From an LVMH-winning teenager and Instagram’s most elegant aliens to a decentralized fashion week and the near-collapse of SSENSE, Montreal spent 2016 to 2026 proving that a fashion capital does not have to behave like one.
In 2016, Montreal did not look much like a fashion capital in the conventional sense. The last edition of the city’s traditional, industry-facing Fashion Week had taken place in 2013 before the event was folded into the larger Fashion and Design Festival. The garment industry that had once made Montreal a North American manufacturing centre had been diminished by outsourcing, factory closures and decades of job losses. Designers still emerged from the city’s schools, but many of the most promising eventually left for Paris, London, New York or Toronto, where the money, manufacturing and international press were supposedly easier to find. (globalnews.ca)
Then a 19-year-old, self-taught Montreal designer named Vejas Kruszewski won the 2016 LVMH Special Prize.
He received €150,000 and a year of mentorship for a label built around transforming familiar garments into objects that felt strange again: bomber jackets became trousers, ordinary closures migrated across the body, and gender-neutral clothing was treated as a design language rather than a marketing category. He had already shown his first collection at New York Fashion Week, but the LVMH recognition placed a very young Montreal designer before a jury containing some of the most powerful people in international fashion. (lvmhprize.com)
Kruszewski was not evidence that Montreal’s fashion infrastructure had recovered. He was evidence that compelling work could escape it.
That distinction would define the decade.
2016: A fashion city without a centre
Several of the names that came to represent the new Montreal fashion conversation were emerging at roughly the same moment.
Marie-Ève Lecavalier established her label in 2016, developing an aesthetic built from psychedelic graphics, reconstructed denim, leather offcuts and memories of the 1960s and 1970s. Her work had the finish and ambition of international luxury, but it retained something recognizably Montreal in its combination of technical intelligence, thrift and eccentricity. She later won the Chloé Prize at the 2018 Festival d’Hyères, was shortlisted for the 2019 LVMH Prize and had her first official collection picked up by SSENSE. (vogue.com)
At LaSalle College, Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran were developing the creative project that became Fecal Matter, later formalized under the French name Matières Fécales. Rather than waiting for a retailer or fashion editor to authorize their existence, they built a total visual identity through garments, makeup, prosthetics, music, photography and their own transformed bodies. Their images presented elongated limbs, shaved heads, extreme silhouettes and shoes that appeared to grow organically out of human skin.
The work was sometimes dismissed as social-media provocation, which was convenient for anyone who did not care to examine it closely. Underneath the alien glamour was a critique of waste, exploitation, conventional beauty and the fashion industry’s habit of making ugliness invisible as long as the finished product looked expensive. By 2018, their online following was already approaching 100,000, and Vogue was treating the Montreal couple as a fashion force worth understanding rather than merely staring at in mild alarm. (vogue.com)
These designers were not part of one coordinated movement. Vejas was reconstructing utilitarian garments. Lecavalier was making dreamy, materially complex luxury. Fecal Matter was turning personal presentation into a continuous performance. What connected them was that none depended on Montreal having a powerful runway calendar. Their careers developed through prizes, international stockists, editorial coverage and social media.
Montreal fashion was becoming visible again, but the visibility did not originate from a single institution. It emerged in fragments.
2017–2019: SSENSE makes Montreal international
The most consequential institution in Montreal fashion during this period was a website, not a fashion week.
SSENSE had been founded in Montreal years earlier, but its influence became much more physically apparent in May 2018, when the retailer opened a five-storey flagship in Old Montreal designed by David Chipperfield Architects. The project inserted a severe concrete structure inside a restored nineteenth-century building and used the space for appointments, installations, performances, launches and cultural programming. It was less a conventional store than a physical interface for a digital company, because apparently even clothing racks had become too straightforward. (davidchipperfield.com)
That year, former Yves Saint Laurent and Zegna designer Stefano Pilati launched Random Identities with a runway presentation at SSENSE’s Montreal headquarters. The collection was immediately available through SSENSE and Dover Street Market, collapsing the usual distance between show, editorial event and retail launch. Hosting a globally recognized designer’s debut in Montreal made the city temporarily function like an international fashion capital, not because it had copied Paris’s institutions but because a Montreal company had created its own platform. (vogue.com)
SSENSE also provided a route to market for Canadian designers. Lecavalier credited the retailer with buying her first collection and continuing to support the label. By 2019, its Canadian assortment included Lecavalier, Vejas’s Pihakapi project, St-Henri, S.P. Badu, Marina Moscone and other emerging or independent names. Its Montreal spaces brought in collaborators including Virgil Abloh, Arca, Pyer Moss, Lemaire and Samuel Ross for events that would otherwise have been unlikely to happen at that scale in the city. (i-d.co)
International media began to notice the concentration of talent around it. In 2019, i-D described Montreal as Canada’s new capital of young fashion design, linking Lecavalier, 3.Paradis, St-Henri and Fecal Matter to a wider creative community that included artists, image-makers and musicians. The article also identified one of the city’s enduring problems: Montreal could produce designers with distinct ideas, but it often struggled to provide the specialized manufacturing, financing and commercial support required to keep them there. (i-d.co)
The old Chabanel garment district still contained manufacturers, suppliers, sample rooms and deep technical knowledge, but it was no longer the densely concentrated production machine it had once been. Fast fashion, offshore manufacturing and the loss of experienced labour had weakened the connection between young designers and the people capable of turning difficult ideas into repeatable products. The city had creativity. It had education. It had comparatively affordable studio space. It had fewer reliable ways to move from a strong prototype to a sustainable business. (district-central.ca)
The decade’s central contradiction was already in place: Montreal was becoming increasingly interesting to international fashion at exactly the moment independent fashion was becoming more difficult to operate.
The other Montreal fashion economy
The international stories were dramatic, but they represented only one part of the city’s fashion culture.
Established designers such as Marie Saint Pierre, Denis Gagnon, Philippe Dubuc and the duo behind UNTTLD continued to provide Montreal with a mature design vocabulary. Their work ranged from Saint Pierre’s technically sophisticated, body-conscious textiles to Gagnon’s leather and pleating, Dubuc’s restrained menswear and UNTTLD’s eveningwear and tailoring. They demonstrated that Montreal fashion did not begin every five years when an overseas magazine discovered someone with unusual eyebrows. (mtl.org)
A second group of independent brands built businesses around local manufacturing, direct retail and clothing designed to survive ordinary life. Betina Lou and Marmier produced refined wardrobe pieces through small local teams. Atelier b combined natural fibres, repair, circularity and local production with a physical Mile End studio-store. Cokluch, Eve Gravel, Jennifer Glasgow and Eliza Faulkner maintained different versions of locally designed and produced womenswear, while Maguire and Partoem helped extend the independent scene into footwear and leather goods. (mtl.org)
Multi-brand boutiques were essential to this layer of the industry. Stores including Boutique Unicorn, Belle et Rebelle, Les Coureurs de jupons, Espace Flo, L’Empreinte, arloca and Articho gave smaller Quebec brands somewhere to meet customers without each label having to carry the cost of a full retail operation. These stores also did editorial work in the oldest sense: they selected, arranged and explained a point of view. The algorithm had not yet entirely replaced the shopkeeper, despite its tireless efforts. (mtl.org)
Vintage, consignment and upcycling belonged to the same ecosystem. In Montreal, secondhand clothing was not simply a lower-cost alternative to new design. It fed styling, nightlife, music, photography and the raw materials of emerging labels. The city’s appetite for vintage helped normalize wardrobes assembled across decades and price points, which made its fashion culture less dependent on seasonal obedience.
This was why Montreal style rarely resolved into one clean visual formula. The city could support austere black tailoring, psychedelic luxury, practical linen, elaborate clubwear and an aggressively sensible winter boot without requiring anyone to choose a municipal uniform.
2020: The sewing machine becomes infrastructure
When the pandemic closed stores, cancelled events and interrupted supply chains in 2020, Montreal’s independent designers confronted the same problem as small fashion businesses everywhere: beautifully developed spring collections were of limited use when nobody could leave home.
Many turned to mask production. Local studios used fabric they already owned, adjusted patterns repeatedly, sold reusable masks directly and, in some cases, donated products to community organizations or frontline workers. For small businesses, masks created an imperfect source of revenue while regular orders disappeared. They also revealed why retaining local sewing capacity mattered. A city cannot abruptly manufacture an essential textile product if it has spent decades treating garment workers as an obsolete expense. (ellecanada.com)
The pandemic did not invent Montreal’s interest in slow fashion, small-batch production or waste reduction. Brands such as atelier b had already made those ideas central to their operations. What changed was the public context. Local production was no longer discussed only as an ethical consumer preference. It became a question of supply-chain resilience, skilled labour and whether the knowledge required to make physical things still existed nearby.
The crisis also exposed how precarious creative fashion businesses were. A designer might be responsible for design, cutting, sourcing, production, e-commerce, photography, shipping, customer service and social media while still being described as a small lifestyle brand, as though the operation involved occasionally arranging wildflowers beside a linen blouse.
Montreal designers adapted because hybrid careers and small teams were already normal. That flexibility was an advantage, but it should not be confused with security.
2021–2023: Fashion Week returns, but not in its old form
In 2021, Montreal Fashion Week came under the direction of mmode, the Metropolitan Fashion Cluster. The revived event did not simply reinstall a row of runways in one official venue and declare the ecosystem repaired. Instead, programming spread across studios, schools, shops, workshops, streets, museums and cultural institutions. Designers, manufacturers, retailers, educators and consumers were all treated as participants. (en.semainemodemtl.com)
The decentralized structure was sometimes messy, but it reflected how Montreal fashion actually operated. The industry was not dominated by a handful of large houses presenting to an international buying class. It consisted of hundreds of small businesses with different audiences, production models and definitions of success. A citywide format allowed an atelier visit, a repair workshop, an exhibition, a student presentation and a runway show to occupy the same calendar.
This period also produced another generation of designers who were less interested in respecting the border between fashion and costume.
Tristan Réhel, who launched his label in 2020, described his work as “fever-dream-core.” His collections combined sculptural ribbons, distorted proportions, cartoonish surfaces, raw edges, glitter and theatrical makeup. Réhel connected that fantasy to the private worlds he created as a queer child, making fashion a form of escape that could eventually become public. His 2023 runway debut at Fashion Art Toronto resembled a play as much as a conventional fashion show, and his ambitions extended into music videos, drag, ballet and exhibitions. (vogue.com)
That desire to move among disciplines was not a sign that Montreal designers lacked focus. It was a rational response to the local economy. Fashion alone often could not support a practice, but fashion combined with costume, styling, teaching, performance, art direction, custom work or digital content sometimes could.
By 2023, the McCord Stewart Museum was participating in Montreal Fashion Week with programming that connected emerging brands, sustainability, inclusion and the museum’s fashion collections. The involvement of museums mattered because it placed local fashion within cultural history rather than treating it only as retail entertainment. (musee-mccord-stewart.ca)
The people who made the scene visible
A fashion city is not created solely by designers. Someone has to style the clothes, photograph them, write about them, wear them conspicuously and explain to a wider public why any of it matters.
Montreal stylist Cary Tauben built a career across editorial fashion, celebrity dressing, creative consulting and television, developing an approach informed as much by obsessive collecting and thrift as by luxury fashion. Lolitta Dandoy moved between magazine editing, journalism, television, blogging and teaching, using Fashion Is Everywhere to discuss style as something shaped by culture and ordinary life rather than restricted to people receiving mysterious black invitations. (the-project.co)
Grece Ghanem’s rise as a Montreal-based style personality challenged the assumption that digital fashion influence belonged almost exclusively to very young women. Her vivid, modern wardrobe and refusal to become visually conservative with age made her internationally recognizable and offered an alternative to the fashion industry’s usual ritual of praising older women only when they agree to look discreet. (glamour.com)
Stylists and textile artists such as Marième Mboup, also known as Yumboë, expanded the conversation further by treating silhouette, layering and cloth as forms of cultural memory. Her practice connects styling with Senegalese heritage, textile investigation and visual storytelling, demonstrating how Montreal’s fashion identity is continually reshaped by migration and diaspora rather than preserved as a sealed French-Canadian aesthetic. (kitdo.co)
Together, these figures made Montreal fashion legible. They linked clothing to nightlife, music, identity, age, race, performance and the city’s daily life. That interpretive work is easy to underestimate because it does not always result in an object for sale. It still determines which objects become meaningful.
2024–2025: The ecosystem becomes the main event
By 2024, the decentralized version of Montreal Fashion Week had grown to more than 130 events involving approximately 200 organizations. The scale was significant, but so was the range: collection launches, workshops, studio visits, exhibitions, retail events, panels and public programming appeared beside conventional runway shows. (vainqueurmag.ca)
In 2025, more than 100 brands participated. Eliza Faulkner opened the week with a runway presentation, while programming included Marie Saint Pierre, jewellery designer Anne-Marie Chagnon, emerging-design incubator LIGNES DE FUITE and the McCord Stewart Museum’s Canadian presentation of the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition Africa Fashion. (en.semainemodemtl.com)
The structure suggested a more useful definition of a fashion week. Rather than functioning only as a series of wholesale previews for buyers, it became a temporary map of the industry: who designed, who manufactured, who taught, who sold, who collected, who repaired and who consumed.
Meanwhile, one of the decade’s strangest Montreal success stories reached the official Paris calendar.
After years of producing imagery, handmade pieces and direct-to-consumer work, Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran brought Matières Fécales to Paris Fashion Week in 2025 with support from the Dover Street Market Paris incubator. The partnership provided help with development, production, sales and distribution, allowing their visual universe to become a more conventional luxury business without making the clothes remotely conventional. (vogue.com)
By 2026, the label’s garments were appearing on major red carpets, worn by figures including Lady Gaga, Zendaya, Sarah Paulson and María Zardoya. The transition from selling upcycled pieces through online communities to producing full Paris runway collections took roughly a decade. It was not an overnight success. Fashion simply enjoys describing ten years of unpaid, unstable or self-financed work as a sudden arrival. (vogue.com)
SSENSE rises, stumbles and becomes the decade’s warning
No account of Montreal fashion from 2016 to 2026 can end with SSENSE’s flagship opening. The company’s later crisis changed the meaning of its earlier success.
At its height, SSENSE was one of the world’s most influential luxury e-commerce platforms and a crucial discovery channel for emerging designers. It combined high fashion, streetwear, cultural editorial and an enormous global catalogue, while remaining headquartered in Montreal. Its success suggested that an international fashion institution could be built from the city without relocating its centre of power.
Then the luxury e-commerce market contracted.
In August 2025, SSENSE entered creditor protection under Canada’s Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act. The company had undergone layoffs, customers reported delivery and duty problems, and independent brands were left waiting for substantial unpaid balances. The crisis was especially damaging because small labels had relied on SSENSE not merely for exposure but for the cash flow required to finance production. A major retailer can survive a delayed payment. A five-person label may lose its next collection. (vogue.com)
In February 2026, the Atallah brothers received court approval to buy the company back and retain control as it moved through restructuring. Further layoffs followed, and SSENSE entered what industry observers began calling its second act. Its remaining advantage was the same one that had made it important: an ability to find emerging brands early and give them international reach. Its problem was that it now had to rebuild the trust of those brands after many had been left unpaid. (vogue.com)
The SSENSE story encapsulates the decade’s larger tension. Montreal proved that it could create a globally relevant fashion platform. It also proved that scale does not make a fashion business invulnerable, particularly when the wholesale model, international shipping rules, discount culture and luxury consumption are all shifting beneath it.
What Montreal fashion looks like in 2026
By the middle of 2026, Montreal’s fashion industry was considerably larger than its independent-designer mythology might suggest. A 2024 industry report estimated that fashion and apparel supported 77,505 jobs across Quebec, with more than 50,000 based in Greater Montreal. The province contained more than 6,500 employer companies in the sector, 95 per cent of them employing fewer than 50 people, as well as thousands of businesses with no employees. More than one-fifth of sector jobs remained connected to manufacturing. (premierevision.com)
Those figures explain why Montreal fashion cannot be reduced to a list of avant-garde designers. The ecosystem also contains major corporate headquarters, outerwear companies, uniform manufacturers, retailers, distributors, footwear businesses, costume shops, contractors, pattern makers, pressers, cutters, teachers, stylists and sales agents.
Its strength is diversity of scale. A global company can operate near a designer cutting garments in a small studio, a heritage house, a sneaker start-up, a neighbourhood boutique and a costume atelier building objects that barely qualify as clothing. Its weakness is fragmentation. Small businesses often lack patient financing, production support and access to customers beyond their immediate networks.
Montreal Fashion Week is scheduled to return from September 21 to 27, 2026. Its current language emphasizes collective energy and the people who design, make, promote and choose local fashion, rather than pretending that a runway alone constitutes an industry. (en.semainemodemtl.com)
That may be the most important change of the last decade.
In 2016, Montreal fashion’s international story was told through exceptional individuals escaping the limitations of their local environment. By 2026, the conversation had expanded to include the system around them: boutiques, manufacturers, museums, stylists, schools, festivals, digital retailers and consumers. International recognition still mattered, but it was no longer the only available proof that the work existed.
The decade did not solve Montreal fashion’s contradictions. The city remains better at generating ideas than capital, better at producing distinctive creative identities than stable career paths, and better at celebrating local manufacturing than paying what skilled local manufacturing actually costs.
