How UT Austin is reinventing sustainable fashion with sequins

The fourth floor of the Texas Science and Natural History Museum is designed for reverence — fossils, minerals, evidence of deep time. The building trains you to think in epochs and extinction events, not hemlines or handwork. It is not designed for fashion.

And yet, the light catches on sequins.

They don’t flash the way plastic party dresses do. Not the aggressive glare of a polyester past, but something softer. Turmeric gold. Algae green. A purple that looks like it came from a bruise or a beet left too long on the cutting board. The sequins do not scream. They glimmer as if aware of the room they are in — a former blank slate of museum space now filled with dresses, jewelry and handbags.

This is “Particles of Color,” an exhibition born not in Paris, Milan or New York, but in a lab at the University of Texas at Austin, where fashion students, scientists, engineers and artists have been asking an unfashionable question: What if beauty didn’t poison anyone?

The exhibition is led by Jessica Ciarla, a fashion designer turned academic and associate professor in UT’s Division of Textiles and Apparel. Her sustainable sequins — compostable, non-toxic, derived from agricultural waste and natural pigments — are both the smallest objects in the room and the reason for the room’s existence.

Sequins are easy to dismiss. They are tiny, festive, disposable by design. But that, Ciarla says, is exactly the problem.

“I remember Stella McCartney saying she couldn’t find a sustainable sequin,” Ciarla said, thinking back to Copenhagen Fashion Week, where the idea first took hold. “And I thought, well, something so beautiful and exciting should not be toxic to the wearer and toxic to the environment. We can fix that.”

The fix, it turns out, is complicated. Conventional sequins are made from petroleum-based plastic — part of the same system that has made fashion one of the world’s most polluting industries, responsible for roughly 10% of human-driven climate change. Sequins are cut, worn once for holidays or special occasions, then discarded. 

“Once you start digging,” Ciarla says, “it’s not just about materials. It’s labor. It’s waste. It’s how garments are designed. It’s overwhelming.”

The lab’s answer has been to start small.

The exhibition’s first item is a pair of chandelier earrings made by Ciarla herself — tiger’s-eye inspired paillettes in gold, turquoise and purple — the earliest proof that this research could exist outside a spreadsheet. From there, the room opens outward into student work: chainmail gowns, fringe pants made from more than a thousand hand-sewn paillettes, punchinella-woven floral sets, jewelry made with scraps and laser-cut remnants that would normally be trash.

The students talk about the materials the way cooks talk about food.

“There was this one bioresin someone made,” one student says, laughing. “We didn’t know what it was, and then we took it out and were like, Oh my god, it’s a mango. No wonder.”

Another student describes making algae yarn over winter break, boiling and dyeing it in her kitchen. “I was really trying to impress my mom,” she says. “She was like, ‘What is this?’ It smelled weird. It looked like Frankenstein yarn at first.”

This is not failure. This is process.

In the lab, beeswax biofoam is imagined as a shoe sole or wallet. Gelatin-based “gar leather” is woven into jelly shoes. Algae yarn, dyed with butterfly pea flower and red cabbage, is knitted despite its fragility.

“It’s okay that it’s not perfect,” Ciarla said, “This is exploratory. We’re creating new materials.”

What gives “Particles of Color” its fashion credibility — what keeps it from reading like a science fair — is that the research refuses to stay contained. It insists on being worn, displayed, argued with.

In March, the museum hosted a fashion show featuring Danish designer Nikolaj Storm, followed by a panel on the future of sustainability in fashion. Students found themselves explaining punchinella to museum visitors and fifth graders. One dress in the exhibit is a collaboration between UT students, a Vandegrift High School student and an elementary classroom, whose drawings of sustainability were cut into sequins and sewn onto a repurposed garment.

“Every object has a story,” Ciarla says. “It’s not just a pretty dress. Who made it? Why? With what? And what happens after?”

That question — what happens after — has changed how the students see fashion.

“I’m way more aware now,” one says. “You think about the effort behind what you’re buying. The dangers of synthetics. How polyester can affect your health.”

They have looked behind the curtain — into the materials, labor and systems that make a garment possible — and cannot unsee it. They talk about researching sustainable designers, about Stella McCartney’s apple leather, about small social media accounts pushing textile innovation. There is excitement here, but also restraint — a growing resistance to overconsumption that feels generational and moral.

“They don’t let you get away with things,” Ciarla said of her students. “They ask really important questions.”

They have also pushed her to think beyond sequins. The lab now explores nonwoven fabrics, biomaterials, natural dyes. There are conversations about scaling production without recreating the waste systems they are trying to replace — whether to remain small and circular or expand to meet industry demand.

Fashion may never be fully sustainable. “That might be an oxymoron,” Ciarla said. “But it can be responsible. Thoughtful. Transparent.”

The museum space itself reflects that tension. Jewelry, dresses and other items on display were dreamed up because there was room to tell a story.

“I walked in with a pair of earrings,” Ciarla says. “And they gave me 1,500 square feet.”

Standing among the garments now, it’s hard not to feel that something fragile but significant is happening here. A reminder that fashion is not abstract. It touches skin. It leaves residue. It tells stories whether we ask it to or not.

“Particles of Color” feels quietly right in a city that likes to think of itself as creative and experimental. A group of students cooking algae yarn to impress their parents, a professor turning food waste into light, a museum floor filled with objects that insist on being both beautiful and accountable.

The sequins catch the light again, and then let it go.

The exhibit is on view through April at the Texas Science and Natural History Museum on the UT campus.