Accession #1980.037.002: Newspaper Dress

Fashion maven Elsa Schiaparelli used her press clippings in 1935 to create a newspaper print fabric, 70 years before John Galliano famously did for Christian Dior in 2000.

Sometime in between these two iconic iterations of “the Newspaper Dress,” an enterprising individual reimagined one of our local Kamloops publications as wearable art. Using issues of the Kamloops Standard from 1916, this cotton dress whimsically captures the “Splendid Circulation” of newspaper–based information during Kamloops’ early days.

While the dress stitches together massive amounts of information, we don’t know who made it or what story they’re trying to tell.