by Dale Peers While we might immediately think of dolls as a child’s plaything they have a firm place in fashion too. They have been used to educate, illustrate and inspire! The fashion doll was used to disseminate the latest fashion styles to potential clients with both life sized and smaller fashion dolls created. These…
Tag: Fashion History
Gordon Shadrach Lecture for the Seneca School of Fashion
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…
POC Canadian Women Leading the Future of Fashion Magazines
These Black and BIPOC Canadian women have left their mark and let diversity into the fashion industry By: Rose de Paulsen When we think of diversity in fashion, our mind leaps first to the most visible aspects. We think of models, designers, influencers, and we often do not think of the people behind the scenes,…
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…
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…
Round of Applause for Our Kings – Appreciation Post for Canadian Drag Kings!
By Anna Ludmirsky, The world of drag is often reduced to the gay man dressing up as a highly feminized version of a character they are performing as. Although drag was established by men dressing up as women to exaggerate feminine features and characteristics; the word actually derived from these same theatrical origins, the men…
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…