Pop Style: Fashion Pop and Puces Pop

Necklaces by jewellery designer Eugénie Bee on display at Puces Pop

Fashion Pop organizers Olivia Whittick and Marilis Cardinal, along with a fleet of volunteers, orchestrated Pop Montreal’s 6th annual runway show to showcase six emerging Montreal fashion designers.

This year, competing designers Duc C. Nguyen, Christine Charlebois, Danica Olders, Vicky Dubois, Marie Darsigny and Camille Forcherio each presented six looks to a panel of five jury members, among them Isabelle Campeau (last year’s Fashion Pop winner), Jenna Danchuk (Research Editor at WORN Fashion Journal), Melissa Matos (founder of TRUSST Fashion Gallery) and Le Chateau’s Jeff Dasilva and David Thomson.

The prize of $1,000, a $500 gift certificate courtesy of Le Chateau, an editorial spread in WORN Fashion Journal and a pop-up showcase at Espace Pop in Mile End went to Christine Charlebois, a graduate of Marie-Victorin College and École supérieure de mode de l’Université du Québec à Montréal, who specializes in conceptual clothing for women.

All six competitors presented very different styles, and each had interesting and new elements of design. The jury members found that, in many of the collections, the aesthetic idea competed with the craft, and in some cases the final details were absent from otherwise edgy designs. The winner, Christine Charlebois, excelled both in concept and execution of her designs, and the different layers of her talents were evident in her clothes.

Cult MTL talks to Charlebois about her winning designs. Scroll down for a gallery of images from Fashion Pop and Puces Pop.

Kat Sark: Can you tell us more about your idea behind your conceptual design for women?

Christine Charlebois: I use the mathematical principle of the golden ratio (when the sum of the quantities of the larger element is equal to the ratio of the larger element to the smaller one) in all my pieces. I start with all right angles, minimalist cuts, then applying shape and modifying the basic silhouette with patterns and distortions according to the movement of the female body. I don’t want to do clothes just to do clothes, but rather to reveal something about shapes and geometry and measurements in a minimalist and restricted point of view. I used one colour, one form, only two types of fabric, using the minimum to do the maximum.

KS: How did you become interested in that kind of approach to fashion design?

CC: I’ve always been interested in science and philosophy, but it is also a way of expressing my idea of applying reduction and minimalism for a better way of life in general. When so much in fashion is about frivolity and excess, I wanted to show that you can do things differently. ■

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Kat Sark is a fashion and culture blogger at Suites Culturelles, and the co-author of Berliner Chic: A Locational History of Berlin Fashion (2011) and the upcoming Montreal Chic.