Who is Who in the Montréal Fashion Scene
Montréal prides itself on its vibrant and diverse fashion scene and fashion production industry. Montréal designers usually get all the spotlight and coverage, but what about the other people who contribute to the creation and vibrancy of this scene? Here are some of the people who have a lot to do with making this city fashionable:
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Denis Gagnon – Pushing the Gender Boundaries
This season’s Fashion Week was your most radical, most playful, and perhaps the most spectacular runway show to date. You put male models in high heels, used theatrical make-up and synthetic wigs, you had trans-gendered models, and your show managed to push the gender and race boundaries in a way that was both stunning and entertaining. What were your ideas and motivations for this kind of spectacle?
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Marie Saint Pierre – 25 Years of Montreal Fashion
A native Montrealer (born 1961) and a graduate of LaSalle College (1986), Marie Saint Pierre received two grants from the Montreal Fashion Group upon graduation, and started her label in 1987. She was the first Québec designer invited to show her work at the Fashion Coterie in New York in 1989, and the first Canadian designer to present her collection in Paris in 1995. That year she was also awarded the Designer of the Year Award by Elle Québec.
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Montreal Fashion Week – Fall 2012, Day 1
Montreal Fashion Week – Fall 2012, Day 2
Montréal Fashion Week – Fall 2012, Day 3
Montréal Fashion Week – Fall 2012, Day 4
Montreal Fashion Week kicked off with an exhibition and slide show commemorating Marie Saint Pierre’s 25 years of designs. The designer was present in the audience, along with fellow designers such as Denis Gagnon and Tavan & Mitto.
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Anastasia Lomonova will be presenting her third collection at the Montréal Fashion Weekon Tuesday, September 4th, 2012. Born in Odessa, Ukraine in 1984, she moved to Cyprus with her family for several years before coming to Canada. After training as a visual artist at Ryerson University in Toronto, she moved to Montreal in 2007 began working in the fashion industry, and established her own fashion label in 2011. She has won several awards and been named one of Canada’s most promising young designers. Her designs are sold at Denis Gagnon’s boutique in the Old Port and online. The majority of her customers come from both Canada and the US.
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Maria Steiner is the designer behind the Viennese fashion label Ruins of Modernity. I first came across her designs last summer at the w?atf - What About the Future pop-up store at Pressgasse 28, near Naschmarkt, in Vienna. Organized by Sonja Weinstabel, w?atf showcases young and up-and-coming local designers’ work in Vienna. Maria Steiner’s work stayed with me for a long time and her intriguing label begged to be examined.
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Tom Wesselmann and the Art of Colour
In collaboration with the Festival du Mode & Design, the museum hosted a Colour Block Party on Wednesday, August 1, 2012, inviting guests to visit the exhibition and attend a reception. Dress code: colour block! The sea of colours in the rooms complemented Wesselmann’s colour celebrations on the walls.
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AUGUSTIN TEBOUL first made a splash with their mystique and creativity last summer during the Berlin Fashion Week 2011, winning the SYFB award. This year, the two female designers are back on Berlin’s catwalk (July 4 – 7, 2012) with their signature aesthetic that arises from the conception of two contrasting personalities: German-born Annelie Augustin with subtle, minimal shapes and her sophisticated mind and French-born Odély Teboul, the rather chaotic, nostalgic crafts-woman.
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Monsieur Hubert de Givenchy – by Karim Zeriahem
The upcoming FIFA (International Festival of Films on Art) in Montréal (March 15-25) will be presenting a great selection of art films, including Karim Zeriahem’s fashion documentary “Monsieur Hubert de Givenchy” (2011). The film tells the story of one of France’s leading couturiers who continually epitomized elegance and grace since the 1960s.
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Montréal Fashion Week 2012 – Part 2
Since being crowned “Canada’s Breakthrough Designer” at the 2011 Telio competition of Montreal Fashion Week, Earl Luigi has gone on to design, among others, a capsule collection in collaboration with the Japan Love Project – an art show to raise money and help rebuild Japanese communities affected by last year’s tsunami. He has also ranked among the top 20 finalists in the London-based international Hand and Lock embroidery competition. Now in his final year at Kwantlen Polytechnic University where he is completing a Bachelor of Design, Fashion and Technology.
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Payam Tavan and Mike Mitto have been designing together since 1995. It was in Montreal that each established a solid technical base, before going on to perfect their knowledge in Europe. Earning a Master’s Degree from the Domus Academy in Milan, Payam Tavan also worked with the head stylist at Gianfranco Ferré, while Mike Mitto chose to pursue his studies at the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture in Paris, where he went on to work at Chanel for a number of seasons.
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Tracing the Locations of Berliner Chic
Berliner Chic is a phrase associated with more than just the local fashion industry and its ready-to-wear clothing. Berliner Chic is a cultural concept that evokes history: the turbulent story of the efforts and strives of creative designers and manufacturers in Berlin, whose attempts to establish Berlin as a fashion capital have been continuously interrupted by politics, ideology, and war. It evokes the notion of quality (the tradition of handmade clothes) and a certain urban flare that persists to this day in the contemporary fashion scene.
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Since the late 1980s, Jean Paul Gaultier enchanted the fashion world’s imagination with his witty and provocative attitude and humour towards fashion and sexuality, earning himself the notorious nickname l’enfant terrible of the fashion world. His visions of women (and men) in exaggerated cone bras and his reinterpretations of traditional corsets, epitomized by the costumes of Madonna’s 1990 Blond Ambition Would Tour, captured theZeitgeist of the 1990s, with its changing attitudes towards gender roles, fashion, sexuality, and society in general.
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Berliner Chic – One Year Later
Berlin is the city for new and non-traditional media. It is becoming increasingly apparent that just as for city-guide publishers, it may be a futile project to put anything about Berlin in print. The city changes daily, renaming its streets and metro stops, replacing old buildings and establishments with new ones, and generally moving the sand from one “beach-bar event” to another.
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Helmut Lang – Deconstruction of Fashion
The Viennese fashion designer Helmut Lang stopped his fashion career in 2005 to concentrate on his artistic pursuits. His third solo exhibition, entitled “Make it hard” was shown at The Fireplace Project gallery in East Hampton July 22 – August 8, 2011.
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Anna Aichinger is a Viennese designer, who studied at Vienna’s University of Applied Arts, and established her label in 2003. Her designs stand for elegance, quality, femininity, and empowerment. Her clothes are sold at different boutiques in Vienna and presented at Paris Fashion Week twice a year. She believes that “fashion has to highlight the woman” (not vice versa), and that “one should look a woman in the face first, then notice her dress.”
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Gabriele Rigby created her fashion label Fröhlich in 2009, and opened her store in Zieglergasse 68, in Vienna’s trendy 7th district in 2010. “Fröhlich” means “happy” in German, and stands for hand-made, original, individual, comfortable, and multi-functional clothes for women. The name also conveys positive, good feeling, and symbolizes “clothes made with love and dedication,” spreading good energy and thoughts.
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Cloed Priscilla Baumgartner is the clever and stylish designer behind the eco-friendly label MILCH, and the owner of YPPIG Eco Fashion Showroom at Yppenmarkt, a trendy marketplace in Vienna’s 16th district. MILCH was established in 2000, and symbolizes the recycling cycle of nature (transformation from grass to cow to milk).
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Berlin Fashion Week 2011
The 9th Fashion Week in Berlin (July 5-10, 2011) revealed the new Spring/Summer 2012 collections at a new location on Strasse des 17. Juni, with the main entrance across from the Brandenburg Gate (also known as the Fan-Mile during the World Cup public viewings). The key players of the Berlin fashion scene who were invited to present in the main tentthis year included: Michael Michalsky, Michael Sontag, Vladimir Karaleev, Katja Will (C’est Tout), Iris van Herpens, Lala Berlin, Marcel Ostertag, Kaviar Gauche, and others.
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Designers Johanna Kühl und Alexandra Fischer-Röhler studied together at Berlin’s ESMOD fashion school and established their label Kaviar Gauche Berlin in 2003. They opened their flagship store in Berlin, at Linienstr. 44, in May 2010.
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Visions & Fashion – Exhibition at the Kulturforum
Just in time for the Berlin Fashion Week starting next week, the Lipperheide Costume Library at the Kultuforum at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin opened its new exhibition, entitled “Visions & Fashion: Images of Fashion 1980-2010” on display from June 30 until October 9, 2011.
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Denis Gagnon Interprets Alice in Toronto 2011
Every age has to reinterpret its own myths anew, to re-infuse the classics with a contemporary flare and life, and to re-imagine its own heroes and heroines as contemporary. Baz Luhrmann did it with Romeo and Juliet (1996), Tim Burton with Alice in Wonderland (2010). Now Montréal’s most celebrated fashion designer Denis Gagnon is back with a tribute to the girl who takes on Wonderland and its classic absurdities, a girl who stands up to the Red Queen, tames Bandersnatch, rescues the Mad Hatter, and slays the Jabberwocky.
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Berlin-Avantgarde – Art, Fashion & Interior Design
Berlin-Avantgarde, located in Nollendorferstr. 11/12 in Schöneberg, is an art gallery, lounge, fashion and design store, as well as a platform for contemporary artists and exhibition space for charity auctions and art shows. Established in September 2010, it was conceptualized to be avant-garde, creative, and open-minded, and to present contemporary ways of combining arts with pleasure (as the website states).
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S.Wert Design began with a research project of Fernsehturm graphics in 2001, which turned into the book publication Von der Partei zur Party 1969-2003 – Der Berliner Fernsehturm als grafisches Symbol (2003), by Dirk Berger, Ingo Müller, and Sandra Siewert. I met with the Swiss graphic designer and architect by training, Sandra Siewert, who came to Berlin in 1992 from Basel, and has been translating Berlin’s surfaces and façades into her graphic designs.
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c.neeon are Berlin-based designers Doreen Schulz and Clara Leskovar. Doreen comes from Thüringen (in the former East) and Clara is from West-Berlin. They met at fashion school, Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee, where Clara studied textile design and Doreen fashion design. They began to collaborate in their third year, and found their label in 2004. Already in 2005 they received their first fashion award at the Hyères Festival International de Mode et Photographie in southern France. In 2006, the Berlin Kunstgewerbemuseum organized an exhibition of their collection.
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HYPNOSIS-berlin are the Berlin-based designers Niklas Kauffeld and Matthias Jahn. Originally from Kassel, they reunited in Berlin in the early 1990s and found their label in 2006, and have been presenting their collections at international fashion shows since 2008. I visited them in their atelier and show room in Friedrichshain.
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Natascha Loch – Berlin fashion designer at work
Natascha Loch is a Berlin fashion designer who specializes in knit-design. Born and raised in Eckenhaid, near Nürnberg, she moved to Berlin in 2001 to study fashion design. She established her own label in 2006. Since then, she has created more than six collections and has been participating at major fashion shows. Her designs can be purchased at several stores in Berlin and Vienna.
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F.C. Gundlach and the Modern Woman on the Street
As Perry Anderson pointed out, “German culture in the past third of a century has been distinguished less as a matrix of ideas than of images” (Anderson, “A NEW GERMANY?” April 2009). With the explosion of visual culture and new media over the past century, his claim is almost self-evident, yet the question becomes then, how is this matrix of images constructed, and what kinds of narratives do those images create? Capturing images of fashion and film for popular magazines of post-war Germany, F.C. Gundlach’s photographs have no doubt become part of this visual matrix.
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In today’s brand-saturated media world, brand loyalty is perhaps an outdated concept, and as in the case of technology brands, a futile and expensive project. But for those of us raised to appreciate quality over quantity, research the best of the best on the market, and to stick with our choice in a code of honour and loyalty that perhaps seem somewhat old-fashioned, there is a certain satisfaction in identifying with the things we like. So here are some of the things I found in my fashion research, and the reasons why Marc Jacobs is the man.
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Denis Gagnon at Montréal Fashion Week / Semaine de la Mode 2011
The 2oth anniversary of the Montréal Fashion Week (Feb. 7-10, 2011) brought great shows and organizational improvements. The shows were spaced out in one hour blocks, which allowed more time for setting up the show and less delays, the press access and registration was done more efficiently, and the spaces of the Marché Bonsecours building were utilized even better, by staging some of the shows and events in the cocktail room. Many of the great designers from last year’s show returned, and many more got to present this time, including Montréal’s star, Denis Gagnon.
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Denis Gagnon – Fashion in Museum and on the Street
Quebec designer Denis Gagnon managed to take Montréal by storm, not only presenting at the Montréal Fashion Week and designing two lines for the fashion chain stores BEDO and ALDO, but also exhibiting his exquisite works at the Musée des Beaux-Arts. This type of cultural saturation and blurring of fashion boundaries points to a new age in fashion exhibition and consumption.
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When in Berlin… Fashion Highlights
Berlin fashion and design is booming. Here is a collection of links, images, and addresses of local shops and boutiques, organized by areas into “fashion walks.”
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Berlin Fashion Treasures in Vancouver 
Berlin is chic. And as it turns out, traces of its style, culture, and history can be found all over the globe. Along with the pieces of the Berlin Wall that have been sold to amusement parks and museums around the world (Montréal has a piece at the Centre de Commerce Mondial), Berlin culture and fashion is beginning to transcend borders. Having established various “locationalities” of Berlin fashion in cultural establishments such as film, photography, music, museums, and fashion shows, I could not help but notice how far Berliner Chic stretches.
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One is not born a woman, one becomes one. Simone de Beauvoir was right. And Coco Chanel showed us how it’s done. With style. Simone de Beauvoir was the first feminist to offer a sustained critique of fashion and femininity, commenting on the “woman of elegance” that “What she treasures is herself adorned, and not the objects that adorn her” (Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949, p.545).
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Kat Sark
