Marques’Almeida @ The Room

Ally wears: top and skirt by Marques’Almeida
Cindy wears: vintage silk T, cropped pants by Oak + Fort, patent brogues by Zara, and American Apparel backpack

Wednesday night was the culmination of a year-long dream. Myself and Ally attended the Flare magazine x Hudson’s Bay fashion week party for Marques’Almeida, TOME, and Kaelen. I’m going to take a gander and say Marques’Almeida, more than any other designer out there right now except for maybe Raf Simons, gets written about the most on this blog. So of course we were peaking to meet the designers behind the brand, Marta Marques and Paulo Almeida. In person they were every bit as lovely and chill as the clothes they design. While I tried my hardest to restrain my inner fangirl, we gabbed about Toronto’s jerk chicken scene and the city’s best vintage shops. Apparently we also drank some wine and caught up with our friend Nicole Jankowski, stylish and talented fashion writer based right here in Toronto. [Look at that sick leather top tho.] But please forgive me if all I can remember right now is the exact shade of purple lipstick Marta was wearing.

Images by The Pack

SS 2015: White Heat

Lisa Perry

Fashion month is only halfway through and already the amount of shows to take in is starting to overwhelm. With hundreds of designers unveiling their Spring Summer 2015 collections during this short month, all of the new trends, textiles and colour combos to keep track of adds a sense of chaos to my normally simple fashion life. For times like these, a visual palate cleanser is your new BFF, and what makes a better visual palate cleanser than the freshest, most elegantly minimal colour to wrap yourself in?

Marques’Almeida

Phoebe English

 Kaelen

The answer to that obviously rhetorical question is nothing. Nothing looks better and is more idiot-proof than wearing head to toe white (except for maybe head-to-toe black). And judging by the SS15 collections, this isn’t a trend that’ll die any time soon. Its aggressive simplicity makes it almost anti-trend, as timeless as a little black dress but just a touch more daring and prone-to-spills. It ruled the runways of New York and London and dominated the street style scene outside of the shows as well.

Kathleen Kye

Sally LaPointe

Jonathan Saunders

Alexander Wang

As the only colour in nature defined by an absence of pigment, white gives designers a blank canvas upon which they can demonstrate their skill in fabric manipulation, experimenting with shapes, and creating unexpected textures. Runway looks in New York and London ran the gamut from distressed denim workwear to tissue-thin haute rags. My favourite look? A pristine white shell paired with high waisted short shorts by Lisa Perry, the innocence of the vintage bathing suit silhouette is spiced up by the high hemline of the shorts and the completely see-through PVC skirt layered on top.

Images via style.com and Dazed digital

Yonge and Nude

Artful nudes and high fashion photography go together like bacon and eggs, or bucket hats and #sadboys. But for what has felt like an eternity, it seemed like high fashion editorials have barely made a blip on the Canadian publishing radar, leaving us fashion-starved hosers to settle for out-of-date shopping guides and meatless editorial spreads.

But as Gandalf and Buddha would say, nothing is permanent, and the fashion publishing landscape in Canada is changing for the better. With beautifully-made and artfully designed publications like Bad Day and Frische rising out of our soulless, mass media rubble, and with shops like SOOP SOOP doing their part in spreading the good word, it’s sort of nice to be Canadian and into fashion these days.

The Toronto-based, Milan-founded styling and photography group MILA is another such entity making it a little more interesting ’round these parts. Handling everything from photography to styling to photo editing, the two women of MILA, Maddalena Petrosino & Eleonora Gaspari are pretty much behind every element of their editorials short of modelling the clothes themselves. The photoset seen here appeared in the Italian online mag nss and features clothing and accessories from SOOP SOOP, Kaelen, and Armed.

The ShOws AW14 – Day 2

Day 2 of the shOws featured some very unwelcomed guests: buckets upon buckets of snow. “Lousy Smarch weather“, as they say. Dedicated showgoers like myself trudged on regardless, dead-set on seeing some fresh Canadian talent and maybe scope out some well-dressed model babes. Not everyone felt the same, judging by the noticeably sparse studio space. This bode well for me and my reliably crappy camera phone, as I snapped an endless succession of blurry-faced but impeccably-dressed beauties, my line of sight unobstructed by stray sock buns or fashionably large hats.