FAT Arts & Fashion Week gives budding designers and artists a boost
To become a world-class fashion city, Toronto needs multiple platforms for designers and artists said Vanja Vasic, the executive director of |FAT| Arts Fashion Week. She’s on a course to help make that happen.
Once known as Toronto’s alternative fashion week, FAT has grown up in the seven years since it was launched by Vasic while she was in university. The week-long exhibition of emerging designers and artists — which begins Tuesday and runs through Saturday — is a platform for Canadian and international designers hoping to make a name for themselves in the Toronto fashion market.
“For them, it’s a launching point,” said the 30-year-old director. “It’s important to have these points in your career where you can be out there, you can express your ideas (and) you can get feedback from the media and the public.”
Fashion can be intimidating, but that isn’t the case at FAT, said Vasic. FAT is about expanding the Toronto fashion scene, she said: “I think it adds flavour, it adds crunch and it adds diversity.”
The exhibition, which takes place in a factory space at 213 Sterling Rd., south of Bloor Street, is more conceptual than the bi-annual Toronto fashion week. Art exhibitions, contemporary dance shows and video installations co-mingle with runway models and contemporary design elements.
“That’s what Toronto needs in fashion. Global centres are already doing these things,” Vasic said pointing to the London fashion scene that came out of alternative and experimental movements.
About 4,000 to 5,000 people attend the yearly event, which has a strong focus on international artists and designers. Twenty per cent of this year’s programming includes exhibitors from abroad.
Pedram Karimi, 33, is scheduled to show his debut collection at FAT on Friday. The new designer is looking forward to the opportunity of meeting other designers. “It’s always good to network and collaborate,” he said.
Born in Iran, Karimi spent his adolescence in Austria and graduated from LaSalle College in Montreal last year. After trying to find a design job for several months, he decided to create his own line with encouragement from a former professor.
“Canada doesn’t make fashion; it makes clothes,” said Karimi, who considers himself an artist first and a designer second. He says he’d like to see his line of modern, minimal clothes picked up by Holt Renfrew, the Room at the Bay and R.A.D., a store on Dundas West.
Young designers like Karimi can turn to FAT as a viable alternative to fashion week, said Vasic, because buyers do attend the shows. “I think we do get a lot of the same audience as fashion week, but we also have a more diverse audience as well,” she said.
Changing the name of the show as it evolved was a necessary change, she added, because there was a misconception that the show only exhibited an avant-garde style within fashion. Although the show started as an alternative to the traditional fashion week, it has gained its own identity over the years.
“I don’t think it can be considered as an alternative anymore,” said Vasic, adding it can be viewed as part of an evolving Toronto fashion landscape.
FAT’s partners include the Drake Lab, where showgoers can buy pieces from the designers on Friday. “I think it’s important to have a platform like that,” said Vasic.
“It’s not easy in Canadian fashion.”
Article source: http://www.thestar.com/living/fashion/article/1166603--fat-arts-fashion-week-gives-budding-designers-and-artists-a-boost
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