Montréal Chic: A Locational History of Montreal Fashion by Katrina Sark and Sara Danièle Bélanger-Michaud tells the stories of cultural, urban, social, and historical transformations in Montréal through the lens of fashion.
Just as Berlin and Vienna, the first two cities of the Urban Chic book series, Montréal has fashion schools that produce local talent, a fashion industry with local designers and manufacturers, a dynamic fashion scene with its promoters, advertisers, and event organizers, and museums that own and/or exhibit local and international fashion collections. Each of these components contributes to forging a sustainable fashion culture.
Our book focuses on the ways in which fashion permeates many social and cultural spheres, such as museums (with local and international fashion exhibitions), cultural initiatives, festivals, and scenes (fashion, music, film, arts, design, dance, and literary festivals), as well as the key organizations in Montréal’s fashion economy (Bureau de la Mode, Groupe Sensation Mode). Our research un-covers and presents many untold stories of the local innovators, designers and other fashion experts. Our book is the first English-language comprehensive study of fashion and culture in Montréal that aims to outline the role fashion plays in Montréal’s culture, economy, and creative life.
Our chapter on fashion in Montréal museums, entitled, “Montréal Chic: Institutions of Fashion – Fashions of Institutions” is published in Fashion Theory Journal (Volume 19.3, June 2015). It examines and contrast the fashion collections at three of Montréal’s cultural institutions, the Musée McCord, an urban and historical museum that houses over 18,000 pieces of costume and textile artifacts, the Musée du Costume et du Textile du Québec, which owns and exhibits a collection of 8000 items worn, collected, and donated by Québecers and contemporary fashion by Montréal-based designers, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, whose director Nathalie Bondil has made locally-produced international fashion exhibitions one of the key point of its curatorial practice since 2008.
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