Reporter’s notebook; Nathalie Atkinson is dazzled by the stars and scenes of Quebec couture
CECI N’EST PAS UN TRADE SHOW
With apologies to Magritte, one of the highlights of Montreal Fashion Week is Ceci N’est Pas Un Salon, a.k.a. Le Showroom. Just don’t call it a trade show. Over two days during Montreal Fashion Week, Canadian designers who have runways shows — and many who don’t, such as Travis Taddeo, Ophelie Hats and Judy Design — set up a kiosk to show offtheir fall collections. Domestic and foreign stylists, buyers and press wander through. Some finds include Juma’s new silk twill scarves (they’ll retail for $200 come fall), printed with almost-abstract patterns made from digital photographs of tree silhouettes and landscapes taken outside their Wallace Street studio. It’s in Le Showroom that I discovered my new favourite accessory designer: Charlotte Hosten. Stocked at boutiques around Montreal, her necklaces are mixed-media sculptures that incorporate found materials, vintage items and fabrics into statement bibs. The dramatic Deauville tuxedo collar necklace with a pleated ruff, fabric pom-poms and swags of pearl ($240) is a standout. Hosten can also incorporate meaningful mementos into custom versions.
PLEASE DON’T FEED THE MODELS
The showroom at 555 Chabanel, the Centre International de Mode de Montreal, is proudly a trade show kind of event. It’s in this industrial tower in a bleak strip far from Old Montreal that Sensation Mode presents its Midi Fashion shows. We nibble on a buffet, quaff some white wine and sit down to one informal group presentation that includes several of the CIMM member export brands and sales agencies such as Simon Chang, Nobel Furs, Zen B. and Frank Lyman. The music is boppy, the models look well-fed and there’s the smell of fresh paint (the front showroom space is freshly whitewashed for the occasion). This is commerce-centric rather than media-and marketing-focused, so the room is heavy with buyers (front row, in Ghost chairs) and standing-room only. All are busy taking notes for future orders as the lines, each getting eight to 10 looks apiece, file briskly by on models with barely a pose. This must be what buyers’ presentations were like 40 years ago. This group of vendors is so good at making sales that they’ve taken a lesson from reality pageant TV and appointed a Miss CIMM 2010. But leggy 22-year-old Cynthia Morin isn’t posing at car shows or smiling for Tyra’s approval; she’s articulate (with a master’s in marketing) and will be the promotional ambassador for CIMM’s member manufacturers, wholesalers and agents all year. Only in Quebec, folks, only in Quebec.
HOMAGES AND MONGOLIAN HOMMES
Alexander McQueen never attended Montreal Fashion Week, but the British designer’s absence was keenly felt by Judith Desjardins. She accessorized her higher-end J.U.D.E. line with iridescent feathers, elegant wings and what seemed to be almost entire birds, jutting out of models’ heads and even torsos (think Tippi Hendren, had The Birds ended badly), with bits of feathers in lieu of tassels on jewellery. Later, Yves Jean Lacasse for ENVERS sent out a terrific collection for both sexes, although his forte is menswear. It was on a nomad theme, conjured especially by the peaked wool hats by milliner Elaine Saucier. Far from looking costumey, there was impeccable, if burly, European men’s tailoring and lots of grey flannel.
HIGHLIGHT REEL
Two strong new lines book-ended the week for me. The first, Melissa Nepton, I first spotted at Boutique Unicorn on St.-Laurent. Nepton was a finalist on La Collection last year (Quebec’s take on Project Runway) and her first collection is out now for spring. For fall, the Paris-trained designer offered abstract shapes with a twist in always-chic grey and black jersey, cashmere and wool. Nepton is clearly influenced by the Japanese and the Belgians but is eminently more wearable — and affordable. The most pleasant surprise of the week, though, was the runway debut of Dimitri Chris menswear. I was expecting either the usual elaborate men’s costumery but what came out of the fog and strobe lights was Master of the Foxhounds: The Disco Remix. This inaugural offering (already at Gostyle in Toronto and Urimij in Montreal) is the wardrobe of a debauched weekend spent slouching around the British countryside with a 21st-century Sherlock Holmes. Accordingly, the men paired Sherlockian deerstalker hats with their trim double-vented jackets, Crombie coats, caped sweaters and tan and grey wool flannels. In three words? Dieter von Teese.
GET OUTSIDE
Harricana’s Mariouche Gagne is now upcycling more than grandma’s fur coat into garments; she’s taken that other most sentimental vintage item, the wedding dress, and is crafting it into ready-to-wear garments. For her runway show she teamed up with adventure outfitter Chlorophylle. The successful Chicoutimi-founded outdoorsy brand turns 30 this year and this was its first foray onto the fashion week runway. The mix of fur gaiters, toques and mittens with colourful Gore-Tex was, despite the early spring sunshine, a reminder — in Technicolor fuchsia, butter yellow and green dahlia prints — that Canadians do spend a goodly amount of time in the great outdoors, and we want to look good doing it. It was a compelling mix of plaid flannels, slope gear and apres ski, right down to the snowboard props. Ditto Soia & Kyo coats and jackets and the debut of its new men’s line Kyo.
NADYA TOTO
The first whiff of spring is in the air on Monday but the city feels fatigued after a raucous weekend: Saturday’s allnighter Nuit Blanche capped off the Montreal en Lumiere festival (and it’s March Break across Quebec, further emptying the streets). So it’s a rather languid Monday evening show that marks designer Nadya Toto’s return to the runway after a prolonged absence. It’s cocktail hour, both figuratively and literally, and on the runway it’s a cocktail of jersey, lace, glitter and taffeta, set to a techno-strings arrangement.
Toto leads with a cold shoulder — the inevitable one-shoulder dress. Next, a collarless cocoon coat in short-nap fun-fur coated with a kind of liquid-gloss treatment, and lots of jersey inset with panels of lace. The shape veers from jaunty — dirndls, peplum jackets and bubble skirts — to sleek — the deflated fabric of collapsed shoulder points and a series of body-skimming, cut-down-to-there dresses in a glittering diagonal fabric that recalls Solid Gold dancers’ costumes. Throughout the show, many of the looks are cinched with wide belts, ridged, glossy and capped with a rosette, and worn flatteringly high. Along with texture, the collection’s most interesting exercise — because it’s very commercial, a good thing in this economy — is not in its tried-and-true shapes but in these sorts of details.
DENIS GAGNON
A good night’s sleep later and I’m still in awe, processing Montreal Fashion Week’s final show, Montreal’s favourite son Denis Gagnon. The designer has been riding high (and high profile) this week, starting with a rare, long and freewheeling live television interview Sunday night on Tout le monde en parle, the popular current affairs and culture talk show in Quebec. There has also been intense buzz and buildup both to the runway show and to Je m’appelle Denis Gagnon, the documentary about the designer working towards his Fall 2009 collection show. It will premiere in two weeks at the FIFA festival. Sitting down for the show last night (standing room only, with two shows required to accommodate all the guests), buzz was at a deafening high.
Needless to say, Gagnon did not disappoint. In crafting this collection -because it was craftmanship and art, start to finish -he was clearly enamoured of mixing materials and pushing his experimentation up yet another level. Using brass zipper teeth by the mile, he shaped them, like fine embroidery thread, into swirls on leather, jersey and mesh -and sometimes, on their own. It was a virtuoso exercise in technique from start to finish. Many pieces combined long silky drapery fringe and crochet, using the former like fabric in swishing, overlapping panels on pants and skirts and mixed with leather (like a body-con sculpted leather jacket, shaped like something from Thierry Mugler).
It was superb.
Find more style and reports from Montreal Fashion Week at nationalpost.com/retailtherapy
Credit: Nathalie Atkinson; Weekend Post