Tipperary secondary school set to compete at Junk Kouture World Final

Students from the Ursuline Secondary School, Thurles, are set to take part in the World Final of Junk Kouture.

Christina Whelan, Caitlin Cussen and Tara Johnson qualified for the World Final back in October when they were one of the ten Irish teams set to compete on the grand stage, with their project, “Vision Zero.”

This is the third year in a row that the Ursuline has qualified for the World Final, previously competing at the 2022 edition in Abu Dhabi, and in Monaco in 2023.

Speaking with the Tipperary Star, the girls took us through the inspiration behind the dress.

“We decided to make the whole thing out of seatbelts, so it’s RSA themed, and we did that because, a couple of years ago, I had an accident off a bike, I pulled the front brakes, and I went over the top of it and I fractured my skull in three places,” said Christina.

“I lost all the hearing in my right ear and everything, and I was in hospital for a couple of months, so we decided then to base our whole dress off road safety.”

The girls’ dress is unique, in the sense that they used a sole material for its construction, utilising old seatbelts in creative ways.

“We used the one material throughout the dress, we used seatbelts. We cut off the edge of the seatbelts and frayed the rest of the material, and then we dyed it, and we tried to use the same material with different textures throughout the dress. We made tassels for the skirt and then we used what we had left of the seatbelt after fraying it for the rest of the skirt and top.

“It took a lot of experimenting, we were a long time before we could figure out that we could use the inside of the seatbelts, so it took a lot of preparation before we could actually get to the part of putting the dress together, to strip them, they came out grey, so we had to strip them of colour, and then used a synthetic dye to boil them into the purple colour to get out the colour that we got.

“The whole dress is made from the one material, from the headpiece, to the skirt, to the top to the train, all using just different parts of the seatbelt.”

The girls pride themselves on the fact that they used just one material throughout their design, saying it helps them stand out compared to the rest of the competition.

“The rest of the competition was great, you could have easily picked another ten from the competition, the standard was very high, but I suppose, well, we intentionally started from the beginning with just the one material, which is quite unique compared to some of the other dresses,” said Christina.

The girls say they were elated finding out they had qualified for the World Final, saying that they were not expecting to be called out as one of the ten teams to go through, and that they are thrilled to be representing Ireland at international level.

“We were one of ten to get through to the International level and we feel great pride to be representing Ireland on an international level for this competition.

“We weren’t expecting it at all when they were calling out the names of the dresses. I wasn’t even half listening but we weren’t expecting it at all so it was a great honour,” said Christina.

“We were one of the last few to get called out so we kind of thought after the first few that ‘oh well, it was nice while it lasted.’

It’s great to be back in it and be representing,” said Tara.

Their teacher, Mr Michael English says he is immensely proud of what his students have achieved.

“I couldn’t be more proud, you know. That’s their work, and they went from basically a box of seatbelts to making that, and that’s something that they’ll have with them for the rest of their lives. How many can say they represented Ireland on the world stage?” he said.

The Junk Kouture World Final takes place on Tuesday, March 4 2025, in The Mahony Hall, Dublin.