Today we’d like to introduce you to Matthew Richmond.
Hi Matthew, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
Before social media and the endless scroll of curated lives, young adults faced a rare luxury: true boredom. Back in 2006, sitting in my first apartment in Ann Arbor, I found myself with time on my hands and an itch to create.
I grew up in a creative household with a mother who was always crafting, paired with an early fascination with fashion. My love for clothing started with Barbie doll outfits and deepened while watching Turner Classic Movies, mesmerized by the legendary Hollywood costuming of Edith Head, Bob Mackie, and Hubert de Givenchy. Having never seen a paper dress before, I pulled an old tailor’s bust out of my parents’ basement, dragged it to my apartment as decor, and decided I was going to build one myself.
I gathered up leftover gift wrap and tissue paper I had stored away, shaping it into a futuristic, Judy Jetson-inspired gown. The process felt surprisingly intuitive.
The true “aha” moment came while designing window displays for the company I was working for at the time. When I started placing my paper dresses in the storefronts, entire crowds began gathering on the sidewalk just to admire them. What began as a cure for boredom in a small apartment ultimately transformed into a signature art form.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It was definitely a journey shaped by raw trial and error rather than a perfectly smooth road, but that’s what made it rewarding.
I didn’t have YouTube tutorials or TikTok videos to guide me, ( they didn’t exist) and I had never seen anyone else construct a paper dress before. The biggest hurdle was the engineering side of things: figuring out through pure experimentation how to transform a fragile, rigid medium like paper into something structurally wearable that moves with a body.
There were plenty of learning curves along the way, but working through those challenges independently forced me to innovate. Mastering the medium on my own didn’t just teach me how to build dresses, it made my technique stronger, my problem-solving sharper, and the final work entirely my own.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I am a paper and unconventional materials fashion artist specializing in wearable art, avant-garde garments, and high-impact experiential marketing pieces. I am best known for sculpting striking, structural dresses out of surprising mediums, not just vintage tissue paper, gift wrap, and newspaper, but also unexpected materials like VHS tape, plastic bags, and even live plants and trees.
Today, I work extensively with corporate clients and brands to create show-stopping marketing activations for grand openings and special events. I regularly engineer custom gowns constructed directly from a company’s branded materials and logos, worn by live models to create an unforgettable, crowd-drawing centerpiece.
What sets my work apart is its raw, self-taught origin. Long before social media or video tutorials existed for this niche, I engineered my own techniques through trial and error to make rigid, unconventional materials structurally sound and wearable. Because I developed my process independently, my creations carry a distinct structural signature that standard pattern-making simply can’t replicate.
I’m incredibly proud of where this medium has taken me. Highlights include designing a newspaper dress for Miss Universe Canada that highlighted her controversial platform on medical marijuana, as well as crafting a piece using original Hudson’s Department Store shopping bags. That Hudson’s dress now sits on permanent display in the new Hudson’s building in Detroit, Michigan, serving as a lasting tribute to the city’s iconic retail history.
What makes me proudest of all is taking an art form that started out of pure boredom in a small apartment and pushing humble materials far beyond their expected limits to stop people in their tracks.
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
Luck definitely played a role, but mostly in the form of unexpected timing and happy accidents.
I’d say “good luck” showed up in the very beginning, the simple coincidence of having leftover gift wrap, an old tailor’s bust from my parents’ basement, and a stretch of total boredom in my first apartment back in 2006. If I hadn’t had that specific mix of extra time and random materials on hand, I might never have built that first Judy Jetson-inspired dress or realized what was possible with paper.
When it comes to bad luck or setbacks, working with paper and unconventional materials means things will inevitably go wrong. Garments can tear, weather can ruin a delicate piece, or a design won’t drape the way you envisioned. But in this field, “bad luck” is really just forced innovation.
Ultimately, luck might bring you the initial spark or put a raw material in front of you, but turning a fragile sheet of paper into a structural, wearable dress, or building a business out of it, takes trial, error, and relentless persistence. Luck got me started, but curiosity and hard work are what kept it going.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.thepaperdresscode.com/
- Instagram: thepaperdresscode
- Facebook: The Paper Dress Code
