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: Seneca College
Ribbon Skirts: Resilience with Every Ribbon
By Rose de Paulsen In February of last year Cecilia Nowell from Vogue.com covered a story out of Washington state where an Indigenous community was given body bags instead of PPE and Abigail Echo-Hawk (Pawnee) turned them into a garment that combines her resilience and the traditional ribbon work. Indigenous communities across North America have…
All Eyes on Alfred: A Look Back at Canada’s King of Fashion
By Olivia Belande, Alfred Sung– you’ve heard the name, haven’t you? Perhaps not immediately familiar if you do not work or closely align yourself with the fashion industry, though you’re surely familiar with his products. Alfred Sung is a Chinese born Canadian designer whose garments, perfumes and accessories have long dominated upscale department store shelves….
The Cry for True Androgyny: Navigating Genderless Fashion in a Binary Industry
By Olivia Belande, This week, on a long Toronto rush hour drive home from Seneca’s Newnham campus, I had the pleasure of listening to British Columbia based podcast Love To Sew. The current episode I was playing featured Italian sewist Emilia Bergolgio (@emilia_to_nuno on instagram), and the topics of discussion ranged from tailoring choices, preferred fabrics to genderless fashion. It was this,…
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…
Breaking Barriers, Forging Pathways: Yasmin Warsame
By Olivia Belande, It is no secret that Seneca College is home to some incredibly phenomenal alumni, many of whom have gone on to create fantastic things, make amazing discoveries, and become tremendous people who we are honoured to have called one of our own. Today, we would like to introduce to our readers the…
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…
Rebecca Belmore, Art as a Call to Action
by Rose de Paulsen, Rebecca Belmore is Anishinaabe and member of the Obishikokaang who creates political and personal art installations with sculptures, garments, photographs, videos, and multiple other mediums. Before she found remarkable success with her art, she grew up in Northwestern Ontario connecting with the land during her childhood. Her profound connection with nature…