my main goal was to create something that defies easy categorization. Imagine people pass by on the street, they often make quick judgments on others based on a few seconds of observation, and I wanted to play with that notion. So I chose one of the most recognizable forms as symbols of clothing: a T-shirt and pants. Using these common and visually simple forms, I played with expectations. From the front, it looks like there's a T-shirt where you'd expect a T-shirt to be, making it seem like the person is wearing it. However, physically, the body and the T-shirt are not directly connected. Similarly, for the bottom, I placed very noticeable pants shape inside a transparent skirt. Visually, it immediately appears as pants, but functionally, it is closer to a skirt.

In his San Juan workshop, Designer Gonzalo Chavez, 36, a native New Yorker who calls himself Mr. Terp, has been painstakingly assembling pop-top rings into glittering dresses, vests, stoles, belts, miniskirts and maxiskirts—all resembling the mailed armor worn by warriors of the Middle Ages to ward off sword blows. Collecting the rings from rubbish heaps behind San Juan bars, Chavez files down their rough edges and crochets them together with silver thread...

The first pop-top garments were almost as stiff as their medieval counterparts. But Chavez has made them much more supple. "They fit like a second skin," he claims. "As you wear them, they change shape a little and mold themselves to the contours of the body." Rings differ too. Budweiser's rings are light and flexible, Miller High Life's are "soft," and Pepsi's provide a heavier, stiffer garment.