itself is one answer: it comes from a pair of bedsheets that Montgomery’s parents had for years, and were going to throw away). Eight years ago, around the time that he began sewing clothes and building his client base, Montgomery started to read about fast fashion and textile waste.
He was horrified by the enormity of the problem, and committed to mitigating it in his own work.
“Throughout my journey I have learned a lot about clothing pollution and how drastic it truly is,” he said. “While we all need clothing, for it to become waste to the point where it damages the planet is pretty mind-blowing.”
He still thinks about how to use every scrap of fabric he touches, using extra bits for caps, pouches, clutches, and even earrings and bracelets. His collaborations, like those with Studio Strata and Trash to Fashion, show people in real time what it looks like to reduce waste—and how a single person can still have an impact. Fraser, for her part, believes that too.
“It’s all symbolic until it either happens at a massive community scale or at the corporate level,” she said. “But there are more of us than there are corporations. And every corporation is made up of employees who have a recycling bin … simple choices like that. Also choices like: Do you need a new car every two years? Obviously not.”
“Imagine if a tenth of the population in New Haven, or even one percent of the population in New Haven, decided to move their money from a bank that invests in fossil fuel companies to a bank that doesn’t,” she added. “That’s actually significant.”
She practices what she preaches: almost all of her clothes are refashioned or thrifted, with trashion accessories like big, heart-shaped earrings and window screen necklaces that are totally one-of-a-kind. As a writer, she’s committed herself to climate storytelling under the alter ego Tara L. Roí, writing steamy, sometimes heart-flutteringly good romance that includes an acknowledgement of climate disaster and man-made warming that is killing the earth (Roí’s forthcoming novel, Refashioned by Love, is due out in November).
Her dream, she said, is for greater New Haven to see that upcycling is not as arduous as it may seem—and that people don’t have to get it perfect the first time. After an opening reception at 63 Audubon with 70 people, she said that she feels optimistic.
“It just showed me how supportive parts of the community are,” she said. “What I hoped would happen is happening—people want to learn. They want to know how to make things like a trashionista. Now it’s like, I see a bottlecap on the street and think about how to translate that into a button. Or a car mirror and translate it into a skirt. We’re seeing that people are hungry for this information and wanting to learn to think differently.”
That work isn’t free, she added: the organization’s target for this year is $43,000, which would cover the upcoming ball, allow for future events, and also allow Fraser to take a part-time salary for the work she puts in. She noted how grateful she is to partners who have already jumped onboard to help, including Dwight Hall at Yale as a fiscal sponsor (a full list of supporters lives here).
“I'm honored to be a part of it,” Montgomery said in a phone call Thursday. “Even being considered for it is a testament to my own journey. I find it a great way to challenge the creativity of people … it’s challenging people to be creative with what could be waste, to make it into practical things. Once people start to see the importance to that … it’s taking a personal step to save the world.”