Elisabeth Atchadé

INTERVIEW BY LORENZA MEZZAPELLE

Montreal-based fashion design student Elisabeth Atchadé emigrated from Cotonou, Benin, West Africa to Canada as a young child. She graduated in Fashion Design at Lasalle College in 2020 and has since progressed her studies in design and management at the l’École supérieure de la mode at l’Université de Québec.

Before pursuing fashion, Atchadé first studied Psychology, which inadvertently became a major source of inspiration seeping through her designs. Her thought-provoking silhouettes and use of vibrant patterns create a dissimilarity that is reminiscent of her childhood, demonstrating the challenges of growing up in a culture that greatly differs from her current environment.

Upon immigration, Atchadé could not speak a word of French or English. She recalls resorting to artistic outlets to express herself in school — drawing and painting became an ideal way to communicate with those around her. Atchadés’ experiences growing up shaped her creative approach and gravitation towards themes that touch upon immigration, identity, globalization, and the African diaspora on social, political, and historical levels.

Growing up as the child of firstgeneration immigrants, Atchadé did not immediately recognize all the sacrifices that immigrating represents. Yet, today, these personal and collective experiences are what make up the majority of her practice. Her inclination towards clothing is not just a fluke. Before immigrating, Atchadé’s father had graduated from the Moscow State Textile University with a specialization in natural and synthetics fibres. Her grandmother, who she never knew, was a weaver who worked primarily with cotton. However, despite her close ties with the industry, she was not immediately drawn to it.

“The world of fashion was one that I found to be quite cold,” she states.

“Growing up, I didn’t necessarily see it under the eyes of diversity, I didn’t see black women occupying this space in design, and subconsciously I did not feel welcome.” What drew Atchadé in, was the possibility to share her vision and culture through garments and hopefully add to the dialogue of the greater societal rejection towards clothing and the common perception of fashion's superficiality; the underlying social, economic and political reasonings that fall hand-in-hand with the history of fashion.

“I am someone who loves cultural and social diversity. This cultural sharing, this cultural exchange; it is wealth, it has no cost, it inspires me daily,” she muses.

“It makes me want to know people far beyond what they want to express.” The young fashion students’ desire to understand people within a deeper context is a key component in her research. Her interest in history, psychology, and dress all tie into one another seamlessly in her collections on both personal and broader levels.

Even at first glance, it is apparent that cultural diversity and a deep understanding of the importance of representation are at the core of her designs. “I want to show that, yes, if I can succeed you can do it too. Now, we’re at a turning point; we feel things moving, it’s fun and it’s interesting. Not only on a larger scale but also on a level of what is happening in schools — I don’t know if anything is changing because, at the time, it was predominantly the white man who decided; the white man who represented women. It’s interesting to see, now, how there is a certain reappropriation of the body that is occurring,” says Atchadé. “However, beyond diversity, my mission is more humanitarian and I want to demonstrate joy and love. It’s difficult to have pressure and to say yes, my mission is to inspire this new generation of tomorrow,” she adds.

Atchadé believes that staying authentic is staying alert to the phenomenon of globalization, about cultural exchanges between one another. Her cultural upbringing from both Benin and Montreal has created a unique perspective that not many get the opportunity to showcase, a fresh take that not many get the chance to explore. “I also think that staying close to myself, staying close to my roots — I love speaking about where I’m from — is something that repeats itself,” she says.

Atchadé's textile choices and silhouettes emphasize her roots, gravitating towards noble and natural fibres, cotton being her primary material. “I’m born in the town of Cotonou. It’s from Cotonou, it bears the name of cotton; it was truly a town where they picked cotton and they worked it," she says. "I love cotton because, with cotton, we can do this technique called [Dutch] wax — you know, those colourful African tissues? This is the kind of textile that attracts me. I find that cotton is not neglected per se because it is everywhere, but often it is undervalued,” she adds.

Her first inclination when starting a new collection, or researching new inspiration comes from topics and conversations driven by her friends and family. Whether spawning from the news or as simple as a youtube video, Atchadé finds that as time goes on whatever she is most drawn to is the idea she ends up settling on. “When something clicks, I find refuge in my head; I speculate, I try to interrogate myself about the future, I try to interrogate what the person is telling me to try and deduce above and beyond what they are telling me to try and make a subject out of it. When I get really into a subject, it becomes a sort of obsession. At that moment, I read a lot about the topic. It’s very multi-faceted,” she states.

Atchadé often feels this natural pull towards her intuition and this idea that women are more developed within this realm, feminine energy and an authentic state of divination radiating through.

“I find this very interesting because, precisely, in our society, logic is encouraged, it’s more so characteristics that fall into a “male energy” that is encouraged. Of course, everyone has logic, but I find we don’t encourage intuition, and this type of voice, often enough. I function a lot with this voice,” she adds.

Atchadé's most recent collection Sapa is inspired by “La Sape”. It is a movement originating during the French colonial period in Africa, and it is an abbreviation based on the phrase Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes. A term used to designate the fact that one is irreproachably well dressed and an expression deriving from the word sapa which is originating from the south of France meaning to adore. Her inspiration to create a collection in ode to this movement was first sparked when she fell upon the song Rumble in the Jungle by Fugees. She states, "it was a song that sort of ran parallel with a certain resilience and resistance regarding a fight in Zaire in 1974 with Muhammad Ali — I thought wow, they were still talking about this 20 years later." She adds, "when I saw the video, I became interested in this history and I began to ask myself: What was going on in Zaire during this time for this fight to be so monumental? Through my research, I began to interest myself in La Sape."

During the colonial times, the French disembarked on the West African coast, donating old clothing served as a means of facilitating the way by which they assimilated the African people. This created a certain cognitive dissonance amidst the African population; the identity of Africans was put to the test. For Atchadé, this movement served as a witness to the extraordinary resilience of Africans. La Sape is not intended to be racist, nor violent, nor xenophobic. La Sape is a fusion; it is in the joy of life. She adds, “Today, we who are confined and in a period of questioning ourselves, many of us, and myself first and foremost, have recently focused on ourselves. We now value life more than ever, the will to live. What is my Sapa collection about? That’s exactly what it is. The joy of life.”

Roxanne Ouellet-Bernier

INTERVIEW BY TOMMY LECOMTE

With a keen sensibility to social realities, Roxanne Ouellet-Bernier turns fashion collections into storybooks indexing French-Canadian identity. Ouellet-Bernier is currently pursuing her education as a second-year BA student in UQAM’s fashion design program. Her practice deals with collective memory, addressing questions surrounding French-Canadian identity in its various forms.

Primarily working in menswear, Ouellet-Bernier brings a refreshing take on the standards of men’s attire through a meticulous exploration of materiality and garment construction. She challenges our expectations of clothes by incorporating a tasteful dose of rural kitsch into formal garments. Marked by wistful prints and textures, her collections Les fleurs du tapis evokes a longing from times past and judiciously frame the narratives she constructs from her research. Through her projects, Ouellet-Bernier addresses the intergenerational fabrication of identity and cultural legacy. Her creations emerge from a process of referencing various histories, accumulated into open-ended assortments, which rely on the shared pool of a nation’s memories to suggest meaning.

Les fleurs du tapis is a tribute to French-Canadian identity to reconsider how apparel can act as a medium for narrative development. From allusions to personal stories, to cultural symbols and traditions, Ouellet-Bernier carefully weaves tales surrounding the nation’s past into visual and tangible capsules. In this second project of her undergraduate studies, she establishes the relationship between literature and fashion, referencing the notion of the idyll and its place in the definition of Quebec’s identity. Inspired by the Quebecois idiom “s’enfarger dans les fleurs du tapis” (stumbling over the flowers of the carpet), meaning to dwell on imagined details, this project considers the nation’s idyllic tendencies.

“My goal is not necessarily to protect our culture, but more so to make it evolve. It’s a very soft critique of how we [French-Canadians] can be very closed off to the rest of the world and see it as Quebec being ‘against the rest of the world’, or how we perceive Quebec as a minority society,” she says.

Ouellet-Bernier’s work begins with a thorough consideration of the complex nature of French-Canadian identity. Her upbringing and familial heritage become fodder for a quest to define social identity. The fashion design student plunges into familial archives, analyzing photographs and developing a kind of portrait of the social dynamics that surround them. The motivation for her work stems from a preoccupation with the way prior generations lived and how that may relate to the development of an identity. In Les fleurs du tapis, she focuses this anthropological quest on the baby boomer generation, also dubbed as the “lyrical generation”. She recognizes the generation’s impact as instigators of a variety of political and artistic movements. “It feels as though I have analyzed it so much that there is a certain sense of detachment that came from it, but it remains a sort of fascination with the subject. Especially regarding things like the Quiet Revolution and the referendum, which both happened relatively recently.” Ouellet-Bernier denotes the parallels and differences between generations, comparing rituals performed by her ancestors and how they have evolved. “I think there’s a real duality between culture and how we disseminate it. There’s a large part of it that is based on tradition and wanting to preserve things the way they were – while on the other hand, we want French-Canadian culture to shine so there is a certain bitterness there.”

When discussing the importance of addressing personal topics in her practice, Ouellet-Bernier says, “I think it is really important to find your own identity as a designer, and it is really what defines whether you are genuine or not. I believe it is something that a lot of people can relate to. There have been revolutions and cultural movements everywhere and we all have a local culture we want to protect. It allows you to differentiate yourself from others, and it’s the best way to do it because it is specific to your own experience.” Moreover, this imperative to discuss matters of identity is a crucial differentiating factor of her work. Her ability to make these personal interests relevant to a broader audience allows her to navigate the line between the garment as a product and as an art object. Working with the notions of culture allows her to tap into a more personal segment of the economically driven fashion industry. “I think it can be an advantage, especially right now when there is a strong tendency towards localism. There is truly a sensibility toward that. Even when you look at projects from students in Europe, oftentimes there are international students, and there is that sensibility as to where they are from and their cultural baggage.”

Ouellet-Bernier’s practice is characterized by a strong sense of aesthetic and formal play. Materiality plays a complex role in her work. The combination of garments and fabrics denoting seventies interiors offers a symbolic language to engage with social context and histories. Pieces in her collection appear as time capsules, which could have been taken straight out of the family photographs she references. She crafts pieces with ornate floral prints and lace, which play on the verge between masculine and feminine. Her intent is not necessarily to disrupt ideas of gender or menswear specifically, but, in her own words, more so to “make garments that happen to be worn by men”, setting aside established perceptions of the dress. Her astute visual sensibility shines in the way she integrates patterns and textures as symbolic collages. This approach emphasizes the history built into each material, where the mundane becomes of interest as an agent for meaning and emotion. This dignification of the ordinary illustrates the importance the designer places on history in her work.

Craft being an important component of her fashion work and visual aesthetic, I was intrigued to know whether she felt like fashion has become detached from tradition. “From a commercial standpoint, definitely,” she says. “With technology and all, [fashion] has become centred around that. But also, especially in recent years, there has been a renewal in the interest for ‘tradition’, although I don’t feel like that is necessarily the right word for it. There is more interest in preserving certain aspects of the past and techniques. For example, with the pandemic, a lot of people started knitting. I don’t know how much that is going to translate itself in the general market, but there is interest and potential there.”

Her ability to bind storytelling to the creation of clothing also highlights how fashion can often act as a document of time and space. Ouellet-Bernier sets a very specific scene in her collection to transport her audience to another period. The clothes she creates open the door to alternate realities of a future past. The discourse of French-Canadian identity is invigorated by the stories she associates with it, relating to notions of performativity in how the culture is communicated. Most notably, her fluent use of props in her collections entertains the theatricality of the affair. Tablecloths and replicas of food mesh themselves seamlessly with the clothing – turning a replica of the very Quebecois ‘pain sandwich’ into a perfectly acceptable way to accessorize an ensemble.

In retrospect, the young fashion design student feels like she has accomplished what she set out to do with this collection and says herself to be happy with the finished product. Regarding elaborating such a project in an academic environment, she says, “It’s really easy to look back on a project and say how there is tons of stuff you would change: I’d choose a different fabric, I would look more for this or that, etcetera, but at the same time I don’t think I was restricted too much by the fact that it was created in an academic context. Although there are critiques and juries in the process, we’re mostly free to make conceptual decisions for our projects. I think it could be beneficial if maybe there was more emphasis on the artistic process and experimentation, but overall, I think I am fairly satisfied with it.”

Roxanne Ouellet-Bernier and her collection Les fleurs du tapis set the bar for a new generation of designers, concerned with garments as art in their respect rather than mere commodities. Her meticulous creative process alludes to slower, more conscientious ways of making, which we can only hope to see more of in the future of fashion. She operates at the intersection of social science, craft, and art, where each of them is equally crucial to the finished product. Her collection arouses new meanings and narratives surrounding French-Canadian identity. She proposes her fashion projects as a comparative examination of generations, all the while developing a unique aesthetic dialect to communicate it. Her enduring fascination with Quebec’s own cultural identity will remain essential to her artistic practice as moves forward in her career. She represents a force of the local fashion scene, utilizing her heritage as her reason to create.

Tishanna Carnevale

INTERVIEW BY JULIA BEAUPARLANT

Born and raised in Montreal’s Mile End – a popular district, known for its creativity and culture – Tishanna Carnevale, a self-proclaimed citygirl describes it as the perfect work environment. The neighbourhood offers a constant source of inspiration and with its rich and diverse crowd, it brings everything together in a harmonious fashion. “All kinds of people seem to share a sense of care and empathy, on top of a natural open mind. It’s like a utopian bubble…close to what a society should look like,” she says. The young creative grew up with her father’s strong work ethic, her mother’s creative influence but most importantly, their complete support. Much like Tishanna’s playful approach to styling, these disparate elements work together, bringing an appreciation of assembling the extraordinary - she’s not afraid of playing with colour combinations and contrasting patterns.

In 2014, Tishanna started her 3-year Fashion Marketing program at Cégep Marie-Victorin. To strengthen her skills in design, she then went on to pursue an intensive 6-month course in sewing. From there, Tishanna focused on styling and grew her portfolio for about a year until joining ESM. “When starting the program, I was familiar with my aesthetic because of the styling years. This experience was a very accessible way to explore my interest in fashion, as you just curate different things and assemble them. So when I joined ESM, I knew what I liked but I couldn’t properly explain the connections between my inspirations,” she adds.

In her first-year collection, Tishanna explored this fluid perception of reality and made sure to render it in a bold and optimistic perspective. The exuberant looks were designed to fit her overstimulating fantasy world. She aimed to arouse joyful feelings by gathering vivid colours that were inspired by hallucinatory visuals, mixed with her appreciation of the blooming urban gardens around her. The emphasis hourglass silhouettes are meant to celebrate the fake, as a response to the current ideal body image.

While creating in an academic context, Tishanna was able to pull inspiration from existing literature, reading Susan Sontags' Camp literature from 1964 allowed insight into her personal growth and understanding as an artist. “It allowed me to truly better understand myself and changed my perception. I read "Notes on Camp" and it was my personality explained in 11 pages. Especially at our age, we constantly try to become our ideal self, the version we idealize and aim to become. We stick to some personality traits and we try to adopt others. So as a result, we are partly genuine and partly fake. You become your persona…but you have to play,” she explains. From her point of view, this is where self-objectification happens, and in her eyes, it isn't a bad thing. She argues that once someone decides on the product they want to be, “They should use the projection of their image as strength and take ownership of specific characteristics.” From there, she stuck to the idea of Beingas- Playing-a-Role.

Subsequently, Tishanna joins this idea to the postmodern Hyperreality of Jean Baudrillard. “We live in a simulation through social media. We fabricate entire identities and common space online. The derivative products of this simulation are based on nothing real,” she says. Once this is acknowledged, embracing artificiality becomes a strength as ultimately, we become simulacra that bring us closer to our ideal self.

Tishanna rejects the constructs of a mutual exclusiveness between sexuality and intelligence—or superficiality and purpose. In her first-year collection, she staged muses who are cleverly moving around the notion of beauty as a form of power. Rather than looking at it as an aesthetic value dependent on the viewers' taste, she grants the muse the ability to play with their appearance in achieving a true projection of themselves. These musings act as an extension of self-projection; thus, a sharp sense of self-awareness is used as a weapon to navigate today’s society dominated by the

power held through the image. Tishanna's designs actively play with the notion of the gaze. Her muses are extravagant, loud and intelligent, they actively lend themselves to a state of observation.

“One of my oldest memories is in kindergarten calling my mom in tears’ cause I didn’t like my outfit,” she says.

From her childhood to her late teenage years, the young creative reflects on being depicted as superficial: “In high school, I was treated like the fun and silly friend, it deeply bothered me,” she adds. In retrospect, she began to notice a profound dichotomy in the act of superficiality based on one's appearance. Nonetheless, this souvenir paves the way for her current obsession to delineate an unapologetic form of femininity reflected in her collections.

In retrospect, Tishanna associates being long called “superficial” to her love of the artifice; that’s how reading Sontag’s publication brought her intrinsic motivation. For now, we could say she’s in the incubating phase of Camp Art, enhancing her sensitivity to develop a more nuanced approach. She wants to bring it to a second or third degree. She says, "if you don’t have the sensitivity, you won’t understand unless you’re extremely kitsch. It’s cool, that’s how you know a product is a niche.”

Tishanna expands this idealized narrative to inanimate objects. “I don’t think being materialistic is a bad thing. I’m super materialistic and I get attached to objects,” she conveys. Looking at the few dozens of vases lined on her bedroom walls, she describes her relation to the functionality of clothes as being complicated. She adds, "Since my internship, I find it slightly irrelevant to produce useless things, but it’s in contradiction with my entire self: I love useless things and I love objects. Just like fashion, and everything else we do." The young fashion design student has been collecting original and thrifted pieces in hopes of achieving fully wearable showpieces for her future collection. Strongly engaged in the social scene, Tishanna explains how going out every week used to nourish her creativity. “I find it so interesting to see people interact between them and analyze how they decide to represent themselves through their clothes, and what they decide to put forward. It can be very particular.”

Naturally, this mutually reinforced relation between the social and her work is a major plus to balance the workflow, considering that living in Montreal comes with the FOMO a sunny day at the park. Now, working from home resonates with blasting the music that would be playing in the clubs to remain motivated. It comes with no surprise that the current lack of social happenings deprives inspiration, as she feels this isolation reflects in her current designs.

Tishanna has come to miss the toxic environment of a pre-pandemic fashion school. Its structure, competition and deadlines are her best conditions to perform. Always seeking honest critiques, she overcomes daily obstacles with the support, insight and fresh perspectives from peers and friends carrying aesthetics she respects. This constant feedback helps her validate and push ideas further daily.

Tishanna notes a certain resistance to share her process with a broader audience, as an oversaturated Instagram feed comes with constant comparison. And that’s where designing took her out of her comfort zone, "I don’t like doing things that aren’t good at the first time, and designing is 100% that. You think you have a revolutionary idea and the next day you see it on IG. Everything is accessible right now, we all have the same collective memory; so nothing is that revolutionary." To counter this feeling, her previous studies within Fashion Marketing have helped her resist this urge, and become more confident in sharing her ideas. "In the last year, I’ve had the chance to work with all the people I idolize since I’m 18, that’s so cool. And that’s what’s nice about here, making connections is easy," she says.

Tishanna translates her daily obsessions into her narrative, by merging clothes, social events and styling, with a sensitivity for the artifice.

" I see my pieces as conversation starters," she says.

For now, Tishanna is completing her internship, in which she’s building patience through the multiple prototypes needed to make something good. After all, is there a better moment to perfect your sewing skills than in a global pandemic? Luckily, Tishanna has yet to produce her graduate collection.

PHOTOGRAPHY KAVEN TREMBLAY

STYLING TISHANNA CARNEVALE

HAIR STYLIST ANITA SANCHEZ

MAKEUP ARTIST NEVE KERRY

MODEL LAURIE & JADE