Natalia Fedner
The Eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, 2025
Contact Lens Pods, Steel, Copper, Contact Lenses  

Created in Partnership with Professional VisionCare of West Hollywood 

Hand-made from over 400 discarded contact lens pods, this 21st century flapper dress is a wink to the symbolism of Dr T.J. Eckleburg from The Great Gatbsy. Gilded in gold, the shimmering plastic goddess reminds us to have a good time, while continuing to look at the world through caring eyes.

Artist Statement:

Every morning I would wake up to an ever-growing pile of plastic contact lens pods, discarded by my boyfriend in his haste to get ready. As the pile grew, I noticed two things: 1. This felt so wasteful – it was a lot of single use hard plastic that was just getting tossed. 2. There was a beautiful repetitive pattern emerging from the haphazard pile. Eureka! I would save the pods from the landfill and make an epic dress in the process.

Since I love chainmaille and make metal clothes for a living, it made sense to turn the pods into a “chainmaille pod dress”. I started out by developing a large scale “swatch”. This took a week, as I was experimenting with the perfect placement for the jump rings, the correct size hole punchers to create the holes in the plastic pods, and the overall pattern I wanted to create with the pods. Once I had my swatch, I realized I would need a whole lot of contact lens pods to make my vision a reality. Even though I diligently collected my boyfriend’s discarded pods for 6 months, I needed more. So I called 10 different local optometrists to see if anyone had discarded or expired contact lenses/pods. While I’m sure they all thought I was a little nutty, I found a supporter in Dr. Chang from Professional VisionCare of West Hollywood to let me take his expired stock. Normally this stock would just be thrown away, so I was glad to rescue it from its land fill fate.

After washing all the pods to sanitize and clean them, I began the long work of punching and jump-ringing many many MANY pods together. I lost track of the count, but I believe the outfit was made from around 600 lens pods, from 4 different styles of contact lens pod.

For wearability, I jump ringed 5 strong gold push-button clasps to each side seam of the dress. The dress can actually be stepped into, and then snapped shut around the body. This type of closure is extremely functional – but also very nice to look at!

I took gold plated copper chain and crocheted it to create a beautiful gilded edge to the dress. I used the same technique to create arm pieces and a necklace, crocheting directly into the holes in each pod. I also created a set of earrings by gluing two pods together. But first I filled each earring with cleaned expired contact lenses, to give them a green glow.

A 21^st century flapper, made from the refuse we discard every day in our quest to see clearly. Gilded in gold, the shimmering plastic goddess reminds us to have a good time, while looking at the world through caring eyes.

The overall message of the dress is that the dark side of the American Dream is wastefulness and environmental destruction. As a Ukrainian refugee immigrant, I embody some of the best aspects of the American Dream. I love the life and opportunities my country has given me, so I want to do everything I can as a fashion designer to make sure that I leave it a better place than when I found it – and that means re-using materials as much as possible -and championing environmental causes and policies.

For this look, I drew symbolic and literal inspiration from my favorite book, The Great Gatsby. For the silhouette, I chose to go with a “flapper” style of design – that meant I needed to have fringe and opulence. I named the outfit “The Eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg” as a reference to the billboard that overlooks the valley of the ashes in the Great Gatsby. The following quote perfectly encapsulates the way I feel about the discarded and forgotten plastic contact lens pods – and about the environmental price of the American Dream: “But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Evidently some wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away.”

After I finished making the dress, I decided that it needed some jewelry to fully embody the opulence of the 1920s. So of course this is where I chose to hide another Great Gatsby easter egg, in the form of the earrings. If you look close you will see that they glow green inside their plastic pods (yes there are actual green lenses inside!). This is a reference to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock – the one that Jay Gatsby would look at every night. It is a symbol of hope. While the dress is a warning about our wastefulness, the earrings are there to represent hope – a greener future (literally and figuratively).

Another moment of symbolism in the dress is the use of gold as the highlight color. I chose gold because I wanted the dress to appear gilded. The Great Gatsby is a book about dreams, wealth, power, and love. Money is at the center of Gatsby’s ability to reach his dream (attain Daisy) and Fitzgerald puts little gold and yellow moments throughout the book (Gatsby’s tie, his car, Daisy’s gold pencil and there are many references to shimmering and sparkling). For me, gold is the metal color I most associate with flappers and the 1920s.

I designed the pod fringe to move with the dancer and fan out as she twists and twirls – giving it a flapper’s fun and flirty vibe.  

I hope that what people take away from this piece of art is that there is great beauty everywhere – we just have to open our eyes- and be creative with how we re-use what we already have