This dress was made from the biodegradable plastic trash bags available at your local natural foods retailer.

The dress comments on disposable fashion – clothing from stores like Forever 21 and Old Navy that are meant to fall apart as their fashion goes out of style. The classic “shift” style of the biodegradable dress reflected the hotel’s mid-century origins, our obsession with cleanliness and disposability, and was meant to be thrown away after one use. The dress was buried in a friend’s compost pile.

I used the dress during a performance at the Jupiter Hotel in Portland, Oregon in which I spent several hours making and re-making the bed. The hotel is focused around the interactions of its changing residents. Large picture windows in your room encourage voyeuristic onlookers to have a peek at the action inside as they pass by on the way to their own rooms and chalkboard doors allow them to leave comments about what they see.