Fashion Celebrities Customize Trashy Cans

Turning their attention curbside, fashion and pop culture notables are getting down and dirty for charity. “Have you ever walked by the back of a restaurant at night?” asks fashion designer Michael Bastian. “It’s insane how much food goes to waste, those huge garbage bins full of stuff.” Waste and its whiff of economic imbalance led Bastian, the creative director of menswear atBill Blass, to partner with Danish design company Vipp, creating a one-off receptacle inspired by the current varsity theme of his eponymous line. “It’s a big, sexy football trashcan,” he reveals.

Bastian joins Bono and designer Cynthia Rowley in this year’s arts and crafts project involving stars bedecking bins for charity. Supermodel Helena Christensen hosts this month’s auction in New York, the proceeds of which will go towards the Food Bank for New York and Chernobyl Children’s Project International. Of his tar-dipped bin, L.A. artist Mattia Biagi says, “It represents the relationship between human beings and their own pollution in our modern society.” And Bastian could be speaking about his next line, so proud is he of his crafts project. “These are like the apotheoses of trash bins,” says Bastian. “I hated fucking with mine, because it was just too beautiful.” In other words, trashion is pure fashion.