On March 28, 2022, Canadian artist Gordon Shadrach gave a talk to students from the Fashion Studies (FST) Fashion Arts (FAA), Fashion Business (FAB), and Fashion Business Management (FBM) programs of the Seneca School of Fashion. In his inspiring and provocative talk, Shadrach covered topics such as the cultural meanings of specific garments like the…
Tag: Fashion
Alex S. Yu: Made with Dream and Love
By Rose de Paulsen, Alex S. Yu may not have been in the fashion game for long, but he has already made waves with his collections at Vancouver fashion week. Originally, Alex Yu was set to study computer sciences at Simon Frasier University. But, when fashion calls you pick up the phone, he then found…
Anita Clarke, “Engineering Storyteller” of the Online Fashion World
By: dr. Mark Joseph O’Connell, Olivia Belande, Anna Ludmirsky, and Rose de Paulsen, Seneca alumnus Anita Clarke is a famous Toronto-based fashion blogger as well as a content marketer with Shopify Canada where she holds the position of Senior Managing Editor of the Shopify Engineering blog. Anita finds fashion inspirational due to its ability to…
Edith Strauss – From Schmatte to Riches, The Woman Who Left a Legacy within the Fashion Industry
By Anna Ludmirsky, Full-time mother as well as a full-time business owner and designer, Jewish-Polish Immigrant Edith Strauss ensured she would succeed and push through instances of hardships in all aspects of her life. Not many people are as brave enough to begin a journey in a risky industry which expects you to outperform yourself…
Making What Others Say is a Flaw, into a Success Story – Winnie Harlow
By Anna Ludmirsky, The modeling industry has always been an unloving and unaccepting form of art riddled with a brutally strict list of requirements to be successful in it. Height, skin tone, weight, every inch of your body is placed under scrutiny and every flaw is judged and “fixed” to fit a specific standard of…
Vicarious Consumption during a Gilded Age
By Dale Peers (professor emeritus, Seneca School of Fashion), With the recent premiere of “The Gilded Age” Julian Fellowes gives us another peek into an earlier age. As he did with Downton Abbey, we have a glimpse of an era that seems so very different to our own. In this production we time travel to…
Marie Marguerite Rose: A Story of Early-Colonial French Chic and Emancipation…
By dr. Mark Joseph O’Connell, This is Charlene Chasse she has worked as a historical re-enactor with Parks Canada for the past nineteen years. She states of herself:…”I knit, I sew, I cook and I do hot yoga.” She also brings to life the fascinating historical figure of one Marie Marguerite Rose… Fig. 1, “Charlene…
Fashion Upcycling a Canadian Perspective
Seneca Fashion Arts faculty member, Professor Jennifer Dares has published a chapter “Fashion Upcycling a Canadian Perspective” in Circular Economy : Assessment and Case Studies (2021). Abstract Upcycling is a design practice that uses pre- and post-consumer textile waste derived from apparel manufacturers or disassembled garments to create new fashion, providing a sustainable design solution to divert textile waste…
Welly Couture – A Look into 80’s Couture
By Anna Ludmirsky, Born in Indonesia, Kurniawan Welly is a designer who created incredibly stylish high fashion garments most notably in the 80’s. These full gowns incorporate beautiful detail in every crevice of the piece from the bustier to the petticoat. Though Welly’s garments seem very outlandish and over-the-top nowadays, during that period of time, his target market of the…
Forever Elegant: Yasmeen Ghauri’s Stamp on the Canadian Modelling Industry
By Olivia Belande, Ethereal and romantic in stature, Yasmeen Ghauri is a Canadian-born supermodel of Pakistani and German heritage who quickly swept the nation and helped to diversify the national modelling industry. The supermodel was discovered in 1988 at the age of 17, while working in a Montreal based Macdonald’s location. Quickly thereafter, Ghauri became the face of Chanel, Christian Dior, Jil Sander,…