Cincinnati -- University of Cincinnati fashion design junior Jason Evege is gearing up for an international design competition with a dress that is, literally, about time.

Evege's fashionable entry for the 1998 Young Fashion Designers Competition to be held Dec. 15 in Paris is an eight-pound dress "clock-full" of timepiece gears, hands, faces, stems, springs, coils and even a grandfather-clock pendulum.

Though weighty, the sleeveless, V-necked dress and its accompanying train, is wearable, serving as a fashionable metaphor for time and its heavy hand. For instance, vertical, evenly spaced quilting on the dress recalls the inevitable regularity of seconds, minutes and hours. Evege, who used pliers-and-hammer as much as needle-and-thread, dented and smudged the pendulum that hangs from the collar down the exposed back to echo the "wearing" effect of time on all things. Hanging along the back of the dress as fringe is a clock-face cut into strips.

UC is among eight U.S. schools represented in the competition for young designers where the Americans will test their skills against peers from 16 countries in a runway fashion show judged by professional designers like Christian Lacroix, Paco Rabanne, Kenzo and Pierre Cardin as well as fashion journalists, according to Margaret Voelker-Ferrier, associate professor of design in UC's College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. The motif for this year's contest: create a suit to come into the millennium.

The winning garment will go on permanent display in France's premiere fashion museum, the Musee des Artes de la Mode, part of the Louvre. The grand prize winner will also receive a one-year scholarship to a top Paris fashion school and a $4,000 cash award.