THE ONE PERCENT F/W26
Power affects us all. Whether it’s the corruption of power by those who lead us or the lack of power from those who seek it. We all have a relationship with it and that’s ultimately what this collection is about.
I grew up in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Montréal called Cartierville and Hannah grew up in the richest neighborhood, Westmount. She went to a private school, I went to a public one. She was born with a set of privileges due to her skin colour and I was born with a different set due to mine. Although it’s been a challenge at times to find common ground, our clashing upbringings has given us the ability to not just experience one side of the coin, but both and our love for one another is the glue that ties our conflicting worlds together.
I can vividly remember being a toddler waiting at the bus stop with my mother holding grocery bags during the harsh Canadian winter. A fancy sports car would drive by and pause at the stop light. I would lean in and look observantly behind the tinted windows in awe of the picture perfect family cruising comfortably. Who knows, perhaps Hannah was in that car with her family and if it was, she would insist that that comfort isn’t as glamorous as it looks on the outside.
That memory became the starting point of developing this collection; dissecting all the codes of luxury and wealth that most society aspires to embody. That elite world can either empower you or can leave you feeling powerless if you aren’t part of it.
The collection is divided within three tableaux of Power; the power of archetypes, the power of community and finally the power of the future. Each look tells parts of our story and hopefully a valuable lesson to learn.
The bourgeois family opens the show. It’s an appropriation of high class attire; a lost form of glamour. More importantly, revealing the painful obsession of beauty and the monstrous coldness that exists within elitism.
We “Fecalized” the New Look by injecting our distorted vision of glamour. Guilt is a feeling that often requires empathy, something power usually distorts. White lamb leather couture opera length gloves with red palms titled “Guilt Gloves” not only matches perfectly with our new heels designed with Louboutin.
We closed this tableau with obnoxiously large bow ball gowns on women who just had extreme work done. We wanted to reveal the healing process of these types of individuals who go under the knife in the quest for endless beauty. Only the queen of trompe l’oeuil Alexis Stone can pull off such realism as it’s part of her own obsession.
The second tableaux represents the power of community. Since our decade long journey to get to our debut last year in Paris, we are often called a Cult Brand because of our strong base of supporters who adopt and live by our values. We wanted to explore that through jersey hoodie capes with elongated kangaroo pockets. They are worn by our friends and family who often feel powerless in these very disturbingly conservative times.
Hannah leads ‘The Immortals’ tableaux in our ‘New Look’, an albino python cocoon skirt suit in our signature silhouette with heeless skin boots morphing into her legs. There is a part of the one percent that have access to tools of life that most of us don’t.
Someone like Bryan Johnson doesn’t use these tools to enhance his outer shell like the others do for vanity pleasures, he’s obsessed with his internal imperfections and the extension of the human life. On the other side, is our dear friend and Parisian mother Michèle Lamy. She is defiant and transcends time while embracing the natural beauty of aging without fear.
12 years ago, our fashion school teacher Milan Tanedjikov presented our graduating project brief, asking us to speculatively design for 2026. The collection we are presenting today is a continuation of that project we designed all those years ago titled “The One Percent”. Today, he sits front row as our special guest. Debra Shaw closes the show in the same look I drew all the years ago, my take on one of the most powerful silhouettes, the one of an Elizabethan queen.
This story of power comes to an end and as we have seen in history time after time, too much power can eclipse our humanity. Perhaps that’s why we aren’t born gods.
