Hello Toronto!!

To all Petey blog readers!!

Here we are in Toronto!!!

This has been a dream come true for me in the literal sense. Ever since I started university I’ve been looking at apartments, making plans and dreeeeeaming of the day when I could really do it. Finally, with Meaghan and I’s decision to go to Design School, it gave us the opportunity we needed to get out of Windsor (as much as I love and will miss it) and get onto bigger and better things. We’ve been here only one day thus far, but already the improvement in positive energy and motivation is proving that has indeed been all worth it.

The closest subway station to us is St. Clair West, a lovely little location on the edge of middle town, with an ice cream store on the corner and an occult shop across the street. We’re five minutes on foot from groceries, banks and transit, and I’m currently sitting in a Starbucks about two seconds from our apartment. (By the way, a chick just walked in with a totally fab gray pull over coat with epaulettes and a big floppy collar – awesome.)

I spent a summer here two years ago doing some freelance stylist work and got to know the city really well. It was summer so I walked everywhere and my lodging was right on the corner of Queen West and Bathurst, which if you know anything about Toronto, is pretty much the busiest, most insane part of the city, with the exception of Dundas Square...which is just a zoo. I grew to love it quickly though, seeing very clearly that this was a place where I could be successful and happy living in the fast paced, high energy environment Toronto is known for.

We’re taking this week off to get out apartment together and get prepared to begin school and work. But starting January 6^th, 2011, we’ll be taking orders, doing alterations and getting back to it. Contact vanessapetey@gmail.com for any information you might need about Petey the Troll Apparel’s goings on in this great city, Toronto, Ontario.

Until then!

Christmas Time: A Time For Family, Food and Fashion

Happy Christmas internet!

If you’re among those of us who celebrate Christmas every year with the trees and the gifts etc, you know that it’s a very unique time of year. I think that because religion is somehow loosely still involved with the idea of Christmas, it makes it difficult to be publically critical of the holiday, but I don’t care!

I’m not going to be a Grinch or anything, don’t worry. I’ve actually spent the entire day watching Christmas films like Charlie Brown and Santa Clause is coming to town. But I do have a problem with the way our overly consumer based society has turned Christmas into a competition to see who can spend the most on their loved ones, not mention the pressure involved with performing a certain way in front of loved ones for the two hours you see them every year...

Anyways, I’ve found that the best way to deal with this kind of unnecessary pressure and anxiety is to find the things about Christmas that I like, and focussing on them to make the whole thing more pleasant.

The first one is that if you have family members you actually like and want to see, (we all do...yes?) you get to take a few days off and hang out with them. I like listening to my father playing guitar Christmas morning and eating bagel and egg sandwiches. And like I said above, I love Christmas movies, which is a trait I inherited from my mother, who I love watching old movies with while drinking tea and sewing.

The next part of Christmas that I love so much is the food. I think we can all agree, Christmas food is amazing and it lasts forever. I’m anxious for the left over’s from Meaghan’s two Christmas’s and my two Christmas’s, featuring classic turkey, glazed ham, lamb and mint jelly and about 7 different kinds of vegetables and potatoes. MMmmmm....

Finally, the most obvious best part about Christmas is choosing your Christmas outfit! You get to pick a fab outfit to wear Christmas eve for everyone to see you in, then another fab outfit to wear for Christmas Day the next day. Ever since I was a kid I carefully selected my outfits for Christmas to present to my family members I didn’t often see, a true representation of the type of person I am year round.

I’m having difficulty deciding on my outfit for tomorrow, Christmas Day 2010. I’m thinking about my calf-high heeled boots with skinny jeans and an oversized sweater. Or perhaps a feat of layering including a dress, tights, a sweater, a collared shirt, some gloves and some fab accessories. Hmm.

So Merry Christmas to everyone, and please choose your outfits wisely this Christmas.

Much love!

Petey Couture Preview 2011 - Some Comments

The time has come!!

Last night, we at Petey the Troll Apparel released our preview photographs from the shoot we did last week at the infamous abandoned Michigan Central Station across the creek in Detroit. Justin, one of our WetFresco photographers delivered them in the early hours of the morning and I posted them immediately. I can’t speak for the rest of the team, but I can safely say that this was the most memorable and most successful photo shoot ever. I knoooow I say that every time we post new pictures, but it’s true!! So last time I posted, I told you about the location, the calamities and debacles that we faced with entering the abandoned, barbed-wire-fence-surrounded structure, not to mention the cold and the fact that we almost caused an international incident.... this time, I’ll talk about something massively more important: the clothes.

This time around when we started thinking of Petey Couture, all I could think of was BIG. We created the sub-label for just this purpose: to create clothing as art, or Couture, if you will. It was basically so we could use outrageous fabrics and do off the wall stuff without it interfering with the marketing for our Ready to Wear line, Petey the Troll Apparel (Did I mention our Going Away Sale at Phog is next Thursday night?? - Shameless plug!!!!!)

Ahem.

I can’t speak for Meg, obviously, since I don’t really see her clothes before the model puts them on ever, but for myself, I started making sketches of large skirted gowns made of unorthodox materials to find the most over the top designs possible.

I always try to incorporate as many art forms as possible into my projects in an effort to create a complete picture for the viewer, supported by the surroundings. This project, for me, was about using other art forms that I am interested in to create clothing. The first example is obviously the colourful Art School Gown worn by Ivana Jezdic, a beautiful model and friend we’ve been using in shows and photographs for years. The base of this dress is utility canvas, the kind used for stretching across frames. I lined it with cotton, to make it a little softer for the wearer, and then coated the entire thing in white gesso. On top of the gesso is three more layers of paint, both oil and spray. This dress represents to me the transition I’ve taken since I started University and went to art school with the intention of being a painter to where I am now, preparing for my debut at fashion design college in Toronto.

Once the dress was made, before I added any details, Meaghan and I thought we should discuss the direction of the collection, for the sake of our application to Toronto Alternative Fashion Week. The main themes we both had in common were darkness, a sense of propriety reminiscent of the Victorian Gothic period, and an interest in over the top detailing.

What really made the idea come to life for me was our addition of the umbrellas into the line for the first time. As a side note, it has been on my mind to start creating umbrellas for over a year now and it’s finally coming to fruition. These umbrellas are insane, wait til you see them. So when you add umbrellas, black lace, formal wear and an overriding theme of darkness, the most obvious conclusion to come to is the darkest of them all: the dichotomy of life and death.

Meaghan’s counterpart to my Oil Paint dress was an androgynous, formal nod to the tuxedo, complete with frilly 70s tuxedo shirt. The outfit is simple, which is perfect, because the dress is so out there that we needed something to balance it. The best part about this outfit is the back of the jacket. She’s beaded together a skull, to make a broach. It’s a really wicked piece. Like I said, I never see her clothes before the photographers do, so I have no clue what else is coming for her, but I’m gonna leave mine at that for now anyways and say thanks for reading again and stay tuned for all kinds of Petey stuff happening over the next few weeks.

Until then!

Petey Couture Photoshoot in Detroit City - The Adventure

Hi Petey followers!!
Today I'd like to use this blog post to talk about the adventure that was the preliminary Petey Couture 2011 photo shoot this afternoon, December 14, 2010. As I mentioned in my last post, this shoot was for our application to Toronto Alternative Fashion Week showing this April 2011. We had one photographer - Justin Bondy of Wet Fresco Photography, two models wearing two couture outfits and two designers preparing for a shoot of epic proportions...at least for Petey the Troll. The five of us piled into the car with our double doubles and our high confidence and we headed off toward the Ambassador Bridge - one way to Detroit City.

Michigan Central Station is a Beaux-Arts era structure built in 1913 by the architectural duos Warren and Wetmore and Reed and Stem, the architects behind New York Grand Central Station and a variety of other similar train stations across the United States. It was built at a time of prosperity in Detroit, when Henry Ford's new "assembly line" style of making cars became all the rage, and every average joe could get a well paying job in a factory. With so much money flying around, the people of Detroit built the Michigan Central Station to be among the most grandiose, most luxurious buildings in America. Of course, in 1913 the prolonged dominance of the vehicle in Detroit had not occurred to the designers, who assumed the majority of passengers would be arriving by streetcar or some other form of public transit. Thus, when the state built the massive freeways across Detroit City and made it impossible to live there without a car, the use of the old train station became unclear. As the majority of the population moved to the suburbs, leaving their formerly beautiful city to ruin, the station went with it. In 1988 the last train left the station and they closed their doors, abandoning the building to the elements, scrap collectors and homeless of the area.

I can't stress enough the beauty of this building we saw today, even in the state in which it currently exists. The oversized arched front windows are all broken, and there are bits of the ceiling all over the floor, but generally, the place is not in the worst possible shape. I mean... it's no Grande Palais, but it isn't caving in or anything. The graffiti covers every available surface in a free floating dialogue in which some of the most reputable taggers are involved. Aside from the graffiti, there is evidence of human life throughout; empty pop bottles, cigarette butts and footprints are scattered about the floor of the main room. We got in with no problem under the fence and through one of the broken windows. The shrill cold seemed even more bitter in the shade of the hollow shell we were standing in and Meaghan and I worked hard to keep the models from freezing their fingers and toes off for some of the shots. For the duration of the time we were in the building - not more then 30 minutes - we saw no one else inside. No homeless, no other explorers, no one to bother us or even say a word. And it was fine. :)

It was upon exiting the building that we came to realize that it wouldn't be that easy after all. I hopped out the window and spotted a truck watching us on the other side of the fence demanding that we come to him, lest we be arrested. It was a Border Patrol officer and he was not in a good mood. He unlocked the gate of the barbed wire fence and we huddled out like teenagers caught smoking a j on school property. He lectured us for a while about all of the horrible things that *could* have happened while we were in there etc etc... then he got on the phone. Before we knew it, there were SEVEN Border Patrol vehicles surrounding us: five little artists from Canada-land - aka NOT the United States.
"Is this going to be an international incident??" I thought on the inside, while trying to keep my cool on the outside to avoid panic.
Of course, after scaring the hell out of us and causing frost to actually form on body parts of ours from standing out in the freezing cold so long, they let us go without so much as a slap on the wrist. The dude was even flirting with one of the models at the end for Christ's sake. Ridiculous.
So we warmed up, drove home and breathed a sigh of relief upon entering our lovely Windsor, where there are a lot fewer abandoned historic structures, a lot less of a chance you'll be hasseled by a gaggle of international border guards for taking some beautiful pictures.

Peace!

Hometown Ruins: Fashion Photography and Exploration in Detroit City

It’s been a little bit since I last blogged and the reason is simple. I’m in the process of packing up my life for the eighth time since I left my mom’s house in preparation for Petey the Troll Apparel’s relocation to the great city of Toronto. Additionally, we’re currently working on our application for Alternative Fashion Week in TO this year and it has proved to be a mammoth project. The setting for the photoshoot for the two outfits we’re planning on submitting is none other than Detroit city, Windsor’s pathetic, unemployed older cousin. So this post is going to be about my research on that fantastic town of ruins and how we plan to use abandoned structures in a dichotomy with couture fashion to represent the overall intended artistic impact of this year’s collection.

I first really became fascinated with Detroit when I took an architecture class in my third year of University. I was privileged enough to have Dr. Veronica Mogyorody as a professor in this class and have been addicted to modernist architecture ever since. The seed had been planted so when I was introduced to Detroit from an art historical perspective by Dr. Michael Farrell when I was finishing up my degree, I became obsessed. I also spent a lot of time working on Detroit research when I completed a final project for a History Workshop on the 1967 Race Riots. The decline and fall of this once magnificent city captivated me, and I’ve been in love ever since.

There's this really unbelievable documentary me and Meaghan watched after a trip to Detroit last week called Requiem for Detroit. We were across the creek earlier that day for fabric shopping, gallery visiting and of course, urban exploration. We were mapping out the locations for our next Couture photoshoot, and paid a visit to the old Michigan Central Station.

I cannot express to you how overwhelming it is to be around these abandoned architectural masterpieces in Detroit. Every empty building tells its own sad story about the fall of the great city that was once the 4th biggest in the United States. What attracted us to using these buildings for our photoshoot was the duality of the beauty and devastation that every inch of Detroit eminates. The Michigan Central Station, for example, was at one time one of the most glorious beaux-arts structures north of New York. It was built with the intention of being way over the top in tersm of elegance, luxury and style. It was meant to be the place where people first arrived in Detroit - the golden gate before entering the sparkling city. Did you know that once, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the automobile, the Detroiters thought it would be quite fitting (and quite humble... I must say) to paint the downtown section of Woodward avenue GOLD. Can you imagine painting Woodward avenue gold today? I thought it would be a fantastic art piece for someone to execute. If I have loads of cash one day (as all artists do, I'm sure,) maybe I'll do it... just for the remarkable sense of irony.

As soon as we returned from Michigan central Station that day I started looking up more of the classic abandoned buildings in the downtown core. One was the Book Tower. I've looked at the building from afar many times and never quite knew what to think. It reminded me of something out of Gotham City. It's one of the Italian Renaissance inspired buildings that was added to the city when they were still wealthy. The Book Brothers, in the early 1920s saw that the car industry was booming in this town and it looked like it could only get better from there. They built buildings along Washington Blvd in Detroit including this one which stood with to the old Book-Cadillac Hotel.

Our collection is about endings and new beginnings. Themes of darkness and death are the base, with ovetones of hope for renaissance and a brighter future. If a city like Detroit, with it's fascinating and tragic story is not perfect as a backdrop for this collection, I really can't think of what would be better.

We're going tomorrow to shoot the promo photos, so look for them within a week's time at http://peteythetrollapparel.com!!

Thanks for reading! Salut!