Neha Nanubhai, a recent graduate of Skyline High School, is a finalist for the Stuck At Prom Scholarship Contest, in which young designers submit promwear made entirely from duct tape.
Courtesy of Neha Nanubhai/TNS
SEATTLE — You may remember this inventive, lovely dress from Sunday Best a few weeks ago; its designer Neha Nanubhai (who’s modeling it here) created it from duct tape as an entry in the Stuck at Prom Scholarship Contest presented by Duck brand duct tape. An 18-year-old Skyline High School graduate who lives in Sammamish, Washington, and is now a student in the Apparel Design and Development program at Seattle Central College, she was one of 10 national finalists in the contest. Though she didn’t win, I was charmed by the dress — as were many readers! — and wanted to find out a bit more about its designer.
“I would say doing the pleats was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life!” said Nanubhai, in a phone interview last week. Her dress, inspired by the work of Japanese designer Issey Miyake (famous for his intricate pleating), features multiple tiers of pleats, edged with mosaic designs. Typically pleats are set with a hot iron — which would burn duct tape. Much trial and error ensued. “It was a bit of a tricky process, but I got there!” And just sewing duct tape was challenging: Nanubhai said she’d worried that the process would damage her sewing machine, but a teacher’s suggestion of using silicon spray helped a lot.
This is Nanubhai’s second year entering the contest; last year, she submitted a dress inspired by her family’s Fiji culture. “It had a whole bunch of turtles on it — it was very island,” she said. But she was dismayed by how much material was wasted in creating her dress, and decided this year to focus on sustainability, using tiny scraps to create the mosaics, with little waste: The whole dress required just 14 rolls of tape.
Nanubhai’s 2023 dress is actually three separate pieces: a tiered skirt, a strapless bodice and a single sleeve attached by a necklace (a design detail inspired by something she saw on a red carpet months ago). Another inspiration was the work of Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí, whose influence is seen in the mosaics, the beads of the necklace (mirroring the bead-like shapes outlining the roof of Gaudí’s Casa Batllo in Barcelona), the tile-like textile of the sleeve and the stained-glass windows on the back of the dress.
Ultimately, Nanubhai didn’t end up wearing the dress to prom because she didn’t go — too busy with Running Start, a program through which high school students begin college classes early, and the Seattle Central program. But she dreams of a future in which she’d wear her own creations (likely made from fabric, not duct tape).
“I’m a very short person and trying to find clothes for a short person is very hard,” she said. “Especially as you grow up, you don’t feel like shopping in the kids section where there’s glitter and neon colors — that’s personally not my vibe for the rest of my life.” She hopes to one day run her own business, creating clothing that works for all sizes and shapes.
“There are so many different bodies and I want to curate my brand to be open to everybody. That’s my long-term goal: really focus on body positivity.”
