LITCHFIELD — When it comes to getting ready for the prom, usually the guy just picks up a rented tuxedo, while the girl spends weeks primping and fussing over what to wear.

But when Josh Sirois took Jennifer Newton to the Oak Hill High School prom May 22, it was he who spent  hours on his outfit. He made his tuxedo out of duct tape.

She wore a smashing teal floor-length gown. He wore white pants and jacket with an argyle vest, all from duct tape.

Sirois, 19, attends the University of Vermont. Newton is a junior at Oak Hill High School.

He got the idea for the duct tape tuxedo when watching a Discovery Channel show about the durability of duct tape. Sirois is familiar with duct tape and its many colors; his father, Dan, used it on race cars.

“I thought, ‘How cool would it be to make a suit out of duct tape?’” he said. “When my girlfriend brought up the idea of going to the prom, I said, ‘I don’t want to spend $150 on a tux. I’ll make one for $40.’”

At first she was skeptical. “She thought it would look lame,” he said.

So did his mother. “Are you serious?” a doubtful Kelley Sirois asked.

But he won them over, explaining he would not wear a tux that looked lame, and making it and wearing it would be fun.

The work began during his Christmas college break. There were a few failed attempts, but things changed when he grabbed one of his old suits and used it for a pattern.

He wrapped the tape around the legs and arms of the material suit. When it was just right, “we cut up the seam of the leg or arm, opened it up,” pulling out the material, then proceeded to build the other side.

Fashioning the jacket with lapels was tricky and a lot more work than the trousers, he said. Sirois used real buttons on the jacket, attaching them with Velcro.

He built his vest out of black tape, then crossed on top teal and white tape, creating an argyle style. “I knew her dress was teal,” he explained. He used black “for contrast.” Sirois credits the mix of colors, and the vest itself, for giving his outfit the pop.

The suit was “almost flawless, except for the wrinkles,” he said. And wearing it was hot. Duct tape just doesn’t breath like polyester.

Sirois made his suit more comfy by wearing a regular dress shirt and athletic pants under the tape trousers.

Although he began building the suit last winter, it wasn’t finished until a few days before the prom. That meant a lot of stress and scrambling for himself, his girlfriend and his parents. “I was worried,” Sirois said. When the prom date arrived his suit was ready.

“It came out pretty good,” he said.

Almost too good.

As the couple posed for pictures, went out to eat, and danced, many didn’t realize it was a duct tape tux. “They couldn’t tell from far.”

The worst part about his prom project “was worrying whether it was going to come out well enough to be presentable.” The best part was “making it, and the reactions everybody had. I got a lot of congratulations. People said, ‘Wow, that’s made out of duct tape?’”

While he had admirers, he insisted he did not upstage his girlfriend.

“I didn’t want to take the thunder away. It’s not my prom,” he said. “But it wasn’t a problem. She got a lot of compliments on her dress.”