70 THE QUEENS COURIER • BUZZ • OCTOBER 10, 2019 FOR BREAKING NEWS VISIT WWW.QNS.COM
buzz
LIC resident is a second-time fi nalist in
annual toilet paper wedding dress contest
BY ANGELICA ACEVEDO
When you see Lindsay Hinz’s brilliantly
white wedding gown with layers upon layers
Photo credit: Lindsay Hinz
Long Island resident Lindsay Hinz modeling her toilet paper wedding dress.
of ruffl es, accessorized with an intricate
fi shnet headpiece and a bouquet that
resembles a single rose, it’s quite hard to
believe that she made it all using only toilet
paper.
“It took me two and a half months to
make,” she told QNS. “And that was pretty
much every day aft er work from like
six o’clock until midnight, and then sometimes
a few hours before work in the
morning and then every weekend.”
Hinz, a Broadway costume technician
who’s worked on productions like
“Hamilton,” was one of the top 12 fi nalists
out of 1,500 entries at this year’s 15th
Annual Toilet Paper Wedding Dress
Contest, presented by Charm Weddings
and Quilted Northern.
Her dress, along with the other fi nalists’
gowns, were featured in a nationally televised
fashion show event on Monday.
“I didn’t place but it was a really, really
cool experience to be recognized for my
work and to have it showcased throughout
the country,” Hinz said.
Photo courtesy of Lindsay Hinz
But this wasn’t the fi rst time the Long
Island City resident participated in the
competition.
She fi rst entered the contest — which
has a grand prize of $10,000 — two years
ago aft er seeing an article about it in a
Facebook group called Costume People.
“I looked at the pictures and I was like,
‘Oh that’s really cool. I could do that,’”
Hinz said.
She then admitted that although she had
a fun time back then and even made it to
the top 10, it ended up being a lot of work
so she decided to skip out on the following
year’s contest.
“But then, when I found out that they
were going to make a TV show and that
it was going to be a much bigger deal this
year, I decided to give it one more try,”
she said.
Hinz explained that as a Broadway
costume technician, her job entails putting
together costumes that were already
designed by other team members.
As a seamstress by trade who studied at
the University of Virginia, this comes more
naturally to her than designing something
from scratch — but she thinks it’s also “fun
to have creative freedom.”
“One thing that I love about the contest
is you have the freedom to make your own
choices,” she said.
And that she did. As a self-proclaimed
“movie buff ,” she took inspiration from a
wedding dress that appeared in a popular
movie franchise.
“I was like, ‘OK, what wedding dresses do
I remember from movies that have really
stuck with me?’” Hinz said. “And one that
I really thought of was Katniss Everdeen’s
wedding dress in ‘Hunger Games.’”
She used 56 rolls of Quilted Northern
Ultra Soft and Strong, and spent about 100
hours creating the ruffl es in the skirt portion
alone.
“I essentially created fabric out of toilet
paper, so it’s like rolling toilet paper
out and stitching it together one panel at
a time and creating yardage of fabric and
then I can make a dress the way that I
know how to make a dress,” Hinz said.
Photo courtesy of Lindsay Hinz
Hinz, who lives with her boyfriend in
what she says is a “really tiny apartment” in
Long Island City, said that diff erent pieces
of the dress were stored in several places
throughout their home in the months
leading up to the fashion show.
“Th e skirt is absolutely ginormous and
so it basically took up one of the rooms in
our apartment,” she said, laughing.
Although she didn’t win the contest this
year either, she has fond memories of creating
her toilet paper dresses.
Hinz reminisced about the time she
walked to Astoria Park, where she took
pictures to submit to the contest, wearing
the fi rst toilet paper dress she ever created.
“I had people like on the sidewalk yelling,
‘Congratulations!’ And there was a
bus full of children on their way to school
being like, ‘Oh my god, look at her dress!’
she laughed. “And no one knew that it’s toilet
paper!”
Th is year was no diff erent, when she
went to a friend’s apartment lobby to take
the photos of her new creation.
Hinz said, “I was there, posing for pictures,
and people were leaving their apartments
being like, ‘Oh my god, that’s incredible,
congratulations!’”
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