FASHION Magazine
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Inside Park: Calgary’s fashion crowd hits Edmonton for a stylish industry party
Last month, Alberta kicked off a month of fashion weeks and events around the world with its own fashion gathering, unlike any fashion gathering the province had seen before. Hosted at Latitude 53’s new downtown Edmonton location, Calgary’s PARK (Promoting Artists, Redefining Kulture) debuted into new, northern territory.
For anyone who knows the history of the two cities, (hockey) rivalry is core to their relationship, but with FASHION as its official magazine sponsor, Edmonton’s fashion industry professionals—from designers, boutique owners, hair stylists and make-up artists, to photographers, bloggers, writers and media personalities—came together to mix and mingle with their local community and connect with their southern counterpart.
Calgary’s Jessie Li and Kara Chomistek, co-founders and producers of PARK, are looking to expand the organization’s reach and connect the fashion industry’s movers-and-shakers by hosting events throughout the province (and one day, they say, Canada). “The Edmonton fashion community has been incredibly supportive of what we’ve done in Calgary and we want to continue to build and develop the relationships between our two cities,” says Li. The two young producers, a chartered accountant and an engineer, respectively, co-founded PARK in 2008 as an effort to provide emerging artists and designers with greater opportunities to show and sell their works.
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Inside Western Canada Fashion Week’s kick off party: theatrical dresses, stylish bloggers and more!
Western Canada Fashion Week kicked off its seventh year and 14th season last Friday night at Phabrik art + design, a warehouse-style studio space in south central Edmonton run by WCFW’s executive and creative director, Sandra Sing Fernandes. The venue was the original hosting grounds for Edmonton Fashion Week way back when in 2005.
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Far from frump or farmer: Alberta’s top 10 style bloggers
By now, most of us can recognize the many hours it takes to curate a decent fashion blog, and we’ve spent enough time perusing said blogs to know the value in finding a unique voice amongst the noise. Case in point: despite an overzealous cowboy rep (I’m talking the Calgary Stampede, of course, though there’s nothing wrong with rocking a good pair of cowboy boots), and a smothering from what was, at one point, the biggest shopping mall on the planet (I’m talking West Edmonton Mall, of course, though there’s nothing wrong with being a front-runner for immigrating brands like J.Crew), the prairies churn out some die-hard fashion addicts who are both independent thinkers, and far from frump and farmer. We’ve rounded up the top 10 personal style bloggers from Alberta who aren’t afraid to wear floral print pants, mix and match patterns from head-to-toe or seize outdoor photo-ops in subzero temperatures—bare-legged if they must—just for the frill of it.