When the sustainable design movement first started, rolled paper jewelry and gum wrapper bags were plentiful. You have to start somewhere, right? Turn the clock forward to this collection of paper jewelry, created as a collaboration between KEZA and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) students Jenny Lai and Lindsay Perkins.

The RISD designers participated in the collection to help empower women who were formerly sex workers by helping them set up their company and develop skills in making paper jewelry.

KEZA, a fashion company dedicated to assisting businesses in East Africa with the intention of improving the lives of women there, consider themselves a “people-inspired fashion company.”.

For this particular collection, KEZA highlighted a Rwanda cooperative that creates paper jewelry.

In conjunction with KEZA, Lai and Perkins spent all of summer 2009 in Rwanda working with the artisans to make the paper jewelry you see here.

And you thought paper jewelry was sooo amateur.