From afar, it is a stunning dress with a hooped skirt-like bottom, a tight corset and stylish filigree work on the shoulders, the kind of piece that would fit right in at a fancy ball in Victorian England.

Get a little closer, though, and you will notice that the dress is largely made up of condoms — something that may have landed you in behind bars back then.

Today, it’s the kind of statement piece that could easily be at home on prestige fashion runways.

The dress is the handiwork of Alexandra Russell, a McMaster University undergraduate who enrolled in professor Alexander Hall’s class on communicating science for professional audiences.

Russell was talking to her mother about her hunt for a topic she could use to amplify her final class project when her mother said something that go

See Full Page