Ferndale designer fashions dresses from paper

Dresses made from newspapers, bags, and condoms are hitting the haute couture circuit in Detroit.

Excerpt:

"By day, Matthew Richmond does social media and promotions for L'Esprit Academy beauty salon in Royal Oak. For the past eight years, he's made dresses out of paper on the side, and some big names have taken notice of his work. More on that later, though.

Why paper? "Because if I did it out of fabric no one would even care," Richmond laughs. The real reason, though, is more practical: Richmond doesn't know how to sew...

Richmond moved to Ferndale in 2009, and the next year a friend suggested he should pull off an "ambush." "I didn't even know what that was," he says. "She said that you just dress a bunch of models up and parade them in the street in a crowded area." So Richmond staged his own guerilla fashion show — and it paid off, making the rounds on social media.

"People have been doing it in New York city for years," Richmond says. "That's basically how I got recognized." He started getting attention from bigger media outlets. "I did an NPR station, and CBS did an online story, and then CNN picked it up and put it on their website," he says."

More here.