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Designer Creates Dress Made Entirely Out of Strangers’ Pubic Hair

In an attempt to outdo Lady Gaga's infamous meat dress, Sarah Louise Bryan has made dress to gross out everyone who looks at it.
Courtesy of Sarah Louise Bryan

A 28-year-old fashion designer who first grabbed media attention in 2014 for creating a dress made entirely of Skittles has unveiled her latest creation: an ensemble made with donated pubic hair.

Sarah Louise Bryan, of Wakefield, England, was able to collect enough hair for the bra top and full-bodied skirt thanks to well-wishers on social media. In an interview with Broadly, the mother of two said she received thousands of responses. In one day, her mailbox had almost 50 envelopes inside, all full of hair.

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"My postman was confused," she says.

Bryan says her intention for the outfit, which took six months to make and was stored in her 13-year-old son's room, was to create "the most disgusting thing I could think of." She wanted to top the raw meat dress Lady Gaga wore to the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards.

When asked if she was ever able to get over the gross factor as she handled the pubic hair, Bryan says no. In fact, she made sure to use protective equipment during the dress-making process: rubber gloves, an eye mask, and a mouth mask.

Bryan's other attention-grabbing works have required less fortitude. In addition to the Skittles dress, which took more than 145 bags of the candy treat and about 90 tubes of glue, she has also crafted a dress made of 3,000 paper poppies, as well as other forms of wearable art.

Flavia Lovatelli is a Columbia, South Carolina, based artist who specializes in wearable art, also known as trashion. She tells Broadly many people are jumping on the trashion train because it's attractive. "It shows ingenious creativity. We all recognize trash for trash, and we all recognize what it is that we're using because they're things we've all thrown away. It's easy, recognizable, and when you do something creative with it, the common mortal will look at it and think, 'That was very clever, I would have never thought of that. I would never be able to do that.'"

But Bryan's pubic hair dress, says Lovatelli, falls in a different category. "I think her scope is something more impactful. She's trying to send out a message that is a hard one. Without knowing anything, she's doing a dress out of pubic hair—I would think it has something to do obviously with femininity or with humanity."

That may be one takeaway for the viewer. But Bryan says, "I just want to be the most outrageous designer and have celebs flocking to me."