As a sculptor, Trisha Cheeny could see the innate qualities of plastic bags as a durable, waterproof medium, and she felt their single-use design was wasteful and misguided. She knew there could be a better use for this ubiquitous product. So she started tinkering with them as a material for clothing, and thus Pälemer was born.
Pälemer is a revolution in clothing design, recycling, and material use and a movement to challenge fast fashion and wasteful means of production. Pälemer utilizes plastic shopping bags as a material to produce handmade windbreaker jackets, winter jackets, and book bags. With an estimated 700 billion plastic bags produced each year (each taking up to 1,000 years to biodegrade), Pälemer is above all a movement in recycling to rethink how to use the materials around us.
Cheeney’s work speaks to how innovators are thinking about how best to solve the problem of wasteful fashion and the associated pollutants related to fast fashion. Currently an entrepreneur-in-residence at Open Works, a makerspace facility in Baltimore that has partnered with MICA to offer the residencies, Cheeney will continue to develop her products through 2017. Cheeney was also finalist in this year’s UP/Start Venture Competition, MICA’s annual pitch contest that offers seed funding totaling $100,000 to five winners.
