And What About the Straws?

SIP BY SIP Soyeon Lee in a dress from the Nina Valenti juice-pouch collection.
If she wanted it to be purple, she needed more grapes.

By ERIC WILSON
Published: February 14, 2008

IF ever Nina Valenti had fielded a client’s request that sounded less like a challenge from “Project Runway,” she did not know what it was. Ms. Valenti, a Brooklyn designer, was at work on an ensemble for the concert pianist Soyeon Lee, who had asked for a dress made entirely of used juice pouches.


Patrick Andrade for The New York Times

Ms. Lee, who will perform a series of reinvented or reimagined classical pieces at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday, had asked for a dress that was also recycled to promote a program started by her fiancé, Tom Szaky, who collects the juice pouches from schools to be remade into new designs.

“It’s not the most comfortable dress for her to be wearing onstage,” said Ms. Valenti, who designs a line called Naturevsfuture. “But this is about what it represents.”

More than five billion juice pouches are discarded annually by American consumers, said Mr. Szaky, the chief executive of TerraCycle, a company that makes products like plant food and fertilizer from waste. Millions of the pouches have also been sewn into handbags, pencil cases and totes that some of the nation’s largest retailers, including Target, OfficeMax and Walgreens, are to begin selling for $3.99 to $7.99 in April.

The idea, Mr. Szaky said, is to teach young consumers about reusing garbage to make new products, since some children will presumably be able to carry their lunches to school in bags made from the refuse of their lunches.

Ms. Lee’s dress offers a prettier way of seeing the bigger picture. In total, Ms. Valenti stitched together square panels cut from more than 5,000 pouches of Honest Kids Goodness Grapeness (grape flavor had the prettiest shade of purple) into a strapless dress with elaborate layers and wings. It has a silk taffeta lining to give Ms. Lee some breathing room.

“The only thing I’m having trouble with now is figuring out how to come on stage and sit down elegantly,” Ms. Lee said. “The dress sort of has an octopus effect — lots of arms and tentacles.”

Inelegant, perhaps, but easier for playing the piano.

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