TPL On The Road： The Montreal Fashion Industry
Episode Stats
Harmful content
Hate speech
1
sentences flagged
Summary
Today on True Patriot Love, I m lucky enough to be on the East Coast Road Tour now in Montreal with Oliver Chernaschik. We talk about growing up in the 60s and 70s in Montreal, his love for the city, and what it s like to grow up in a cultural melting pot.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
today on true patriot love i'm lucky enough to be on the east coast road tour now in montreal
00:00:11.360
and i'm with oliver sury chernaschik and i hope i said the name you didn't need thank you thank you
00:00:17.040
i had a little background right so i always love to talk about people's background because
00:00:23.200
me being italian and quite frankly having a scottish mother and italian father
00:00:30.280
Indian father, English father, Indian and English father,
00:00:35.880
Well, that's, and that's what, you know, makes our cultures great,
00:00:39.120
because we actually come here, and we meet each other,
00:00:53.480
We went to Ottawa through all the challenges, technically,
00:00:56.880
and everything else we got here, but we're here.
00:00:59.320
And we were looking forward to meeting with you
00:01:01.120
because when Montreal came up in our discussions,
00:01:09.240
We handle economy, politics, housing, healthcare,
00:01:18.020
and more shows about stuff that makes people happy,
00:01:22.600
And I know as a kid, my fond memories of Montreal
00:01:29.780
So we would go down, my mom was this fashionista,
00:01:42.040
And, you know, she'd buy like spring, summer, fall,
00:01:53.360
which was kind of cool for a woman of that era, right?
00:01:55.520
You know, worked at A&P, but she would put us on the train.
00:01:59.420
She liked to travel, and my dad worked six days a week.
00:02:02.460
He was a hardworking guy, so he wouldn't come with us.
00:02:06.080
And we would come to Montreal, get off the train,
00:02:14.180
Yeah, yeah, and we would have our clothes made.
00:02:19.780
So we'd have our feet fitted, and we'd have shoes made.
00:02:23.920
It was a cool experience, and we would eat like crazy.
00:02:27.960
We'd stay in a hotel, eat, you know, get fitted for the day,
00:02:31.320
and then, quite frankly, catch the next train late the next day
00:02:34.780
after we go around the city and shop and have fun and eat in great restaurants.
00:02:40.220
So, you know, coming back was near and dear to my heart
00:02:47.080
So I'm thinking about my childhood, and then I'm thinking I met you, you know,
00:02:50.440
and I'm thinking it's a pretty cool environment.
00:02:52.980
so tell me like yeah yeah what brought you here well i mean i'm born in kitchen in ontario but i
00:03:00.500
grew up in montreal um been here pretty much all my life what brings me to fashion itself i'm
00:03:08.700
guessing you're asking um i've always been a creative kid drew a lot when i was young
00:03:16.380
and always had I would say an interest for how how to present myself but also how to present
00:03:25.320
others and so eventually that sort of young creativity developed into more of a of an interest
00:03:34.860
as to how clothing can really come to be a means to express oneself yeah and
00:03:49.840
My grandmother taught me how to sew at the start of COVID.
00:03:52.980
And since then, it's been through my own projects.
00:03:56.460
It's been through some internships, some work contracts.
00:04:10.400
After my initials. And Untold Cowboy is a collective exhibition project.
00:04:22.120
So Untold Cowboy is a series of multidisciplinary visual productions that are dedicated to creating eclectic cowboy characters
00:04:34.920
that challenge the myth of the heroic, glamorized American cowboy
00:04:42.160
and creatively reclaim and reimagine the omitted history
00:04:53.500
Well, you know, and one day, you know, another show on that one,
00:04:59.540
I spent a lot of time, I think, another show that I did recently
00:05:03.300
was with a farmer. I'm heading out, you know, to PEI. So I have a potato farm, a family of potato
00:05:09.700
farmers owned a farm earlier in my life quite a few times. We used to go camping there as a
00:05:16.340
when I was young. Yeah. Oh, nice. The red sand. Yeah, it's beautiful. So what is like this place
00:05:22.420
where we're at today? So we're pretty cool. We're sitting in the sort of exhibit room of Atelier
00:05:29.140
Textile, which is a textile printing and dyeing school that has a partnership with my own studio,
00:05:40.340
which is Ligne de Fuite. So Ligne de Fuite is a Montreal based fashion talent incubator. So they
00:05:48.340
host quite a few young emerging designers in their space. They also do lots of events,
00:05:54.100
They produce runway shows. But both of our spaces, Atelier Textile and Ling de Fut,
00:06:00.340
have a partnership, a collaboration agreement, if you will. So we sort of exchange services,
00:06:06.900
use the space, vice versa. So while Ling de Fut is really based around fashion, garments, making,
00:06:14.660
sewing. Atelier Textile, on the other hand, is focused on textile art, so dyeing, printing, etc.
00:06:24.660
Oh, good combination, right? Exactly. It's a rare one. I think we're one of the very few,
00:06:32.980
definitely in Montreal, perhaps in Canada as well, that have this sort of dynamic going on between
00:06:39.780
garments and textile so kitchener right which i know well because uh you know from ontario
00:06:48.260
grew up there so you make it to montreal i make it yeah my parents my parents studied
00:06:54.740
architecture in waterloo had me flew to europe for a couple years to move to montreal oh okay
00:07:03.540
all right and so you grew up in montreal went to school here yep right and then you decided
00:07:08.580
to get into fashion and then off you go so help me out here so you get into fashion you decide
00:07:14.660
how do you figure out kind of what part of fashion you want to enter into because that seems to me
00:07:20.180
always to be the most complicated thing right how do you how do you figure that what like it's it's
00:07:25.060
a good question because it comes i can only speak from my own experience but it comes from a very
00:07:30.580
sort of or develops in a very organic way right there's an interest at the start that that grows
00:07:37.780
into a passion and grows then into a need and then grows into a means to something right
00:07:44.860
fashion now has become a means for me to um to keep developing my craft um but in terms of how
00:07:54.600
what areas of fashion um there are so many but since i my context is one that's outside of school
00:08:03.140
right I'm self-taught so I didn't go to fashion school I really had to to figure it out on the go
00:08:12.400
so it started as my first fashion experience if you will was as a pattern cutter in the in
00:08:19.840
for a brand in the garment district then once that settled it was really through developing
00:08:27.340
my own projects and so my and i'm i'm you know a emerging designer that has a label and a project
00:08:35.760
going on so and there it's a saturated market the one i'm the one i operate in um but fashion has so
00:08:43.760
many different facets there's a creative side there's a designer side there's a very technical
00:08:49.720
side, there's also, it's a business in itself, right? So, you can, it's a huge, huge global
00:08:58.100
industry and I operate as a very small prism of that. Yeah, no, no, and I love the story because
00:09:06.160
quite frankly, so I tell it similar probably age to what you are now. I started basically building
00:09:14.700
homes um and i i started kind of from the ground up from foundations and basically from there i
00:09:21.820
learned carpentry and from there i learned so now you know just before covet hit uh we were building
00:09:28.380
homes uh and and it was great right because over time i just from without any traditional
00:09:36.060
education i wasn't trained as a project manager didn't become a red seal carpenter you know but
00:09:42.700
but i did a little bit of everything as my my family was in that uh that business so
00:09:49.900
then i learned it when you so when you talking about starting out and being a pattern cutter
00:09:54.620
i love that right because you're right there you know you're learning the trade hands-on
00:09:59.420
and then you get into it. So, hey, before I forget, behind you.