Scouring the grocery store for inspiration, budding fashion designer Whitney Buczkowski came across a classic soup label with a timely twist.
"I found Campbell's soup with the message 'Help Hunger Disappear' on the labels. It couldn't have been more fitting," she said.
Buczkowski, 22, is one of seven first-year Pacific Design Academy fashion students who created a one-of-a-kind garment with food labels to help raise donations and awareness for the Mustard Seed Food Bank.
This is the second year of the project, a partnership with the Bay Centre.
The students' creations are displayed on the second-level concourse of the Bay Centre, where the public can browse the display and stories behind each piece and designer. Visitors can vote on a favourite garment with a $2 suggested donation to the food bank (non-perishable food items are also collected), and be entered in a draw to win a $100 Bay Centre gift card.
The student with the most votes also wins a gift card. "Last year we raised $1,600 and had 832 votes," said Bay Centre marketing director Adrienne Lockstead. "The public was very receptive to the display. The pieces are works of art. We're expecting a lot of votes this year and to raise some money."
The project is part of the 12th Spirit of Giving campaign, which has raised more than $2.4 million for the Mustard Seed. The food bank helps about 7,200 people each month, a large number of whom are children and seniors on income assistance.
I stopped by the design academy recently to meet the student designers as they put the finishing touches on their food-label dresses.
"Everyone really gets into their garment. This is an assignment, so they're critiqued on craftsmanship and the idea," instructor Melissa Harris told me.
Shawna Brown, 31, explained how her Valentino-inspired gown made of water-bottle labels was crafted to have a cascading mermaid skirt.
Nicole Harris, 18, and Melina Morry, 19, began with bold greens, the former using Nabob labels and the latter uniting green beans with a futuristic shoulder piece.
Christmas dinner was the springboard for Kara Mullen, 27. Her western-style dress had a potato sack skirt and a bodice made with beet, gravy and cranberry labels.
"A lot of my stuff has been country and western with a Lady Gaga twist," said the Saskatchewan native, whose dress could as easily fit in at a square dance as a rockabilly concert.
Vanessa Prescott, 18, paid tribute to her Métis heritage with an aboriginal-inspired dress and headdress. "I would have liked to use labels from food my ancestors ate, but it wasn't packaged. So I used Red River cereal labels to represent grain from the prairies and canned-salmon labels," she said.
The most eye-catching of the bunch was Christine Gallinger's incredibly pink Bubble Girl dress. The 18-year-old used hundreds of Double Bubble labels to create an impressive fringe flapper-style dress, inspired by her favourite designer, Alexander McQueen.
When it comes to details, Buczkowski's Campbell's soup dress was most impressive. She used dozens of soup labels on the gown, 400 hand-cut appliquéd flowers and hundreds of hand-painted sequins. Her Campbell's soup-labelled shoes added flare.
But what will Buczkowski do with 65 unlabelled cans of tomato soup?
"We want to warm it up on a cold day and walk around town to hand it out to the homeless," she said.
The dresses are on display at the Bay Centre until early January.