Ask fashionistas about their earliest fashion inspiration, and you’re likely to find a common thread: Barbie. Who didn’t covet those little plastic high heels and matching outfits?

Sometimes we even pulled out needle, thread and scraps of cloth in awkward attempts to create our own designs – primitive, yes, but not too far removed from today's popular “lagenlook” layering trend.

Belfast clothing designer Meredith Alex was no exception. As a girl she’d venture into the attic of her family’s 200-year-old house, pull out vintage clothing and play dress-up for hours.

Meredith and model Alex Shaffer in a pom pom dress that used donated, unused craft pom poms and recycled fabric.

“I would drag all my friends up there, even in the hottest days of summer. I was also a Barbie girl. Yes it’s true - my Barbie collection was extensive and I still have many of the ‘outfits’ collected during those younger years. I always loved that the outfits came with matching high heel shoes and because of it even to this day, I have to admit I have an addiction to great shoes - not as many as Imelda or Sarah Jessica Parker but almost.”

Her mother, a seamstress, must have recognized early talent. By elementary school Meredith was taking sewing lessons from a friend and neighbor, choosing the fabrics and learning to pattern. She still has the first thing she made: a little multi-colored flowered cotton top with the appliqué heart.

During high school she helped with school play costumes and reworked her clothes into new “crazy outfits.” “At the time,” she says, “I was positive they were the coolest thing on the planet. Only later looking at photos did I discover how wrong I had been.”

She graduated with her BFA from the California Institute of Arts and after college became an assistant artistic director with ABC Studios, doing set dressing work for the TV shows “Alf” and “Mr. Belvedere.”

Her fashion recycling continued as a young, single mother in Los Angeles. She created baby clothes from recycled thrift store fashions and sold them at high-end baby boutiques. “Designing these baby clothes was the first phase of developing my love for re-using and re-inventing clothes and fabrics into one-of-a-kind art to wear,” says Meredith.

Meredith is still designing, and was a semi-finalist out of thousands of applicants for the television show “Project Runway.” This weekend she’ll show her work at SO RE FA, a national exhibition of socially responsible fashion in Philadelphia. Her designs, made of natural and recycled materials, include dresses made of birch bark, reused industrial fabrics and fasteners, recycled rock concert t-shirts and discarded paint swatches.

Where does she find ideas? “Often times the inspiration comes from just seeing multiples of an interesting object being thrown away. In my Contemporary Collection that premiered in the Cassandra Project in Portland in 2004, I had a silver dress made out of juice can lids. I had started the juice can collection myself, but then put a plea out over the email to friends and friends of friends to save the juice can lids from the frozen juice containers because I needed about 200 total for the dress and soon I was receiving packages in the mail and getting them dropped off at my doorstep. That was really a great feeling to have other people involved and passionate about recycling for arts sake.”

Her MADgirl “wearable street fashions,” made from re-worked vintage clothing, are geared to the general public and “the fun-loving sprites inside all of us. I do mostly women’s wear - dresses, skirts, tops and jackets, some children’s wear (mostly custom orders for friends) and what I like to call ‘flavor-blasted’ blazers for men.”

“The inspiration is in the fabric and the colors,” says Meredith. “I am drawn to something that I find at a thrift store or yard sale that I can cut apart, shorten, add a new cool ruffle or adorn in some way with polka dots or other colorful fabrics to make a signature one-of-a-kind piece someone will treasure and wear with love and of course a big smile on their face... You can’t help feeling amazingly fabulous and like a rock star - even in Maine.”

Looking forward, she’s putting the finishing touches on her website. She’s not interested in mass production. “When you used re-cycled or vintage clothing and fabrics, individuality is the name of the game and personally it makes it more interesting for me.”

To find out more about Meredith and her work, you may contact her at her studio at Waterfall Arts in Belfast,meredith@waterfallarts.org, or at meredithalexdesigns@yahoo.com.

Meredith's birch bark dress that will be featured this weekend in Philadelphia.

The t-shirt dress is made from second-hand rock concert t-shirts.

The zipper dress, made from recycled zipper scraps and fabric from a local tension fabric company.

A dress made of paint swatches called "interior design."