Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2024 i FASHION

AS MY TIME HERE AT FASHION COMES TO A CLOSE, I look back with gratitude for the many talented people I have been so fortunate to work with. I arrived at FASHION in 2009 to cover then editor-in-chief Ceri Marsh’s maternity leave. I had been at the Toronto Star for 20 years, as a fashion writer and then fashion editor for most of that time. My husband reminds me that after my first week at FASHION, I complained to him that “this job involves a lot of meetings”—meetings with the art department, story handling editors, the marketing team, the sales team, the publisher. But I quickly adjusted from the “lone wolf” nature of being a newspaper writer to the collaborative culture of a magazine. And what I soon realized was…

Back when I was starting out as a fashion editor, I would often find myself thrust in front of celebrities and given about five minutes to interview them for a piece of online journalism that would have the shelf life of a banana. I’d have no time to develop a real rapport or ask anything serious while their publicist loomed near, so one of my go-to questions became “Would you rather be overdressed or underdressed?” Hard-hitting stuff, I know. Predictably, bombshell glamazons like Adriana Lima would answer that they’d prefer to be overdressed, while indie-cool girls like Dree Hemingway would opt for under. I tended to side with the underdressers. After all, when deployed correctly, this move can be a headturner. Think of Sofia Coppola at the 2013 punk-themed Met…

I’m in the south of France watching a dozen luxury yachts float by on the Mediterranean Sea (confession: and obsessively Googling who each one belongs to) when Brian Kennedy, director of the Center of Healthy Longevity at the National University Health System, asks, “You know the saying ‘You are what you eat’?” I flash back to the previous night’s glorious cheese plate and Champagne dinner. I guess that makes me delightful and indulgent? Guilty! “Where does the science behind that saying come from?” he continues. A member of Dior’s Reverse Aging Board, Kennedy is presenting at a skincare conference hosted by Dior Beauty, alongside many of the other global skincare experts and dermatologists who make up the board. What does food have to do with skin, though? While the link…

If there was any doubt that the ’90s and 2000s are back in a big way, rock band No Doubt’s Coachella set this past April—their first concert together in nine years—put that dispute to bed. Frontwoman Gwen Stefani performed “Just a Girl” in rhinestone-encrusted brows, and millennials everywhere were instantly transported back to 1995. Nostalgia didn’t just make a comeback in the desert this past spring, though. Looks that defined the 1990s and early 2000s have been dominating runways, festivals and, perhaps most notably, TikTok for years. Gen Z is just as enamoured with the era as those of us who lived through it, and thanks to social media, the 20-somethings may even be driving the resurgence. But what’s behind the obsession? According to a few industry pros, the answer…

Anyone who believes that Canadians are shy and reserved hasn’t seen Indigenous icon Ashley Callingbull, beauty content creator Stephanie “Glamzilla” Valentine and drag powerhouse Brock “Brooke Lynn Hytes” Hayhoe in action. The three self-made media stars have trailblazed their way to global acclaim, busting stereotypes as coolly as they bust a move at FASHION’s September 2024 cover shoot. They were complete strangers before gathering on-set at the Windsor Arms Hotel in Toronto but are soon a tangle of arms and legs in a compelling group shot. It’s impossible to boil all of their achievements down to a few paragraphs. But here’s what you need to know, if you don’t already. Callingbull grew up physically and sexually abused and in poverty in Enoch Cree Nation in Alberta. “I didn’t even dare…

Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter has made Western gear hot, but that’s not Brit Ellis’s only motivation for creating these beaded earrings. “My dad’s dress shoes were elaborately embroidered black cowboy boots,” explains Ellis, who is Haudenosaunee and designs under her spirit name, Blu Hummingbird. “They are in every formal picture I’ve ever seen of him and a part of so many memories. So not only do they feel very familiar, but since my dad passed away, they’ve become something that represents all the best parts of his personality to me. I even have a tattoo of his exact boot with a bouquet of wildflowers.” Ellis uses FireLine to assemble an assortment of seed, Charlotte-cut and Miyuki beads and backs the earrings with home-tanned and hand-dyed hides. What would the artist, who…

My lifelong obsession with clothes has led to some tragic sartorial gaffes. My closet is a graveyard of leopard-print sweaters, acid-washed jeans and metallic nylon sneakers. Mercifully, once I hit 30, my style settled into something more cohesive—or at least more legibly normal. Shoes, however, remain my playground for experimentation. And a new one has just entered the chat: the Mary Jane. Mary Janes were originally called “bar shoes.” They are said to have originated at the turn of the 20th century and were actually more popular with boys. The infantile shoe eventually matured into a sophisticated style for women. Flappers wore them in the 1920s before designer Mary Quant put Twiggy in a pair in the 1960s, inducting them into the proverbial fashion hall of fame. Fast-forward to 2019…

THE DROP: LOUIS VUITTON LVERS EAU DE PARFUM ($395 FOR 100 ML) THE DETAILS: “If the sun was shining on you, what would you do with the light?” This is the question Pharrell Williams regularly asks himself and his loved ones. Williams’s answer? Create a fragrance out of it. LVERS—a woody-green perfume inspired by photosynthesis that features notes of bergamot, cedarwood, ginger and sandalwood—is his first scent with Louis Vuitton since he became the brand’s men’s creative director in 2023. “Light plays a fundamental role in life, nature and photosynthesis,” says Jacques Cavallier Belletrud, master perfumer for Louis Vuitton. “Without it, there would be no natural ingredients. Light serves as the foundation for creating beauty in fragrances. It’s a concept deeply intertwined with our craft.” THE DROP: MICHAEL KORS “MANHATTA”…

Frédéric Malle has had it with fragrance flankers. The concept refers to a brand’s variation of an existing perfume that retains some of the original’s notes and attributes. “Brands will take a fragrance and produce very different scents from it, which I think is quite unsettling for customers,” says Malle over a video call. “They think they’re giving a certain perfume to their wife only to discover it smells like somebody else.” Malle is the iconic “Éditeur de Parfums” behind the 24-year-old perfume house Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle, but his latest project is the Legacy Collection for Estée Lauder, where he has been tasked with doing what he does best: editing, reinventing and innovating. The collection features five of the most trail-blazing and historically significant Estée Lauder fragrances—Knowing, White…

Ask any Gen Z or millennial makeup lover what their first beauty purchase was and they’ll probably answer “lipgloss.” The two generations (the former with their beloved collections of Bonne Bell Lip Smackers and Lancôme Juicy Tubes and the latter with their, well, plethora of options to choose from) are united by a “more is more” approach to shiny lips. I vividly recall once swiping on so much gloss that it ran down my chin and collected in a little pool, looking disturbingly like a sparkly goatee (#corememory). But like all beauty trends, lips (literally) dripping in gloss moved out of the beauty zeitgeist while other lip textures and finishes became de rigueur. Remember the matte-liquid-lipstick craze of 2016? Since its creation in the 1930s by Max Factor, lipgloss has…

Hair, Nathan Archambault for Public Image/Oribe/T3. Makeup, Veronica Chu. Nails, Naomi Misu for P1M.ca. Photo assistant, Nathan Cook. Fashion assistant, Kennedy Adams. Models, Inari Moore for Niwa Models and Dylan Cabezas for Want Management.…

HAVE YOU EVER HAD A MINOR MELTDOWN IN A CHANGE ROOM? Yup, me too. It happened when our research assistant, Sarah Mariotti, and I went to the mall to try on jeans. As part of FASHION’s ongoing series on how sexism influences the design of women’s clothing, we were comparing sizing among different brands. The information was unexpectedly complicated and hard to find online, so we decided to actually go to a mall (yes, they still exist) and try on jeans from different retailers. Smash cut to two hours and nearly a dozen pairs of pants later and I was having a minor existential crisis. “Wait, is this actually my size?” I worried as I struggled with the button of a nastily tight pair. “Is there something wrong with me?…

Remember the age-old trick of holding frozen spoons over your eyes to reduce puffiness and undereye bags after a late night out (that is, before storing facial rollers next to ice cube trays became the norm)? That’s cryotherapy at work. The super-cooling of the face and body has a range of benefits and applications. “Both cryo ice globes, which are used on the face, and immersive ice baths, which we see popping up at wellness spas, can be considered cryotherapy,” says Dr. Leah Smith, founder of and medical director at My Beauty Doctor in Toronto. For the skin, ice-facial diehards swear that the treatment can reduce the appearance of fine lines, decrease undereye puffiness and even banish breakouts. For the body, the effects of cold include a decrease in inflammation,…

AZURÉE “Its herbaceous green top and middle notes—cumin, cardamom and clary sage—make this a perfume for everyday life,” says Malle. “You can wear it in any circumstance.” WHITE LINEN “This is the femme fatale of the group,” declares Malle. “It might seem a bit distant at first, but the more it lingers, the more you notice its power.” PRIVATE COLLECTION “I had friends and family members who wore this in the past, so I knew it quite well,” says Malle of the floral green scent with notes of patchouli, sandalwood and musk. KNOWING Malle describes this chypre floral with notes of redcurrant, damask rose and amber as “super sexy.” ESTÉE “I was intrigued by this one because there’s so much ylang-ylang in the formula,” says Malle. “It comes across a…

Is it cliché to blame your parents for your problems? Maybe. But in Vanja Vasic’s case, owning 80+ Canadian designer pieces is a very fun problem to have. “I feel proud to wear Canadian,” the founder of Fashion Art Toronto (FAT) exclaims. “I look forward to the moment when someone asks me what I’m wearing and I can tell them about the designer.” You see, Vasic caught the independent-designer bug from her parents. Her dad is a filmmaker, and her mom is a visual artist (her work covers the walls of the collector’s eclectic Toronto apartment), but both have flirted with fashion at different times and in different countries, selling their tie-dyed creations in Serbia (where Vasic was born) and leather jewellery in Canada. “Serbia was very poor at that…