Photo courtesy Kid’s Stuff [Trucs d’enfants]

Gender-neutral clothing is a growing trend in Canadian fashion, and one that is trickling down to the wardrobes of the youngest Canadians.

From chains such as La Tuque, Quebec’s Aubainerie, to small businesses such as Vancouver’s Pley Clothes, options for parents looking to build their children a genderless closet are growing across the country. Brands appear to be thriving in Canada’s larger cities and fashion hubs, including Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto.

Ideas of gendered children’s clothing have been evolving since the 19th century, when pastel colours for children came into fashion. Some historians say the idea of “pink for girls, blue for boys” only fully solidified itself in the public sphere in the 1940s.

Now, it seems these old ideals of gendered colours are being given up in favour of attitudes toward clothing that allow for self-expression in any colour or style, regardless of gender.

The industry is still in its early stages and its numbers can fluctuate due to self-reporting among other factors. While there is not much information available about the value of the market in Canada, industry projections see the global market for genderless clothing reaching a worth of $3.2 billion (U.S.) by 2028. Even A-list celebrities such as Megan Fox and Zoe Saldaña are raising their children to wear what they want, without gender stereotypes.

“Colour, clothing, style—everything can be gender neutral. It’s really up to us as adults to see it differently,” says Mary-Jo Dorval, the designer behind the Montreal-based gender- neutral kids’ clothing line, Trucs d’enfants. “By not labelling my clothes it makes it easier for consumers to see it like that as well.”

Dorval began her business producing alternatives to the highly gendered clothing of the fast-fashion industry seven years ago. She said she was inspired by her friend’s difficulties in finding sustainable, locally made genderless clothing for their children. Her website is chock-full of orange, purple and green shirts, pants and overalls. Most items are made from a cotton or bamboo-modal blend, and are modelled by children of all ages displaying the clothes’ stretch and fit as they play or nap.

“I really wanted to break this ‘black- grey-beige’ idea we have of gender- neutral clothing,” Dorval adds. By giving children genderless clothing, Dorval says, she provides them with the option to choose how to express themselves.

This rings true for Markus Harwood- Jones, a YA author and PhD candidate in gender studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He says the decision to raise and dress his child, River, in a gender-open way was an easy one. He says he wants his child to be able to express themself now, and feel comfortable with their gender expression as they grow up, whoever they grow up to be.

“When they get older, if River is really butch, or really femme, or whatever, we want to just make sure that they have pictures that feel like, ‘oh, that’s me,’” Harwood-Jones says. His family often uses an analogy referencing starting babies on solid foods. “You don’t start your kid on solid foods on day one,” Harwood- Jones says. They want River to express their fashion sense as soon as they are developmentally ready for it, and provide River a wardrobe that helps them do just that.

Harwood-Jones adds that children show their preferences earlier than many would think. When River was six months old, Harwood-Jones, his husband and their co-parent would hold up onesies on the changing table so River could choose what they wanted to wear.

Now, at almost two years old, River takes the lead on shopping excursions, asking for purple dresses and tutus. Harwood-Jones says his family often thrifts clothing to keep costs low, but when they do buy new, they lean toward small businesses that are queer owned or gender neutral.

Dorval believes small businesses will continue to bear the torch of clothing designed for everyone once the mainstream sheen wears off. However, if parents want to ignore gender labels in big-box stores, she says they should go for it.

“You can buy a princess skirt for your little boy,” she says. “It doesn’t matter.”

Illustration by Derrick Chow

A quarter million Korean adoptees live (or have lived) around the world. Aren’t our black eyes so cute when they get pushed up by our cheeks as we smile for the photo displayed at the office? Don’t we garner the most likes and applause on those mommy blogs when we’re sent to show-and-tell in a hanbok? And how about when we blossom into comely-but-not-too-popular teenagers, the best of both worlds, already imagined in our parents’ alma mater stripes?

But what then, when shortly after that, we become grown Asian people all by ourselves, expected to navigate the ways our genders and sexualities and races collide without any practice or community or guidance? What do we do at that moment when we transform into the uncontrollable exotic beauty of our own mothers’ worst nightmares? At the moment when we start to be the headliner and no longer the opening act, the sidekick, the stage prop—but also when we find ourselves alone in a world that is already licking its lips?

I was around twelve or so when I started to peel photographs of myself from the albums stored on the bottom shelf of my bedroom armoire. Back then, there were these thick cardboard pages coated with an adhesive that yellowed over time. A sheet of crackling cellophane smoothed over top always had creases and bubbles and folds. There was one album for each of the first three years I lived in Canada. I recognized my Canadian mother’s kindergarten teacher penmanship labelling the top right-hand corner of every book. Probably part of a box set, the albums featured the same illustrated girl on its cover. On one, her blond curls were pulled back into a ponytail and she was on her tummy with her arms folded and her chin resting on her interlocked fingers. She was so cute. She looked like my Canadian sister. She looked like our mother when she was little herself.

There grew a disordered pile of photographs curling into themselves at opposite corners, their backs still grimed with residue.

My first night with my new family.

Held on one hip by a grinning moustached uncle who faced the camera.

My pregnant mother’s nervous smile. The same one she still offers today. The awkwardness of trying to hold one baby and carry another soon to arrive.

A rare glimpse at the grandmother who took me into bed with her when everyone else was alarmed that I remained awake through the night. I was a baby. And my body was still fourteen hours ahead.

The earliest days of my life in Canada.

The back of my hand as I reached for a dimpled yellow ball gently held in the teeth of a smooth-haired dog.

A post-baptismal brunch when the defrosted top tier of my parents’ wedding fruit cake was served with English Breakfast or Earl Grey and milk.

The series that captured the weeks following that time I closed a board book on my face and tore the skin off the tip of my nose.

The taming of wild hair into thick pigtails and blunt-cut bangs.

And then.

Sitting on the slippery brown couch, with the quilting and the white flowers, my new sister’s bonneted head rested on my lap, the bottom of my patent leather shoes unscuffed.

No one questioned my excavation project. I don’t know what happened to all those sepia toned images. I refilled the albums with pictures of wild animals cut from childhood magazines.

This year, I taught a university course entitled Race, Fashion, and Beauty. I did it because Black, Indigenous, and other People of Colour (BIPOC) are innovative and creative and playful and beautiful, for ourselves and for our kin. But it is a risk because someone might say, “You’re so beautiful” in one breath and in the next, “Your kind is so beautiful.” Or they might ask, “Can’t you take a compliment?” and then, “Can’t you take a joke?”

I overheard that the students, well, some of them, were afraid. They were afraid to say the wrong thing and afraid to do the work. They were upset that mine was the only course that fit their timetable. They were irritated that they were asked not to cite white scholars. They suddenly acknowledged that whiteness is a race in order to avoid this, but only then. They were angry that they were told that in the class BIPOC speak first and choose first.

I tried to shrug off all the ugliness. I tried to be beautiful.

My campus office has a window. But outside my window is a wall. Sometimes, when I consider the closedness of my view, when I count the years I’ve been here, I feel angry at newer colleagues who bask in natural lighting. But then, I wouldn’t want to be watched.

The walls of my office are covered in photographs printed from Korean and Japanese magazines. Asian femmes pout down from all four walls, their bodies twisted into gorgeous impossibilities. Many are not conventional beauties, but have the absurd and curious loveliness so feted in the fashion industry.

Once, a student came to office hours. Like many do, they admired the exquisiteness lining my space. “Complimented” my bravery. Asked me if it was me in all the photographs.

I learned about the skepticism of a colleague who works at another university. She said that doing beautiful things, doing things to make beauty, was a gimmick. She said that it distracts from politics. I was confused because to me, politics can be done through beauty. And beauty is political. And anyhow maybe she’ll one day understand that someone like me, someone afraid to be exchanged or returned or rejected or something else, must always, always exist through beauty-making.

One summer, I was asked to speak at a culture camp for Korean adopted youth and their parents. I was cautious of the fragile audience. One man, fittingly a lawyer, laughed and declared himself the devil’s advocate. But his daughter, who was a teen at the time, came to me with her friends later on and asked me how to curl her eyelashes. The next day, their white mothers also came to me and asked to help them make their children feel beautiful.

There was another girl a few years younger. Her prettiness was irrefutable. She was shy and away from the older teens and I told her she was beautiful. Her mother said, “It doesn’t matter if she is pretty. She is smart.”

Ever since that time I’ve thought hard about what that girl’s beauty signified to her white mother. Why it was so threatening. Seen as exclusive from intelligence. I’ve thought about how isolated we sometimes feel, how lonely and how ugly. I remembered the pressed powder I’d steal from my own white mother’s drawer when I was that girl’s age and how it smelled like rotted flowers but still I’d dust it on my face to feel lovely. The ache and dry of unblinking wide eyes. The experiments with lemon juice that Seventeen magazine promised would lighten my hair. I remembered how my parents’ friends complimented my Canadian sister’s cuteness and my studiousness when we were young. I remembered how receiving no words confirmed my ugly. And how special attention was rationalized as a need for diversity as opposed to a desire for me in particular. I remembered praying for freckles and arm hair and eyes like my sister’s that turned green when she wore green and blue when she wore blue and grey when she was angry.

What was the danger of telling that girl she was pretty? Is it the same danger in telling myself I was too? Is it a reminder that there are things we are gifted from our Korean mothers that no one else can take credit for?

I was in my late twenties when I met her. I knew she would be beautiful. My Korean mother wasn’t smiling in the photograph that was our introduction but still, she was beautiful. Her eyes were serious and black. She wore yellow.

She stroked my hair when we reunited face-to-face. Her hands were in my hair and she said, “I’m sorry,” and then, to the translator who stood off to the side, “she’s prettier than in her pictures.” Later, as we sat next to one another on the agency couch, she laughingly confessed to the social worker of me: “I used to have the same eyes.”

One time in Seoul, I traced the tip of my finger across my mother’s lips. She asked, “weh,” in that lilting way that Korean women do, but I didn’t stop. I traced the shape of all her features and she didn’t blink.

My youngest Korean sister was there. Our mother asked me, through her, if I’d let her gift me with the day surgery that would give us matching eyes.

My mother calls me “ippun ddal” and sometimes “ippun aeggi” in her singing voice when we speak on the phone. “Pretty daughter,” she says, “pretty baby.”

People were always looking and guessing and holding me in place, holding me down, with both those acts. When I was small, they asked questions about the exotic lands I came from, its fiery food and the black-haired women who made it. As I grew older, it was prolonged glances, comments about Woody Allen. A neighbour who made me feel shy in my stomach. Children who reached for their mother’s hands, hid behind them, without breaking eye contact with me. My solution was to enrobe myself in ostentatiousness. To convince myself that I invited, curated, revelled in spotlight. I made myself into the main event, always smiling, always laughing, lips glossed and hair piled high.

At some point I left my hometown and was told I was valuable all by myself but it was too fast. I was reckless and felt powerful and at once it drew people to me but it also made me aloof.

Today, I live differently in my body. A calm acceptance and affection for eyes I used to widen, of skin I used to powder, hair I used to bleach, transforms beauty-making into pleasure.

Whenever that person I love very much tells me I possess a certain “swanness” and I conjure the duckpond of my earlier life.

Photos courtesy of Sanchari Sur

I am not sure what compelled me to ask him, and what compelled him to say yes. But there I was, craning my neck like a chicken about to be slaughtered, and smizing my eyes for all they were worth, while he clicked. The photos were for my new fashion blog, my experiment with fashion as
an academic.

At the time, I was in my second year of a Gender Studies MA at Queen’s University, while he was in his second year as a master’s of engineering student. We had met on our second day in Kingston the previous year, and upon meeting another brown person—the very first since our arrival into the city—we had been drawn to each other in a way neither of us could explain. He was a good-looking man with a childish laugh, somewhere between a gurgle and a chuckle. He loved cricket, and even played the sport for the university team. He was a little over two years younger than me, and apart from our love of food and Bollywood films, we had nothing in common.

I grew up a tomboy. As a kid, my go-to outfits were knee-length shorts and t-shirts. They were great because they made movement easy. With my closely shorn head of hair, on my red bicycle, when I whizzed through back and inner streets (within a one-to-two mile radius of our apartment building), I could very well have been a boy to those who caught a glimpse.

But even those days of passing were short-lived. Shortly after I hit 10, I got my period, and my nubby breasts suddenly began to sprout, like mounds of alien flesh. My mother diligently got me training bras, contraptions that I hated. I despised the feeling of being caged in, and so when I went on my bike, I wilfully forgot to insert the changing geography of my chest into these elastic coops.

A neighbour from two houses down stopped me on the second day I went out like this.

“Hey!” she said, beckoning at me to talk to her and her older sister, one 14 and the other 16.

“What?” I said.

“We were wondering,” she said, exchanging looks with her sister, “are you wearing a bra?”

For the first time, I felt conscious of my body, in the way I was seen. I had hoped that if I ignored my changing body, everyone else would too.

“No,” I said.

“I told you,” she said to her sister.

“Well,” the oldest girl said to me, “you should wear one.”

He liked long hair on me. When I wore makeup and dressed up in dresses or skirts, I found his smiles got wider. He never said anything outright. He never said, “Don’t wear this,” or “do your hair like that.” But it was implicit.

Once or twice I managed to take him to a house party with my gender studies peers. He didn’t like going. He said that he felt uncomfortable.

In my second year of school, and the second year of our relationship, we began to drift apart. I often found myself losing my temper, conjuring fights out of thin air. He often said nothing during these fights, his silence fuelling my anger and unfettered words; words that made things even sourer between us. Neither of us wanted to let go. I held onto the belief that it was the situation that was causing the rift: his moving into a house with undergrad boys where we had little to no privacy, or his increasing absences for out-of-city cricket matches, or his unwillingness to study together like we used to in our first year. These were excuses I made for our relationship, and for him. So perhaps, asking him to be my photographer was my way to test this theory. To spend more time with him, and to bond in the process.

And for the most part, it worked. We would schedule meetings for fashion shoots, and he would show up diligently. After, we would go out for dinner, or watch a movie, and spend the night together.

The first shoot was on Valentine’s Day, an unusually slushy wetness coating the streets outside the house where I rented a single room. We held the shoot indoors. As someone unaccustomed to being in front of the camera, I found myself smiling shyly. Discomfort etched across my face, as I tried to make myself as confident as I felt when he looked at me in my Valentine’s outfit: a tight black mini skirt paired with a sleeveless black satiny top with lace frills at my arm holes and V-neck. An envelope clutch with dark orange and gold accents, matching the gold of my twisted neckpiece. I had left my hair open, the length of my curls stopping right above my breasts.

I felt sexy, yes. I felt sexy through his eyes.

When British feminist film theorist, Laura Mulvey, theorized the male gaze, I wonder if she was thinking about the controlling gaze of the photographer. Being in front of the camera was different from being behind it. There was a loss of control, as if I was putting my vulnerability on display without really wanting to. As someone who was used to being behind the concentric lens of the camera, rather than in front of it, I felt conspicuous, my body on display. A doll-putul, like my mashi would say. A made-up marionette for the sole consumption of the male eyes behind the lens.

When the cis-het photographer is also your boyfriend, how do you see yourself?

The first few shoots featured me in clothes that put my femme side on display: bright lips, mascaraed eyes, lacy dresses, tight skirts. Now when I see those photos, I see the discomfort, the uncertainly in the forced smiles, the awkwardness in my poses. I also see myself trying to inject comedy into the postures—sticking my tongue out, or pretending to be in a fight scene in a movie—to lighten the mood, so I could hold on to some semblance of myself.

As the blog posts changed from the conventional feminine dress-ups, I also recall the behind-the-scenes fights. With each fight, I felt myself falling away from him, and reasserting myself. With each fight, I felt myself choosing outfits that I wanted to, transitioning to an almost ideal version of myself, the version I really wanted to be. Pants, button ups, oxfords, neutral lips, and hair in a bun.

At a get-together with my gender studies buddies, one that he didn’t come to, I repeated an outfit: red pants, blue shirt, black boots, and a bow-tie. Everyone complimented me, as I relaxed into my clothes, a second skin. For the first time in a long time, my outer version felt like the way I imagined myself.

For the first time in a long time, I felt like me.

Genderqueer is a term I encountered within my gender studies classes. In my two years in the program at Queen’s, I would unlearn and relearn everything I thought I knew about gender and sex. That both gender and sex were on a spectrum. That the binary of either was an imposed illusion. That it was possible to feel like you belonged to neither end of the spectrum, or that you could exist outside the binary.

When I began fashion blogging, I found that my ideas of fashion and dressing up relied on my internalized ideals of this gender binary. That even as I found myself falling on one end of the spectrum, my inner self resisted and recoiled. These resistances came out through my fights with my then boyfriend, and through the ways I wanted to reimagine myself. And in this friction of wanting something and resisting impositions (however implicit), lay an inner struggle I had never quite had the language to articulate. Fashion blogging and my gender studies classes gave me that language.

As I came toward the end of my gender studies program, I began to identify as genderqueer. I found myself inserting the word silently into my writing bios as a gradual way of coming out without it becoming a spectacle. While genderqueer is often known as another term for non-binary, I felt this description fit me better. I was tired of defining myself and my body against the binary, and “genderqueer” felt just right.

In Camera Lucida, French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes writes, “There is a kind of stupefaction in seeing a familiar being dressed differently.” Barthes writes this in the context of seeing a photo of his mother as a little girl, and finds that time collapses when he looks at the photograph after her death. In the same instance, his mother is both the little girl as well as his mother who passed away recently. He is essentially stupefied by this collapse of time.

Rifling through my fashion blog photos in the present time, five years after the blog’s demise, has this similar feeling of stupefaction for me. I am both in the present time and in the past, a bridge between my gender identities from then to now. There is a sense of disconnect between who I was in those photos and who I am now. While time doesn’t collapse for me in the way it does for Barthes, time does become malleable in the sense that I can stand secure in who I am now and who I am becoming, as I look back at who I was back then. I am still in the process of getting comfortable in front of the camera, but these days, it’s on my own terms. I am not who I want to be—yet—but as I hurtle towards the future, I feel myself getting comfortable within who I have chosen to become. And that, I think, is the beginning of everything else that is to come.

Later in the spring, Canthius, a feminist magazine of poetry and prose, tweeted that “the best thing on Twitter right now has to be makeup #booklooks … Thanks for giving us something to look forward to.”

It was a difficult spring, with COVID-19 keeping many of us at home in isolation. And yet #booklooks prevailed. What, you may ask, is a #booklook? Book looks are makeup looks based on book covers. Occasionally it’s more of a dress-like-a-book thing, with outfits inspired by book covers instead—though amongst Canadian writers, makeup has been a more popular route.

Though #booklooks began before the pandemic, they really picked up as a creative outlet during it, with writers and readers submitting their own through social media. Perhaps most inspiring has been the camaraderie between writers, the retweets and praises sung amongst a group so often made to compete. The looks themselves are glorious, and the added bonus of learning about amazing—and notably diverse—books through the informal project doesn’t hurt either. For This’s fashion and beauty issue, we asked six participants what creating #booklooks has been about for them.

Domenica Martinello

I created the Instagram account @makeup4books in January 2019 as a way to privilege pleasure over productivity. Like many, I tend to fall into the trap of valuing my self-worth based on how productive I am. And as a writer and teacher, my favourite things to do with my time—write and read—overlap with my professional life. So, as a New Year’s resolution to cultivate creative hobbies just for the sake of joy and leisure, I decided to merge the aesthetic delights of makeup looks and book covers.

I’ve had a fraught and ever-evolving relationship to makeup and femininity. It’s something I continue to negotiate. Ever since I was a kid I’ve watched my mother’s daily ritual of doing her makeup, understanding it not as an act of creative expression but as self-regulation. When I started experimenting with makeup in high school, it went from unintentionally garish to brashly weird on purpose. My mom, exasperated by this subversion, begged me to take a makeup lesson at the mall (I didn’t).

I’ve internalized so much gendered negativity around makeup, especially as it began to intersect with my professional life: am I wearing too much? Too little? Will I be taken seriously? It’s been powerful to reclaim this space as an unregulated one full of play and pleasure through the book looks.

Victoria Liao

When I was a kid, reading was my escape and my salvation. Struggles with mental illness from around nine years old onwards meant I always needed an elsewhere to go, and reading books granted me that freedom. At 19, after my mental health deteriorated my ability to read without extreme effort and stress, I found myself turning to makeup instead.

For me, makeup is not only a form of queer expression, it’s a source of self-love and creativity that can’t be measured by others’ expectations. I was never supposed to be good or bad at makeup, so I could just do it for myself and treat my face as a canvas.

I tend to pick books that I’ve already read for a book look, because it feels deeply personal to put another’s art on my own face—both that of the cover artist, and the authors themselves. I want to honour their work with my own connection to it. Small Beauty in particular is a book I quote often at friends, with its meditations on anger and its themes of intergenerational trauma and relationships—between both blood and found family.

While I’m still healing in many ways, rediscovering my ability to read and connecting it to parts of my identity that showed up in its absence has been a joy. Book looks are a way to unite my love of both these hobbies.

Terese Mason Pierre

I started doing makeup book looks in a time of great fatigue. I worried about my productivity. At the start of the pandemic, I read articles online about how writers “have so much time now” and I lamented at how little I was getting done. At this point, magazines had reached out to me to solicit work, but I didn’t have anything to give them, and I couldn’t bring myself to write new poems. When I started doing makeup book looks, I felt myself become more creative in ways that weren’t emerging through writing.

I enjoy isolating the colours and textures in a book cover and swatching eyeshadows on my arms for a match. I enjoy looking through catalogues for new books, or finding an author’s bibliography for their most vibrant title. I enjoy experimenting with the makeup on my face—some looks have taken more than one attempt to get right. When I choose a cover of a book I’ve already read, I think about what I felt when I read it and try to remember that as I apply the makeup.

As the quarantine continues, I have found myself mentally withdrawing from other creative forms in order to invest in makeup. I’m not writing much poetry anymore and I’m trying to be okay with that. But I’m no longer fatigued and I’m excited to fill my day. I wonder if when the quarantine ends, the book looks will too, so I decide to enjoy it while I can.

Jenny Heijun Wills

In the minds of some, aesthetics are seen as frivolous if they are temporary and easily removed with a wipe or some baby oil. In all other circumstances, aesthetics are the most important thing—or at least when it comes time to lock down the boundaries of what is good art, writing, etc. When it comes time to dismiss BIPOC and other marginalized creators as too political. As unimaginative.

So, aesthetics are just another technology of rejection. One more moving target. One more way to keep people down, keep people out, keep people going in circles hoping to actually, truly be seen.

This isn’t new information, but we spend a lot of time discussing the effects of these thinkings: prioritized Eurocentric beauty ideals on one side and cultural appropriation, window dressing, and fetishization on the other. Let’s also talk about the judgements placed on doing aesthetics, as in, the act of.

It is no coincidence that this whole makeup book look thing has proven itself to be an outlet for people told to choose between politics and aesthetics (as if those things are ever separable). It’s no coincidence that these makeup book looks have emboldened some folks to insinuate we’re doing feminism wrong. Or doing reading wrong.

So my question is: what is it about momentary aesthetics that makes people so uncomfortable?
Is it that it shows that we know how to do everything—politics, style, innovation, and more?
That the perennial shifting target has taught us we can do it all?
Is that why people look away?

Nisha Patel

From strings of dim Edison bulbs to the harsh reflection of a front-facing selfie, it feels like the face of the modern writer is always illuminated. There is a miserable duality of being visible but not seen, judged for your material appearance, or applauded for a keen play of the eyeshadow brush. It is common that a writer is paid $100 to read from their book and spent $30 earlier that evening on a new foundation. And then they’re the only BIPOC woman in the room.

To be a woman in writing today demands that you always look the part, look good. Publishers need audiences willing to buy books and authors with personality and followers get more likes and sales, and thus are more worthwhile investments. Women need to be careful to toe the line of looking good enough that no one asks if you are having a rough week, but not so good that you are accused of treating their writing careers as vanity projects. On top of that, white male authors pack two suits for their three-week speaking tour, but BIPOC women in cultural garb are trying to stand out. 

The story of the #booklook is that critics cannot hide behind their ivory towers forever, nor is there just one way to interpret and connect with a book. Writing comes from full and breaking lives, and BIPOC writers know this more than anyone because we have had to build immense resiliency to scrutiny. To be a BIPOC woman and a writer is to hold all of yourself out to be judged. Engaging with books through makeup (one of the most criticized uses of the brush) allows women to claim and see the art form through on their terms.

What looks to be a fun play on art is more profound: our looks and our aesthetics are explorations of joy, and that is why it makes so many people uncomfortable. 

Alicia Elliott

There’s something meditative about applying makeup. Like any task that requires concentration, dipping my eyeshadow brush into crimson or goldenrod or cerulean powder, then slowly, softly swiping and swirling it over my eyelid, fills me with peace. In those precious minutes where I’m focused solely on perfecting my blend, I’m not worrying myself sick over the state of the world. I’m not over-analyzing the words of my loved ones, or questioning whether the change this world needs can ever really happen. I’m not worried about whether others see me as competition or conquest. I’m not indulging in the negative thoughts I’ve so often convinced myself are the only possible thoughts I can have.

When I’m doing my makeup, the peace I experience always brings me back to this truth: I’m none of the things people have tried to convince me I am. I’m just me—a person with a tapered blending brush, working toward beauty.
That beauty is a subjective beauty, of course, like any idea of beauty. But what’s important to me is that it’s a version of beauty that I have chosen for myself.

In that way, I suppose, makeup is a natural companion to books. Both are methods of self-expression. Both encourage us to see and reflect on the beauty around us. Both encourage us to see and reflect on ourselves, to consider what face we want to show the world.

What face do you want to show?

Photo by Brandon Brookbank

Shaya Ishaq’s work moves fluidly between mediums—words, ceramics, fibres, jewellery—while maintaining a central locus of honouring Black lineages and sparking light toward liberated Black futures. Tenacious and ever-evolving, Ishaq walked away from journalism school and signed up for a hand-building course at a pottery studio in her hometown of Ottawa. “I really fell in love that winter,” she says. “It was pretty magical to come into the studio first thing in the morning to see my work come out of the kiln or even just how the clay would change when the pieces would air dry before firing. I was totally enraptured by the many stages of the medium of clay.”

Now, Ishaq masterfully combines ceramics and fibres to create ornate and intricate wearable art pieces. On the origin stories of these designs, she says, “At their core, [these materials] come from the earth (before mass production and industrialization, before creating synthetic versions) and I am very dedicated to working with them to see what connections arise. Both invite a meditative process that has saved me time and again.” She started bridging relationships between ceramics and textiles when she began art school in Halifax, going on to continue her studies in Montreal. “It’s only been in recent years that some kind of visual vocabulary has emerged.”

Ishaq’s wearable art possesses a distinct aesthetic that plays with the juxtaposition of hardness and softness, gloss and matte, the whimsy of tassels and sharp curves of ceramic. That aesthetic is visible in her Holy Wata collection, showcased on her online portfolio, and her most recent solo show Mirror Mirror, exhibited at the Anne Dahl Concept Studio in Ottawa.

“Some of my stylistic choices are definitely informed by Black and Afro-diasporic futurist and Indigenous aesthetics,” she says. “More and more, I am trying to find inspiration from my own cultural background in East Africa … which requires a lot of digging, but is ultimately worth it because it brings me closer to myself in a way, by allowing me to reconnect with an embodied sense of self.” Ishaq is also inspired by people who express a certain kind of “unfuckwithable energy,” including characters like Lauren Olamina from Octavia E. Butler’sParable series or Ketara from Avatar, and performers like
Moor Mother, Debby Friday, Backxwash, and Kelsey Lu.

Themes of Blackness in regards to identity, craft, culture, and liberation are integrally woven into Ishaq’s spatial design, as well. During a month-long residency at Halifax’s Khyber Centre for the Arts, she created Black Libraries Matter, for which she reimagined the gallery space by creating a Black library by inviting community members to donate books by Black authors.

Soon after, she had a collaborative exhibit, Reconcile/Overcome, at the Ottawa Art Gallery. It consisted of a handwoven sculptural textile piece and written work reflecting on the consequences of the transatlantic slave trade and labour of enslaved Black people on the foundation of Canada and the United States. Her written work from the exhibit includes this excerpt: “Made by my Black hands in celebration of Black spiritual resilience in all corners of the world. Not all our struggles are alike yet we are gold. We are nuanced and yet are gold. We are resilient and we are gold.”

In reflecting on the intersections of Blackness, fashion, beauty, and culture, Ishaq understands that Blackness and popular material culture are also deeply entwined. “I believe this includes Afro-diasporic cultural production as well. I really believe that materiality is political and omnipresent.” Black culture, she says, “is celebrated yet the people who create it are oftentimes disregarded, treated as disposable, only celebrated when they are dead or in moments like this where the world has to recognize the deep systemic patterns at play. There are so many case studies of appropriation that intersect Blackness, fashion, and beauty.”

In its variety of mediums, Ishaq’s practice seeks to centre Blackness and move closer toward creative sovereignty, despite continued appropriation of Black art and culture. “Ultimately, the more we are able to lean into our own creative sovereignty, the more authentic our creations can be. That sovereignty can look like not fighting for ‘a seat at the table,’ detaching ourselves from Eurocentric symbols of success but really doing things for us and by us.”

TOP: Photo by Cheryl Hann; Models: Francesca Ekwuyasi and Portia Karegeya LEFT: Photo by Mallory Lowe; Model: Jada BOTTOM: Photo by Brandon Brookbank; Model: Candy Contrera

Photo by Justin Louis. Instagram: @sweetloo35

What do the Chicago Blackhawks, Washington Redskins, and Cleveland Indians have in common? Sport and its continued appropriation of Indigenous culture.

Section 35, a B.C.-based apparel company, is pushing back. Founded by friends Justin Louis and Andrew Kazakoff, Section 35 tackles Indigenous stereotypes head-on with political statements people can wear.

“You can still create conversation with clothing, but in a way that people can enjoy wearing it,” says Louis, who is from the Samson Cree Nation in Alberta and is currently based in the Coast Salish Territory of Vancouver. While the designs themselves are conversation starters, so is the company’s name. “Section 35” alludes to the section in the Constitution Act of 1982 that protects Aboriginal treaty rights to land, fish, log, and hunt.

The company carries everything from leggings designed with portraits of Indigenous matriarchs to ball caps resembling the Red Sox logo replaced with red moccasins. Their most popular collection called “Kill Mascots, Save the People,” created in collaboration with Chicago-based artist Santiago X, brings awareness to Indigenous imagery that’s misrepresented and misused on sports teams’ jerseys.

Starting a clothing line was the last thing the two friends thought would happen when they first met playing baseball. As a descendant of Russian immigrants, Kazakoff believed in the message of inclusion that Louis hoped to spread.

Their message has since infiltrated pop culture, with members from A Tribe Called Red and Major Lazer sporting their designs.

But whether their designs are worn by celebrities or by Indigenous youth, Louis says he simply wants people to “be able to speak their truth a little bit and not be ashamed of who they are.”

Fashion is often mistaken as temporary, nothing but a wave of passing fads—but not in Bad Girls of Fashion: Style Rebels From Cleopatra to Lady Gaga by Jennifer Croll. In her vividly illustrated book, Croll takes us through fashion contextually. Readers get a chic inside look at artists, queens, musicians, and designers who didn’t just change fashion—they challenged it. From Marie Antoinette, who used fashion as a way to prove her influence, to Lady Gaga, who used her outfits as protest, Croll reminds readers: “fashion is anything but frivolous.”

Photo from The Transgender Project

A fashion model fighting for trans* rights, Pina Newman is making sure she is heard, while inspiring others to find their own voices. Maxing out the time in her jam-packed schedule, Newman is involved with the Trans Collective, a group of trans* identified people at Ryerson University, “We are advocating for more single-stalled and gender-neutral washrooms as there are too few on campus and they are often spread out,” she says as an example of what the collective does. “Additionally we are going to be impressing the importance of education for professors with regards to trans* issues and being trans* inclusive.”

Newman is also working on Ichannel’s The Transgender Project, and takes every speaking engagement that comes her way, like ImpactU, an event hosted by Ryerson’s Equity Services, facilitating discussions about equity issues on campus.

“I feel very fortunate to have been given these opportunities. I feel inspired to keep going because I have been heard in the previous times I have spoken,” she says. “I am fully immersed in trans* issues and therefore I have gained a lot of specialized knowledge and personal experiences in these areas. This is something I feel is important to share among those who haven’t shared the life I have had.”

Through sharing her stories many have reached out to the activist, keeping Newman going now that she’s found her own confidence, and she wants to make sure everyone else can feel comfortable doing what they want to do.

Newman’s modeling portfolio includes shots by photographers such as Danilo Ursini, which can be found on the Vogue Italia website: “He was the first photographer I worked with here in Toronto,” she says. “,He is absolutely incredible and talented beyond belief.” Newman loves to shoot creative projects, and hopes to do more, once there are a few more hours in a day.

Newman’s trans* rights work keeps her busy, but she has been thinking of finding a modeling agency, getting more acting work, walking in Toronto Fashion Week (she has a blast being involved with Fashion Art Toronto), getting more involved with her university (where she is studying to become a nurse) and speaking at the Philly Trans Health Conference.

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her second year of the gender and women’s studies program at York University. She also maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

Why foster your own cultural innovation and creativity when you can pillage and exploit the cultures that you’ve already ravaged for centuries!? Apparently, companies have decided not to explore all the great amounts of non-offensive and really awesome art coming out of the West, because ignorantly capitalizing on the sacred image of Ganesha is just way more fun. It’s no biggie that we’re settlers on a brutally colonized land that was stolen from Indigenous people, because the genocides of the past can be so easily forgotten when you make Navajo-inspired underwear. Hey, let’s throw in a shirt reminiscent of the horrors of the Holocaust. Cultural insensitivity is so chic, don’t you know?

Is it just me, or do half the necklaces they’ve been selling these days look like they went through my Grandma’s jewelry box and stole my family heirlooms? Yeah, probably.

But in case cultural appropriation isn’t your thing, why not capitalize on a university shooting or serious mental illnesses? Nothing says fashion like trivializing eating disorders.

Apparently, when I was wearing my Hamsa necklace—a popular symbol in the Middle East that is thought to ward off bad luck and the evil eye—this somehow made me a “Spiritual Gangster.” Yes, that’s the name of this top: “Spiritual Gangster Henna Hamsa Tank Top.” Urban Outfitters never fails to get my eyes rolling.

Seriously Urban Outfitters, you’ve got some nice clothes—I won’t lie—but every now and then you manage to create an item that is heinously awful and ignorant.

Urban Outfitters is a repeat offender of crimes of cultural appropriation, blatant insensitivity, and just, well laziness. With the vast abundance of art and design in this world, and the magical portal of information and exploration that is the Internet, you would think UO could come up with something better-looking and less offensive. I guess being called out dozens of times for really awful clothing concepts hasn’t gotten through to the retailer. Many of the products shown and mentioned above have been pulled from the store, because of the enormous backlash. But not to worry, UO will certainly be back with more!

And let’s be clear here: Urban Outfitters is not the only clothing brand doing this. Every day as I walk down the street, I see more of my culture and the cultures of others being sold as meaningless commodities in store windows. I can’t exactly boycott all these stores, or else I’d have nowhere else left to shop. So I bear the ignorance and go for the non-offensive and, of course, inexpensive goods instead.

Aaju Peter. Illustration by David Donald.

A majority of the 27 member states of the European Union voted to ban the trade of seal product imports such as pelts, oil, and meat last July. The ban comes into effect in August 2010. Although the EU did allow a partial exemption for Inuit populations, the ban will nonetheless have devastating consequences for Canada’s northern indigenous people, according to Aaju Peter, an Inuk clothing designer, lawyer, and activist. We spoke with Peter in Ottawa, where she is pursuing an additional degree in international law.

This: What work do you do with sealskins?

Peter: I design contemporary clothes that are inspired by traditional Inuit designs.

This: Such as?

Peter: Everything from tank tops, vests, skirts, pants, jackets, to mittens and slippers.

This: What do they cost?

Peter: A sealskin bag I can make for $350. For a jacket it can be between $1,500 and $4,000.

This: Where do you sell them?

Peter: Mostly in Iqaluit [in Nunavut]. Or by special order. [Former] governor general Adrienne Clarkson has a coat.

This: Is sealskin difficult to work with?

Peter: If you have 10 or 20 years experience it’s not that difficult. It takes a long time to acquire the skills that are needed to work with it.

This: How is business?

Peter: It’s slow right now because I’m working on my degree. But if I did sealskin full time I could be very, very wealthy.

This: What is your reaction to the EU ban?

Peter: It will have a devastating effect. It already has on the hunters. They normally would get $60 to $90 for a skin. Now they get about $5. The cost of living is very high in the Arctic. They won’t be able to get enough money to sustain their families.

This: Won’t the Inuit exemption protect them?

Peter: The exemption is very restrictive and absolutely useless. I won’t be able to sell my clothes in Europe. If [the seal] is traditionally hunted and is used for cultural trading purposes only, then it’s okay. They want us to be like little stick Eskimos who are stuck on the land and go out in our little Eskimo clothes with a harpoon. They will not let us hunt with rifles and snow machines. They will not let us sell commercial products. It’s a form of cultural colonization. A journalist in the Netherlands called it the Bambification of the Inuit, like we’re in some Disney movie.

This: Can you understand the opposition to the seal hunt?

Peter: I don’t wish to understand it. I can explain it. It’s become a moral issue that it’s not right to kill animals. It stems from a society that lives in large urban areas that are totally detached from nature and detached from a subsistence economy where you go out and catch what you need and try to make money out of that. It’s a culture that is pushed by a people who have absolutely no connection to the people they are affecting because it’s not affecting them.

This: Any chance of changing people’s minds?

Peter: I always try to be positive, which is why I went to Europe [to fight against the ban]. But I’ve come to realize that people who are living on selling or eating seal don’t have the same amount of money that special interest groups have. For instance, the animal rights groups had a humongous truck outside [the European Parliament] with a humongous screen where they were showing films of seals being slaughtered. And they put pictures of a seal head with “Vote Yes,” for a ban and put them on the doors of all the 800 members of parliament. We couldn’t [afford] anything like that.

This: What would you have wanted the Parliamentarians to understand?

Peter: That this is an issue that is very, very important for Inuit survival. I travel with the courts to the smaller communities. In the winter you see a frame with sealskin on it outside every home. You can see the importance for these families, who have nothing else, no other form of economy, to be able to sell the skins for what they’re worth. I see the harm that is being done to the communities but they’re not able to communicate this. How can a group of people who know nothing about this pass legislation that can have such harmful effects on others? I have a hard time believing those 800 parliamentarians would be able to sleep at night if they knew the harm they are causing.