Fashioning Life: Wear Your Story

Last night was the opening of a beautiful and inspiring art & fashion exhibit at the Design Exchange that I feel honoured to have been a part of. Congratulations to curator Filomena Natale Gasparro for the show's amazing success.

We've put together a video to complement the exhibit where she explains it much more eloquently than I ever could:

I would encourage everyone locally here in Toronto to check it out from now until March 6th - see the Facebook event page for further details.

Latin American Fashion Week: Behind the Scenes

Makeup artist, Rainier Croft with model, Christine Ramkeesoon

Latin American Fashion Week just finished yesterday and was an amazing event to be a part of with tons of talent buzzing around everywhere.

I've done a few fashion shows lately, which isn't my usual, but when I walked into the Spoke Club here in Toronto and saw a herd of other photographers with basically the same gear taking photos of the same thing I was forced to take a moment to think about how I could capture the event differently, which is an invaluable exercise. What's your purpose for being there and how is anyone going to recognize your photo from anyone else's - how is your work going to stand out? Interestingly, I'm quite sure that had I not been confronted with a room full of other photographers, I may not have tried so hard and wouldn't have gotten the images that I did.

That's when it's time to experiment - one fun trick is to shoot through things. Here, I put some water glasses on the bar and shot through them creating a dreamy effect without any fancy-pants photoshop effects:

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Makeup artist, Tamar Cox "Flawless"

Makeup artist, Sophia Chau Hoang

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Me and my shadow

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Just Sultan bow-ties

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Sultan of "Just Sultan" bow-ties

Startup Fashion Week sneak peek

Last night HangLoose Media hosted some of the pre-production involved in putting together Startup Fashion Week set to kick off next week from Oct. 7-9. The space is amazing and there's a lot of excitement to look forward to from the show itself!

Designer, Sarah Catalfo (Maybe by Catalfo)

Jodi Goodfellow, founder of Startup Fashion Week with Basil Waris, Art Director from Toronto Fashion Academy

Simone Riding-Cunningham, Online Talk Show Host, Media Personality, Actress and model

This event will be quite different from many fashion events as it will feature a lot of engaging talks from some amazing innovators and market leaders and showcase some unique developments in wearable technology.

Vita Chambers, Singer

Designers Alanna Klatt and Vanessa Kiraly (Vanika Design)

Toronto Men's Fashion Week: Backstage

Esteban Ortiz, Director of Makeup for TOM*

A behind the scenes look at makeup and backstage from last week's amazing Toronto Men's Fashion Week (TOM*). In case you missed it, you can find highlights from the Runway here.

...and then...BAM!!

Billy Lee photographing HD HOMME

A big congratulations to Brazilian born/Toronto-based Joao Paulo Guedes, winner of the $10,000 Emerging Menswear Design Award: