Joe Fresh’s success won’t do much to help the aspiring designers’ designers who show at Canadian fashion weeks, most of whom are not trying to outfit the masses, but to help them ascend beyond polar fleece to a world where sweeping ball gowns are de rigueur. But it’s hard to convince Canadians accustomed to international brands to switch to local equivalents and, quite possibly, pay more for them. This sounds a lot like the artist’s lament from time immemorial, and in some ways it’s worse: unlike writing music or fiction, which can be accomplished by one person with the right combination of dedication and ingenuity, fashion is a collaborative art form that entails considerable start-up expenses. In a way, the first skill a designer really needs is to learn how to run a business. Starting a line is similar to making a movie, with comparable barriers to entry. In the end, you can produce a short film — or a collection of canvas totes — for $10,000 to $50,000, but chances are you’ll always be overshadowed by the Hollywood blockbuster. If you want to be a player, you’ll probably have to move to Hollywood. And that’s what most Canadian fashion designers have done, from Dsquared2 to Calla Haynes, who recently launched a collection in Paris.
But designers like Jeremy Laing are working in a new, and relatively untried, model. They tend to run small, specialized operations out of low-overhead neighbourhoods like Vancouver’s Strathcona and Toronto’s Parkdale. Their livelihoods are enabled by FedEx accounts, and the relatively few international buyers who can afford designer clothing but whose tastes stretch beyond Prada. Business is keyed to production rather than promotion. The downside is that, like all forms of artisanal workmanship, this approach doesn’t provide the same return as, say, the hit everyone was wearing last year. (The dress that Laing laboured over received a single order, for just two dresses — from a store in Australia.) But if it makes for a hardscrabble existence, it also comes with less creative compromise. Canada, with its low rents and relative lack of competition, is for nascent fashion designers what Virginia Woolf prescribed for women writers: a room of one’s own.
In a perfect world, a Canadian designer could be as innovative as Laing and as successful as Joe Mimran. As it stands, the familiar gap between creative and commercial success is further polarized in Canada, with its relatively small population. For many years, national culture producers have thought the solution was to professionalize: to make and promote CBC dramas that emulated Hollywood movies, to model garments on American and European trends and present them with pomp and circumstance. But one doesn’t have to be the biggest to be the best; one only needs to have something to say, and to say it originally. Judging from some of our oddball darlings in other disciplines — musicians like Feist and Broken Social Scene, artists like the Winnipeg Royal Art Lodge — this is precisely where Canada excels. This country’s new designers may not be household names. But, working in the outsider tradition, they do us proud.
