She didn't win the scholarship. But her duct tape dress will be part of fashion history.

Recently graduated Oak Creek High School student Ritika Singh is doing all the typical prep work before she heads off to college at Hofstra University in New York.

Getting together last-minute supplies for her new dorm room.

Familiarizing herself with campus maps.

Packing and planning her trip.

And on Thursday, she checked off another item on her list that is less typical — donating her duct tape dress to Mount Mary University's more-than-10,000-item-strong fashion archive.

Singh took hundreds of hours out of her busy senior year spring to design, create and model a 15-pound dress made out of 38 rolls of duct tape. She entered the dress into the Stuck at Prom scholarship contest by Duck Brand, hoping to win a $10,000 cash scholarship.

She didn't win the contest, but she did achieve what she called a "happy outcome" when she got a call from Donna Ricco, an executive fellow in the fashion department at Mount Mary. Ricco had been contacted by Mary Elliot Nowakowski, the now-retired curator for the university's fashion archive collection. Nowakowski suggested that Ricco find a way to procure Singh's dress for the archive, where it will be preserved for fashion design students to reference, sometimes be displayed as part of fashion exhibitions and cataloged in the university's digital archive.

"The collection is about 10,000 pieces of historic clothing and accessories that range back to about 1760 right up to the present day," Nowakowski said. "It's a resource for Mount Mary's fashion design students because they learn the history of clothing and they can study techniques, understand designers, look at clothing construction and fit. It serves as a tremendous inspiration for students."

And now Singh's dress will be inspiring Mount Mary's students — something that thrills Singh, her family and friends and her many fans among the staff and patients at Midwest Orthopedic hospital where she worked as a patient care assistant.

"A lot of nurses and patients read the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article when it came out, and they were so excited to see me in there, and they wanted to vote for me if I made the top five," Singh said. "So when I didn't make it, I felt like I was letting people down. But then Mount Mary called, and it was a complete turnaround with everyone being so happy for me that my dress will be somewhere where it will be remembered."

A duct tape dress that tells 'a story of our time'

Nowakowski has a degree from Mount Mary's design program and was the curator for the fashion collection for 15 years before retiring. She remembers once reading a quotation that recommended reading a fashion magazine rather than a history book to get a feel for different time periods.

"Fashion tells me more about the times than just about anything else," Nowakowski said. "That's because it's not about treaties and wars and economics; it's about people's lives."

That's what Nowakowski had in mind when she suggested Ricco ask Singh to donate her dress.

"The items in the collection that really stick with me are the ones that have stories of the times beyond just pretty clothes," Nowakowski said. "I remember when a pair of bellbottom jeans from the '60s came into the collection. They had been made from a curtain that was torn down at a rock concert in Cincinnati. Talk about a story of the times!

"I loved it, and I had the same feeling about Ritika's dress, that it has a story to tell."

In addition to reflecting the times we live in — a time in which teenagers craft creations from duct tape to fund their college education — Nowakowski also relates to another part of Singh's story — spending a huge amount of time to meticulously create a piece of beautiful clothing.

"When I realized how many hours Ritika put into that dress, it brought back a lot of memories," Nowakowski said. "For my senior project, I made a replication of a 1908 theater suit, and I think I stopped counting how long it took me at about 250 hours."

That suit is also part of the Mount Mary fashion archive.

The message behind Singh's dress — a call to unity inspired by her Sikh faith — is also a sign of our times.

The dress includes duct tape representations of every continent, symbols for eight major religions and every country's flag. There's also a human chain.

"If you look closely, the arms and legs make hearts which shows that everything is about love because that's one thing we genuinely know how to do naturally," Singh said. "I want people to see the dress and take a minute to listen to other people's opinions, put their differences aside and just look at people as fellow humans."

Using fashion to further education

Although the dress collection inspires fashion design students at Mount Mary, Singh's plans for college don't have much to do with design; she plans to focus her studies on religion and sociology.

For Nowakowski, the fact that Singh isn't going into fashion design just makes her story all the more interesting, and it's why she gifted Singh with $1,000 for her education.

"We have this young woman who is not pursuing a degree in fashion design, but she's using fashion and this dress to further her education," Nowakowski said. "I think that's just fantastic."

Although Singh doesn't see fashion design in her future career plans, she does think her dress's inclusion in the archive is strangely appropriate.

"When I was in sixth grade, I was really into fashion, and I actually attended a Mount Mary summer camp for that at the time," Singh said. "When they contacted me, I thought, 'What a small world.' It's really funny that Mount Mary is where my dress is ending up."

Singh's dress will be able to seen in the Mount Mary digital fashion archive, and will be displayed in the university's welcome center in Notre Dame Hall throughout the fall 2023 semester.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Student's duct tape dress is part of Mount Mary fashion archive