Dumpster-chic designer clothes featured in Fashion Week show

NEW YORK (WABC) -- A fashion designer is teaming up in an unusual partnership with the New York City Sanitation Department.

The project is taking on recycled clothes.

Designer Heron Preston is creating dumpster-chic duds for his big Fashion Week show.

It's staged in a pretty unique place, the New York City Sanitation Department's salt shed, and it features the uniforms of sanitation workers.

"This is a whole collision of culture the art fashion world and the Department of Sanitation," Preston said.

It is something that perhaps only an artist could conceive of.

Preston has taken elements of those green uniforms and created new looks, which in a way is something sanitation workers do on their own every day.

"Each sanitation worker is unique, how they tuck their pants in their boots, or the sweatbands and I've seen guys with napkins to absorb more sweat, there are all different style cues," Preston said.

Preston's capsule is actually available for purchase.

T-shirts are going for $60 and bags for $1,200.

A portion of the money raised will go to the newly launched foundation for New York's Strongest.

It is all about promoting the work sanitation workers and zero waste, something Preston and the department both strive for.

"The things that we consumers use don't disappear when we're done with them, they either have to be landfilled or recycled or repurposed. Sometimes they end up in oceans. So this collaboration with Heron is really waking up the fashion world to this reality," said Elizabeth Balkan, Foundation for New York's Strongest.

It's a creative way to say thank you to workers who are often overlooked.

"This is my way of saying thank you to sanitation workers just through the language I can speak which is art, fashion, creativity," Preston said.