New Projects and Personal Inspirations - The New Line in Progress

Whenever I start a new project, in this case (and most cases,) a jacket, I must admit that I usually start working with someone – a specific person in mind. I meet a lot of people on a daily basis, and I'm also lucky enough to have a lot of friends with really unique styles from which to draw inspiration. It usually happens instantly and out of nowhere and it never leaves my head until I leave the sketchpad and move to the sewing room. This is where the seamstress/designer keeps all of her secrets and mysteries, not always enclosing the name of the figure who inspired the garments in her collection. There are times, of course when I make clothes on commission for people, in which case obviously the garment is inspired by them. Trying to describe the process is like a painter describing how they chose which colour to go in which spot on their canvas, or a musician, which notes sounded best where.

       Right at this very moment, I have four jackets in my mind that I want to make over the next month – two men's, two women's. I've been working on sketches of these projects for 3 weeks, and continue to develop my ideas every day as I walk around the city, observing the choices of outer-wear that Torontonians adorn. In some of my previous blogs, I've  discussed actually having to stop on the street, on the subway, or streetcar to really look at someone far away because the image they've achieved with their personal style is so stunning to me that I must make note of it. I'm not a photographer, but I maintain the ability to describe beauty in its many, strange forms.

       

        The first man's jacket I'll be working on was half inspired by a photograph from a Vogue that I cut out and used for a photo-collage in my bedroom, and half by an anonymous person, an artist, who I hardly see ever, but who always interests me on a creative level when I do. And what I've realized since I initially started working on the piece, is that the previous description could be applicable to a lot of the men I know, suiting their styles perfectly each in their own individual way.  That's what I want to achieve with this jacket - a sense of individuality, which can be applied to any style. It'll be a navy blue, slim-fitted blazer, with classic patch pockets and one inside breast pocket and one outside breast pocket. The unique thing that will be about this jacket is that I wanted it to be longer than a normal blazer. Not too long, just a couple of inches, to give it a slightly more dressy look than one that cuts at the waist. I think it has to be the next one I work on, just because it's been floating in my head for some time now and I'm starting to feel like it's a real thing. Fabric-search-time. Give me a week. Less.

       The first woman's jacket I want to work on is going to be a re-make of an old Petey the Troll coat from winter 2009. I've decided I want to use some of the fabrics from the old left over stuff, because quite frankly, I'm a much better seamstress/designer now than I was then (ya know, design school n shit) and I could use the beautiful materials I used before for more beautiful garments. You dig? We have pictures anyways, I'm not sentimental. ;) The new jacket is going to be a mix of mustard yellow corduroy, and brown printed drapery fabric, using grey buttons, and burgundy gathered lace at the cuffs and pockets, just for a touch of history. It'll be the most colourful piece I've worked on in months, actually, and I'm really excited to get going on tearing the old stuff apart. Someone once said an artist cannot grow unless they understand both creation as well as destruction. I tend to agree.

       The second man's jacket I'll be working on is the least finished, in terms of design, of the four I plan to begin working on immediately. Again, this piece was inspired almost directly by a friend of mine who also has a very unique personal style, that which reflects his personality very well, in my opinion. The idea originally came from a jacket he pointed out to me on a woman, featuring both leather as a base fabric, as well as thick knitted wool around the cuffs, the collar, and at the waist. What has kept me interested in this piece has less to do with this interested combination of materials, and more the transformation of it from a woman's jacket to a man's, and thinking about what the key differences are between the two in a case such as this wherein the piece itself is practically ambiguous in style. So I'm still working on it, but expect some sketches and further discussion on this topic in coming posts. :)

       The last coat and the second woman's coat is one which will mirror the first man's jacket I created months ago for an inspired by one of my old co-workers. He challenged me to use lace, a favourite material of both mine and his, on a man's jacket while maintaining the solemnity and masculinity of the jacket itself. What I came up with, as you might recall is a grey, Italian wool jacket with black lace, 1 1/2” thick lining the two front seams under the arms and on the inside of the collar and the cuffs at the sleeves. We agreed it was a success and I was further inspired to use lace on more of my garments as appliques, rather than frou frou. Therefore my next woman's jacket is going to be cream coloured wool, to accentuate the brighter coloured lace, with fold-over pockets, which I've been meaning to include on something for months, fitted, straight cut with a 4” flare at the waist. The front closure will not be double breasted, but will be asymmetrical still, leaving lots of room for the lace applique on the top right corner, in a colour I've yet to decide on. This one is going to be a special one for me, I can feel it already. And do I have someone in mind that I've based the design off of? Of course I do. It's a friend, who I don't know terribly well, but who's smile I love to see as it has the ability to defuse any awkward situation and light up any room. She's got such confidence and pride in herself that it is truly unique and makes me want to dress her up in beautiful things to accentuate those aspects about her that I admire so much.

So that's kind of what I'm working on right now, and hope to be finished with by the end of January so I can move on to more projects such as the further development of my work on the wedding dresses and bridesmaids dresses I'm working on and some art-clothing in the Spring. :)

Thanks for reading!!

V

Morning Daydreams

Most unfortunately, last weekend I managed to finally drop my Blackberry one too many times. It was one of those nights where you know you should have had your shit better put together, and you lament the fool you were for even going out in the first place. Not that I didn't love seeing my fantastic friends, carrying on one of a kind conversations with the brightest and most unique young minds of our generation. Perhaps I'm exaggerating, but these people are great, and I always feel lucky I know them.

Anyways, I've dropped my phone about 1500 times prior to this incident in which the corner of the screen cracked, spoiling the view of the entire screen. I didn't even do anything specifically dumb, it just fell out of my hand and hit the metal base of the table I was seated at.

Sigh.

So the good news is, I got to buy a new phone. :D

The other good news is that sans my palm sized connection to the technological world, I had a lot of time to think about the progression of my work over the past 4 1/2 years since the debut of Petey the Troll in 2007 at the Grandstand FashionShow II at Phog Lounge in Windsor, Ontario. I recall that winter, I was working at Fabricland, your friendly local fabric retailer and where all the really cool old ladies go to work after they've lived their fantastic young lives. I wanted to make a trench coat so badly. I studied the way they were made by buying them at thrift stores and cutting them into pieces. Of course I knew absolutely nothing about pattern making at that point and shutter to think of some of my earliest prototypes, but I worked my ass off trying to figure out the intricacies of the trench coat so that some day I could successfully make one, or two, or three.

That was just the beginning for me, and for Meaghan and I as a team called Petey the Troll. Meaghan got involved initially because I was too shy to attend the meeting about our first fashion show at Phog by myself. For the first year she developed (ghetto, in retrospect, but never the less) makeshift screen printing facilities in the basement of the house I was living in at the time and we produced one of a kind hand printed, dyed and sewn tshirts for the folks of Windsor to collect and display.

Soon afterwards, Meaghan began making items of her own and contributing them to the collections I was putting together. We soon came to the conclusion that we worked particularly well together and that our styles were just similar and different enough to look extraordinarily unique and appealing. When the previous organizers of the Grandstand Fashion shows in Windsor retired their positions, finished their Masters degrees and moved out of the city in pursuit of greater things. As a result I took it upon myself to organize and promote small shows in Windsor alongside other designers such as DillyDaisy, theefamily and Jenn Lopez. It was this kind of experience in addition to our distinctive style of photographing local faces in our clothes, using only local artists for the photography, the printing and the modelling.

In March of 2010 Petey the Troll were preparing to show our first small Couture line Petey Couture at the recognized Toronto Alternative Fashion Week wherein they showed 10 outfits and were featured in several articles back home as a result. This is when it got real for me.

Our decision to move to Toronto from Windsor became finalized not long after this point. We were paying the bills in Windsor by working small theatre jobs and costume commissions, but it wasn't what I wanted and I knew I had to leave Windsor. So Meaghan and I decided to enrol in a design school in Toronto for an exorbitant tuition and packed up our clothes to move here, our current home, in January 2011.

Obviously if you know us, you know that design school didn't exactly work out. I knew on the first day that it wasn't going to be a place that I would last very long due to the fact that we spent three hours in a lab learning to thread a sewing machine :S. Over the next couple of months, I stuck it out in the program to acquire the necessary skills and information to advance my draping and pattern making skills, to further my creative abilities with regards to design. I met some fantastic people, the professors especially. They were inspiring in their precision and their thorough knowledge of their trade, that it made me a much better seamstress and a very effective pattern maker and draper – even after dropping out in the middle of the second semester. :P It was like I got it too well, too fast and it was tremendously boring going through the painstaking process of learning how to sew a straight line, which i've been working on for at least the last 10 years.

What finally broke it for me was when I was working on a wedding dress for my dear friend Courtney Thomas of the photography duo WetFresco out of Windsor, Ontario. I was perfectly pinning each little gather and sewing my tiny baby hem on the soft fabric in the sewing room at school, and I stopped and realized that my fellow students in their at the time (all in much further advanced classes than I,) were working on a-line skirts and other such simple garments. I was out of place. So one day I just took out my Blackberry, emailed the President and walked out of my classroom. Post-Secondary education and I haven't been friends since 2008. Meaghan stuck it out for a while longer but eventually joined me in the working world outside any organized design institutions which claimed the only road to success is paved in money and connections. My perspective has always been that talent, and creativity and initiative could overcome such barriers, and that there was room for success for artists still, especially in a city like Toronto.

So anyways, Petey's up and going again and I'm working on a menswear line, due for completion March 2012! All I can say is that I've never done a line like this before and I'cve already surprised myself at the new designs and ideas that I've been keeping inside for months prior.

Get excited.

Anyways thanks a ton for reading, and look forward to more pictures and udates in the upcoming weeks! Thanks!

Canadian Independent Music and its Influence on Street Fashion in Toronto

 At my day job, I'm fortunate enough to meet a lot of new people all the time. My particular circumstance for the past few months has been that I have seen my place of work go through almost a complete turnover of employees. That means meeting and having to get to know new people very frequently, which of course results in the development of methods of approaching certain individuals with whom you take an interest. Are you from Toronto? Did you go to University? Do you have a boyfriend, etc... One of my favourites, due to the response's ability to speak volumes about the speaker who has unintentionally offered such information is, “So, what music do you listen to?”

The twentieth century made this possible. There are currently two types of people who can be immediately categorized based on their responses to the previously stated question. There are music lovers and there are other people... and if you're a music lover, you know exactly what I mean. If you're a music lover, you've spent many good hours of your life with headphones on, pressing them into your ears to make it even louder than it already is, blaring out of the ipod, cellphone, laptop, walkman, stereo, 8-track, whatever. You're open to hearing the most experimental of genres, and you have a deep appreciation for the classics from ages of the past. There are of course many sub-types under the category of music lover, but if you happen to be one, and you meet another, you know that you understand each other on some level as a result. It's quite the fantastic thing about our generation's interpretation of the music industry.

The Canadian music scene has, in the past ten years been so impressive in quality and quantity that it has managed, in the opinion of many, to out-do their American counterparts. I'm obviously not talking about Nickleback or Celine Dion... everyone knows that's mainstream bullshit created by an American audience who can't get the image of Canadian culture being nothing more than old men “rockstars” with terrible style and bad facial hair. It's barely even worth mentioning in Canada because we're so embarrassed of our unfortunate association with this horrifying image. *Sigh*

Since I moved to Toronto last January, I've been engulfed in the shockingly impressive underground music scene which not only exists here, but in the other major cities like Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary. Windsor was different. Windsor is the type of city that has its own little scene that is completely contained within the city limits. The music was fantastic, but it didn't have the potential for national exposure like some of the artists I've met and seen in Toronto.

So what kind of influence foes this have on the way people dress? Off the top of my head right now I can think of at least ten of my male friends who all dress exactly the same. Though it's kind of funny, I have to ask myself why this happens. What is it about these people that makes them all dress and act in similar ways?

As I walk down the crowded downtown streets of Toronto I look around at a sea of skinny jeans, cardigans and, now that it's winter, pea coats, and scarves, I wonder what's coming next and what all of these same people will be wearing five years from now.  

Until then!

V

Fashiongasms and Epiphanies: TO in the Wintertime

Anyone who knows me personally, knows that my day job is none other than coffee shop barista. It is the accepted fate of any artist, that they should find some other method of paying the bills and maintaining their fabulous artist lifestyles while they toil away at their often fruitless, but always satisfying creative outlet of choice. I like my job if for nothing other than the ever present opportunity to meet all kinds of people from all different walks of life. Especially working on King Street West on the doorstep of the fashion district, some of our clientele are nothing short of magazine worthy in their perfectly put together outfits.

Both at work and in everyday life here in Toronto, I see all kinds of fantastic and unique details on garments and in all the many ways people dress themselves up. For example, I recall a streetcar ride eastbound on St. Clair Ave, approaching Avenue Rd where that big, beautiful old apartment building is with the park and the vines and stuff. It's raining outside and I look over and there's a man wearing a long black duster coat down to his knees, and his head is mostly covered by the giant, oversized gold and black umbrella he's holding to shield himself from the falling elements. The image with all the colours and the rain and the brevity of the encounter was so striking that it burned itself into my mind and has existed ever since as an image I someday hope to recreate with a camera, or a canvas.

Twice today I got ideas for the womens line of Spring jackets which will follow the mens, (construction will be underway beginning in February 2012) from women I saw on subway. I decided to go thrift store shopping for boots (I ended up getting two of the most fantastic pairs of boots ever, one is brown suede, thigh high with two zippers and buckles and the other is shorties with a little heal and a basket weave pattern in leather around the ankle. LOVE.) so I got on the Bloor line eastbound. The first woman I watched for a little while, trying to figure out a way to photograph her coat without her thinking I was a creep. I failed. It was black wool, but around the shoulders, elbows and in some areas of the front panels, there were darker black, textured appliques in random fluid forms. It was really stunning the way it was done and I immediately noted to myself in my phone to remind me to write about the experience in this post. The second girl I only saw for a second because she got on at the stop just before I got off and was a few feet away from me standing by the door. Her jacket was a simple double breasted fit and flare wool coat, but the sleeves were what were particularly intriguing. Mid forearm, I'd say about 5 inches from the wrist, began a 60 degree angled flare with six little buttons on the bottom side. Not 17^th century obnoxiously or anything, but there was a little tiny bit of lace ruffling just at the cuff as well, giving it this fantastic Little Women, turn of the century feeling to a relatively modern looking coat. I just had to make note of it.

I've been working a ton lately, getting full time hours and all, which is fantastic for my bank account, but not so much for the personal life or the artistic life I love so dearly. Last week for example I spent six straight days doing basically nothing but sleep and work. However, in my down time I was preparing for today when I would make the finalized pattern for the next item in my personal Petey the Troll collection of jackets and coats for Men.

Trench coat!!!! This has been the only thing on my mind all week. I managed to complete the patterns for my wedding dress commissions on my last day off, so I have nothing but my sexy trench to think about today. It's a lightweight medium grey wool with two defining linings; one plain black polyester and the other a black, white, yellow plaid I've used in previous Petey collections. There are front and back storm flaps, two side pockets and two inside pockets, 10 front buttons and countless other buttons scatter throughout.

I'm off now to put the rest of it together and I'll be posting photographs to my Twitter account as well as my Facebook all day!  

Thanks for reading!

V