This spring Juliana Gregori, 18, brought new meaning to the term “bag lady.” At the invitation of Lord & Taylor, the continuing education student took up scissors, needle, and thread and made a skirt and a blouse out of the department store’s shopping bags. Not the coziest outfit ever, but Gregori—presented with the chance to show her work in the Boston store during the height of the spring shopping season—wasn’t aiming for comfort. “I wanted to see my design in that window,” she says.

The collaboration between the store and the Museum School was dubbed “A Passion for Fashion” and was conceived to showcase Lord & Taylor’s recently redesigned shopping bags. Last fall, students in the continuing education class “Art as Fashion, Fashion as Art” were invited to submit sketches for garments or sculpture using the white and orange bags as material. Gregori, a newcomer to Boston from São Paulo, Brazil, was one of seven students who submitted proposals; Lord & Taylor accepted all of them. Among the designs were a kimono, a jewelry box, and Gregori’s two-piece ensemble.

The actual handiwork began in late winter. Gregori’s design involved cutting the bags into long pieces, braiding them together, and then sewing the braids together into a blouse. “I had experimented,” she says, “and as the strips were cut and interlaced, the paper got more flexible.” Using her own body as a mannequin, Gregori layered the braids onto a fabric blouse she’d sewn. To accompany the shirt, she fashioned a pleated skirt from a single large bag. “It was hard to figure out how the paper worked,” she says. “It ripped a lot. At times it was a mess.”

Yet costume design appears to be in Gregori’s genes; her grandmother sewed ballet costumes. And 13 shopping bags later, Gregori was fitting her ensemble onto a Lord & Taylor mannequin and showing it off to passersby for several weeks in April. “I was thrilled to have it up there,” she says. “It was so much work and then to have it done and looking beautiful, I was happy.”

Gregori will enroll in college in the United States this fall and hopes to study theater and costume design.