Prints, prints and more prints
This fall, designers have taken prints to a whole new level: adorning their models in head to toe graphics. Whether it’s baroque style florals, geometric confusion or paisleys, there couldn’t be a better time to toss aside your fashion inhibitions and embellish yourself with any print you desire!
Snow White
Designers are constantly breaking the rules, making it a little difficult sometimes to keep up with whether full on denim is in or out. This fall, the fashion world has officially taken on white after Labor Day – a fashion faux pas I was never fond of. Until Indian summer is over, I wouldn’t rush to put away your white linen pants!
Femme fatale
Not sure about prints and white? Do not fret, black is still in, but this time with a rebellious twist. Designers have taken on black and created a wardrobe suited for Trinity in The Matrix. There is nothing understated about this year’s fall black leather gear.
Try on a sleek uniform
The military trend has had moments in the past, but this time around it has a classier feel to it. Whether it’s a cinched waist, gold embroidery or fur trimmings, designers have found a way to incorporate heels into the military uniform.
Concordia grad David Sciacca co-founded Training Mobs in 2011.
Concordia grad David Sciacca co-founded Training Mobs in 2011.
While lifting weights at the gym to a personalized playlist may be the ideal workout for some, others need a little change in pace and scenery – a feeling David Sciacca and Jonas Caruana understand all too well.
What started as a long distance friendship eventually grew into a shared apartment and a business plan. With a mutual passion for fitness, Sciacca, 30, and Caruana, 29, launched Training Mobs in January 2011, a fitness community website that lists and promotes great local group workouts.
“We really wanted to bring back the social aspect of fitness,” said Sciacca. “Make it easy for people to go to whatever workout they want and not have to be members there.”
Aside from being extremely practical for the fitness community, Training Mobs gives that extra nudge of encouragement to its members, a sense of inspiration that Sciacca and Caruana were searching for themselves not too long ago.
After graduating in finance from Concordia University, Sciacca worked three-and-a-half years in investment banking, a job he had no desire to keep.
“I realized very quickly that I wasn’t doing something I was in love with and I got tired of that,” he said. “To be completely honest, I had no idea what I wanted to do.”
His epiphany led him to Costa Rica where he extended an invitation to his Australian friend, Caruana, who shared the same dismay for his management job. The two had met seven years ago during a university exchange program in Budapest.
“We were surfing and we started complaining about how hard it was to find a great workout wherever we were and how hard it was to coordinate workouts with friends while we were working,” said Sciacca. “We thought maybe there was something out there that would help fix this. When we looked into it and didn’t find anything, that’s when we said, ‘Well this doesn’t make sense.’ So we created Training Mobs from that.”
Committed to finding great workouts for their members, Sciacca and Caruana reach out to independent studios and gyms that offer more intimate experiences bigger gyms sometimes fail to provide. Apart from the free exposure, Training Mobs allows smaller autonomous gyms to connect with their target audience all the while offering a variety of workouts to their members.
“People who have opened an independent gym tend to do it out of passion because everyone knows that opening a studio is probably not the fastest way to get brilliantly rich,” said Sciacca. “When you’re doing something you love, you’re more committed to it – you build a community around you and people enjoy that kind of experience.”
Everyday, Training Mobs offers a fresh list of diverse social fitness classes at a discount rate, from circuit training on Mount Royal to hot yoga in the West Island. No matter the time, location or workout preference, anybody can sign up for a workout on a whim.
While Training Mobs continues to spread across Canada and the United States, Sciacca and Caruana are creating new ways to connect their studio and gym partners with their members. One in particular that is gaining some attention is the MobPass.
“We think the MobPass has potential to change the way people think about fitness,” said Sciacca. “We believe in group fitness because it’s more fun and there’s that social accountability.”
With a monthly purchase of $9.95, the MobPass offers access to every Training Mob gym, studio and trainer at a ten-class-pass rate. Suitable for travelers or anyone with a hectic schedule and an interest in trying new workouts, Sciacca describes the MobPass as being a universal gym membership to all the best independent studios from Montreal to Toronto to San Francisco.
“Why are we preventing people from getting access to these small studios that are specialized by restricting them to one type of workout?” he said. “There’s got be people out there that like variety, that would appreciate flexibility.”
Aside from expanding their fitness community and spreading the word, Sciacca and Caruana are constantly trying to keep an open conversation with their partners and members. They share a blog with their members and encourage people to post videos and messages of their great workouts, and to show newcomers that working out doesn’t have to be intimidating.
“This is a community of real people that are going out and getting active,” said Sciacca. “Training Mobs belongs to the community and we always wanted it to be that way. If you had a great workout experience and want to tell the world about it, let us know and we’ll be happy to shoot it out to the world.”
Though there’s no lack of great bars in this university city, it was only a matter of time before Montreal would welcome a speakeasy to the Mile End neighborhood. With the 1920s re-emerging in fashion and cinema, like Baz Luhrmann’s film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, there couldn’t have been a better time to give people a little sense of rebellion.
Le Comme Chez Soi – its inviting name urging clients to act as they would at home – is a luminous cave enriched with mahogany and statement pieces that were either inherited or bought at an estate sale.
The bar is filled with a variety of round and square wooden tables, accommodating any party size. The room is long and narrow with bright antique lamps. An eye-catching upright piano is centered along a stonewall decorated with black and white photos of strangers of the past. If you decide to visit on the weekend, you won’t be surprised to hear a few bluesy tunes that are great company to a good conversation.
The bar is filled with a variety of beers and whiskies. While I appreciate a good scotch on the rocks, it’s hard to order anything else aside from their bloody caesars. It’s fresh with just the right amount of spice and it’s always served with at least three big olives and an onion – the best I’ve had in Montreal!
While the bar may be what you’re looking for, I would suggest giving a glance at the menu and going for the burger. Made with bison meat and dressed with Roquefort cheese and bacon, Le Comme Chez Soi has earned a reputation for having one of the best burgers in the Mile End.
Aside from adding a terrace, this bar could also use an improvement in their service. Considering the room is quite intimate, it was sometimes difficult to get the attention of the waiters chilling by the bar.
Le Comme Chez Soi is nicely lit, has a wonderful ambiance and is filled with people in deep in conversation. It’s the perfect place to take a break from the rowdiness and dancing, and get a feeling of what it must have been like in 1920s!
Le Comme Chez Soi
5386 St Laurent
Montréal, QC H2T 1A5
(514) 277-0100
Growing up, we never really put much thought in the influence of fairy tales on our adult selves. While some simply move on from bedtime stories, others continue to be inspired by these symbolic and creative tales.
“I really like this element of how in fairy tales, the costume is very transformative, and in some way, we can think of fashion of being that way too,” says Valerie Lamontagne. “We are sort of transformed by the garments that we wear.”
Lamontagne graduated from the visual arts program at Concordia University and is now teaching in the department of design and computation arts. Aside from pursuing her PhD, investigating “performativity, materiality and laboratory practices in artistic wearables,” Lamontagne is juggling a number of fashion lines of interactive garments.
Her most famous project is Peau d’Âne, a three-piece fashion collection that incorporates DIY technology. It’s named after and inspired by Charles Perrault’s French fairy tale also known as Donkeyskin. It tells the tale of a princess who makes a list of impossible demands her suitor must fulfill before the wedding. The kicker is, her suitor is her father.The princess asks for three dresses that embody the elusive essence and characteristics of the sky, the sun and the moon.
With the help of programmer Patrice Coulombe and fashion designer Lynn van Gastel, Lamontagne inherited the challenge of creating these “impossible” gowns, a project that took them over three years to complete.
“If you think of any fairy tale or super hero tale, the costume has the power in a way,” says Lamontagne. “The costume is the thing that makes Cinderella a princess, and the costume is the thing that makes Spider-Man become Spider-Man and not the man he was before.”
The blue inflated Sky dress is made with parachute fabric embedded with tiny fans wirelessly connected to a weather station, soaring and expanding with the change in wind speed. The Sun dress has 120 LED lights embedded in the fabric. Different patterns illuminate depending on the UV index, temperature and sun radiation data that is collected from an outdoors mobile weather station. The change in pattern would vary according to real time. Though the Moon dress doesn’t need data because of its predictable cycle, Lamontagne illustrates the intensity of the moon through thermochromic inks and resistive heating. When electricity runs through the threads of the dress, the ink heats up and changes the colours.
“I thought it would be really interesting to network dresses using computational data from these sort of meteorological entities,” says Lamontagne. “I made three very fairy tale-ish dresses related to real time and weather fluctuations.”
Though the Peau d’Âne series was impressive and showcased at the Seamless exhibition at the Boston Museum of Science, Lamontagne says it’s over and has already moved on to the next project.
She challenged herself with the task of creating wearable techs that are seductive and reproducible. She began developing a wearable line called Electromode that is made of pieces that you can purchase as a kit and easily assemble and customize yourself. Lamontagne uses fabrics such as cotton and silk, and prints the garments with the circuitry already embedded. So far, she has used LED lights and designed two dresses and a purse that she sells on etsy.com.
“A lot of the field of wearable techs is based on these off-craft projects which are not replicable,” says Lamontagne. “They stay a bit in the ghetto, either in an academic ghetto, an arts and crafts or a geeky ghetto, and they don’t really go out into the world.”
Aside from Electromode, Lamontagne is working on another mini collection for the TechnoSensual exhibition in Vienna. The event is part of the MQ Summer of Fashion and encourages designers to incorporate fashion and technology.
With the help of fashion designer Isabelle Campeau, and engineer Hesam Khoshneviss, Lamontagne is creating a five-piece series called Stripes and Dots. They’re exploring different elements of pattern making, concentrating on cubism, colours and transparent materials to produce lights effects.
“We’re making things I want to wear, it’s selfish” she says with a laugh. “We’re really trying to push the fashion and design element, and keeping the technology super simple, but it’s still an element that can seduce people.”
Lamontagne says the challenge is creating something aesthetically fashionable and easy to assemble; pieces that can be sewn in a few seams.
As though these two projects aren’t enough, Lamontagne just got funding to develop a new project called DIY Social Skin. She’s on to the next challenge in trying to create wearables that can influence and speak to each other and explore the social dynamic between garments and the individuals wearing them.
“If someone’s been in the sun a lot, or moved a lot, the different data sets can be in a position to share this information and communicate with other wearables,” says Lamontagne. “The wearables can then transform from each other according to the data that’s been collected from the wearers.”
While being a mother, teacher and student can be exhausting enough for any woman, Lamontagne has become a part of this amazing experimental wave in the fashion world.
“You have to begin to really materially engineer how this garment is going to accommodate these technologies, how it’s going to express in a way that it works well,” says Lamontagne. “The fun part is to really conceptualize how we can be transformed by this.”
