The cockatoos on the bodice may speak of 1980s-Australiana, but the fabric of this evening gown is a subtle statement about the current era of fashion.

Self-declared online shopper Britt Timmins, of Lake Macquarie, in NSW's Hunter region, made the dress from household waste - primarily out of the plastic packaging we can't put in our yellow bins.

Her turning point from quick-turnover fashionista to slow-movement trashionista came as an epiphany while she was doing laundry.

"I was sorting through loads of washing, I had this giant pile of clothes," Timmins, of Bolton Point, says.

"I saw how wasteful I had been."

The mother of two daughters, a two-year-old and a teen, had been having a clean-out, preparing to give a stack of barely worn clothes to charity.

"I was making space for another $400 online order. Another mountain of clothing. What are we doing? Do we need that?" she asked herself.

Timmins began to read about the impact of the fashion cycle and was quite shocked by some of the statistics.

"It's literally disposable clothing," she says.

"It doesn't last, it's poorly made. It's not going to take long until it wears out and ends up in landfill."

Australians are one of the biggest consumers of textiles in the world, second only to Americans. And most of that is clothing, according to the findings of last year's National Clothing Textile Waste Roundtable. Averaged out, Australians each buy 27 kilograms of new clothing every year. And every year send 23 kilograms of clothing to landfill.

"The fast-fashion crisis is what inspired me to create the gown because I found out some of the facts on how this is contributing to harming our planet, it's absolutely mind-blowing," she says.

"Every second an entire garbage truck load."

Also, Timmins says, micro particles of plastic migrate from synthetic fabrics and make their way into our waterways via washing machines.

Her nature-themed evening gown, which she titled 'Dressed to Kill', was part-confessional, part-educational.

"Going through my wardrobes and seeing how I was part of the problem made me feel absolutely sick," Timmins says.

She hadn't grown up that way. She'd stitched her Barbie doll outfits from socks, gone op-shopping with her mother when her wardrobe needed a boost and had grandmothers who got serious mileage out of their clothes.

"They really came from that time when nothing goes wasted, it's in their blood," she says.

Her maternal grandmother, now in her late 80s, still wears bell-bottom jeans she had from the 1960s ... she kept everything.

Timmins, who studied fashion but never worked in the field, dusted-off her sewing machine and started upcycling. It started simple, just trying to extend life by lengthening T-shirts into dresses and adding sleeves to turn summer attire into winter-wear.

"Then it turned into being a bit more arty," she says.

"I wanted to push things further, I quite honestly got obsessed."

With the Sustainable Neighbourhoods Waste to Artexhibition upcoming, Timmins took another step out of the fast-lane of fashion by making her first ever trashion piece. It won a people's choice award.

The base structure of the dress was made of plastic shopping bags, stitched into a loose dress form then put onto a mannequin and ironed to shrink it to fit.

The Jenny Kee-look cockatoos are crafted from used postal packaging and petals from a faded artificial flower. She's also incorporated disposable party tablecloths, old lace curtains, Smith's Chips bags, and beer can ring pulls for the corsetry on the back.

"Look really closely at the dress and you can start to see what packaging was used and where," Timmins says.

"It was important for me to make this appear just like any other dress, from a distance, and have that moment when you realise."

Timmins also used debris picked up around Lake Macquarie. She took inspiration from the lake in her design, painting in sailing boats, using onion net bags to make marine life and a white bridal dress bag to make puffy sleeves representing clouds.

The cuffs of the sleeves are made from that most iconic accessory of the recent fashion epoch, the disposable face mask.

"The dress, has become a passionate message for me. It's about finding yourself," she says.