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!
