Yuli Krisna & Deti Mega Purnamasari, Bandung/Jakarta – A fashion show like no other was staged in Bandung as part of the Kartini Day celebrations on Sunday.

On the runway were three women in their 20s modeling outfits they had designed and crafted, drawing from rags and other recycled materials. When the show was over, the three model-designers were escorted back to where they have lived for the past several months – the Bandung Women's Penitentiary.

"Inmates are often regarded as society's garbage, which is why we deliberately staged a fashion show of clothes made from garbage," Ningsih, a women's rights activist, told the Jakarta Globe.

She said she organized the event to show people that convicts were normal people who sometimes happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Of the convicts, "85 percent were jailed for being a drug courier and they were mostly tricked or forced to be one," Ningsih said.

Ningsih is the founder of a recycling community called Sekolah Hijau Lestari and has been teaching vocational skills to inmates, making anything from clothes to recycled jewelry.

"It got me thinking: If real garbage can be of use to society, so can people that society deem as garbage," she said.

The penitentiary has some conditions, however: Only inmates who have served a third of their sentence can take part, and they may not speak to reporters.

In other celebrations of Kartini Day, a Jakarta group called the Women's Action Committee invited female passersby to ink out their condemnations of sexual violence on three two-meter-high murals at the Hotel Indonesia Traffic Circle on Sunday.

Also in Jakarta, women from the Indonesian Catering Entrepreneurs Association (APJI) celebrated Kartini Day by breaking a record for cooking the most types of fish at one time.

The women used more than 400 traditional spices to flavor 50 types of fish during an event at Taman Mini Indonesia Indah on Sunday. The event was jointly organized with the Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, which aims to boost fish consumption in the country.

The ministry cooperated with various women's organizations from the provincial to the neighborhood level.

Born Raden Ajeng Kartini into an aristocratic Javanese family on April 21, 1879, Kartini is famous for her collections of letters that inspired generations to come to fight for women's empowerment.

The letters were compiled into a book titled " Habis Gelap Terbitlah Terang " ("After the Darkness Comes the Light"), published after her death.