Contemplation: The Job Series. 1995-1997.

People frequently preach that the first rule of blogging is to write (and post) every day. when I first began this blog about a year ago, I vowed to not let it become yet another blog featuring photo after photo of its writer standing in her backyard, wearing clothing she believes are incredibly stylish in the hopes that people will commiserate. By sticking to my guns, I have failed at posting daily, or even frequently. I have a full-time job, two children and a clothing line so writing an insightful and interesting piece about fashion and/or style every day has managed to trickle down to the end of my priority list. My other issue with the originally intended direction is that, the more time goes on, the less enamored I am with Montreal's fashion scene. Fashion Week tends to be drab and bordering on tacky, street fashion is a couple of years behind Paris and London and at least one behind New York and local "it" girls are lacking the je ne sais quoi internationally successful ones possess, being swallowed up by our xenophobic, ignorant and often kitschy star system. This week it occurred to me that I'm the one who boxed myself into this genre and I'm the one who sets the rules so it's time for a little reassessment. While it may lead to me changing the blog's current name, I'm okay with periodically straying from the path, for now. I just won't share links to posts that have nothing to do with fashion or style on my facebook page.

Lately I've been taking the time to sit in silence and think.I'm at a crossroads and busting my ass to make sure I come out on the right path. As much as I do my best to not live in the past, it's at times like these that I find it natural and almost necessary to evaluate the choices I've made and what got me to where I am now. 

In the last few days I've mostly been thinking about jobs I've had. I've always known that I have four passions and that they are design/fashion, music, writing and acting. The order in which these passions have ranked has changed, depending on life situations. For example, acting had been reigning champ for years when I got pregnant at twenty and it suddenly plummeted to the bottom. For a while I balanced deejaying and designing. For the last year I've thought about designing more than anything else. Writing has always been the drifter. I've written fiction since I could pick up a pen and was published at fifteen but I've never given the craft as much effort and time as it deserves. What is interesting and maybe a bit sad to note is that barely any of my actual jobs have had anything to do with my passions but at least one of them has constantly been at the forefront of my mind and all of them have been in my heart so the convoluted, eyebrow-raising, and occasionally hilarious routes I have taken to get to where I am now just so that I can make ends meet are something to consider indeed. 

People who have an artistic career path in mind usually study in their desired field, do internships, study some more, get a job and work their way up. By the time I was of age to undertake post-secondary studies and/or intern, I had burst out of my wretched living situation and was fending for and supporting myself. Two years later, I was pregnant with my daughter with no support form my parents nor from a spouse and so I've (only recently) learned to cut myself some slack for not having walked a traditional path. 

All of this said, let's take a stroll through my resumé and see what it is that I learned from each of my jobs, as that's what I need to do before moving on. While I've cut myself some clack (as mentioned above), I have yet to make complete peace with my professional past. 

I'll wrap today's post up with a glimpse at the four jobs I had as a teenager. 

My first job was my best job ever. My aunt worked for a company that did something for the Canadian Space Agency in St-Hubert, Québec and they needed help creating a document library over the course of my sixteenth summer. It was fantastic. I got paid slightly above minimum wage to file NASA documents and to have leisurely lunches with my aunt. A week into my contract, we realized I had been classifying everything the wrong way. My punishment? A hug and a drive out to a pub where we ate giant burgers and sipped sangria for over an hour. This was followed by ice cream. What I learned was that my aunt is an awesome boss to have when you're fifteen and she's your aunt and that, if you can get away with it, nepotism is okay (even though I thought it was "neffotism" back then).

A few months later, I was told by my parents that I had to pay for my own bus fare to and from conservatory. I also wanted to buy my own trumpet and have spending money so it was time to find a job. I sat at the kitchen table with the yellow pages and our phone and began cold calling every place I could think of that might hire me. Within two weeks I was the new week-end dishwasher at a diner called Chez Moe, in Gatineau. I worked for a jovial but strict Lebanese/Italian man who had the largest belly I had ever seen on a person before, wide green eyes and a full, grey mustache. He was Moe. His wife, Diane, was this thin, redhead woman with sharp green eyes and deep crow's feet. When I got promoted to bus girl, their nephew took my place as dishwasher and, despite the fact that he was nine years my senior, he would constantly flirt with me. I remember it being uncomfortable but sometimes exciting. What I hadn't banked on when I got the job was that my stepmom would give me only $10 of the $100 I made every week-end and would stash the rest in my bank account. Seven or eight months of working from 6 a.m. on Saturdays and 7 a.m. on Sundays only to pocket $10 a week became too much for me, once I'd bought myself the beautiful, silver trumpet I'd been eyeing. I quit and didn't work again until I moved out and could take care of my own pay cheque. I learned a lot about the restaurant business, the most important thing being that I didn't particularly like working in it. I was also able to reaffirm that my step mom was a raging bitch because, when I moved out the next spring, I only ever saw $90 of the money I worked so hard to acquire.

My next job was at the Market Fresh grocery store on Bank Street, in Ottawa. I had decided to take a year off school after high school and was trying to figure shit out. This job was hell. Not only was my supervisor a woman who hated me because her boyfriend had been one of my best friends for over a decade and had only started dating her because I rejected him at the prom when he told me he kissed me  and told me he loved me (hell hath no fury, indeed-- she ended up stealing and pawning my mother's engagement ring from my father and blaming it on my boyfriend) but the job itself was rough. I was a cashier and one customer actually threw bananas at me because they weren't as cheap as she had expected them to be. when I began working there, I had been moved into my stepmom's flat but her curfew meant that I couldn't make it back home most nights so I was often forced to find somewhere to sleep, which didn't leave me feeling particularly rested in order to deal with another shift there. I moved into my very first apartment with a twenty-four-year-old boy who ate all of the food I bought so I spent what little money I had left after rent (money I gave to him that he spent on drugs and whatever else instead of giving it to the landlord) on whatever was on sale at work so that I could eat lunch and/or dinner. Everything came to a head when I took the day off work because I had a fever and felt really sick. It was also the only day I could do laundry and so, sick as hell, I dragged my laundry over the bridge from Hull to Ottawa in order to wash my clothing at the drop-in centre. Someone offered me a few tokes of a joint and so I smoked weed for the third or fourth time in my life, right before running into some friends of mine. Friends who hated weed and who were friends with my boss and who went on to tell her that I had taken the day off to smoke weed. (Oddly enough, when I ran into one of them a few years later, he was a huge pothead. 'Wish we could have seen that one coming!). I was fired. I learned to never take a job from someone who doesn't like me (simple enough but I was seventeen), that I'm not cut out to be a grocery store cashier and to find a job closer to home the next time around. I also learned a whole slew of life lessons during that time but a)this is about my jobs and b)it was about to get worse anyway.

The last job I had as a minor was working for the Aldo Company, at an Access boutique, selling luggage, purses and wallets. I liked dressing up for work and I actually managed to be first or second seller on a regular basis. Unfortunately, this job didn't last long due to what was happening in my life. My landlord evicted my new roommate and I because of the money my ex hadn't given him. He wasn't cool about it, though. He changed the locks on us when we were at work so I ended up missing work for that. Then I got sick because  of all the stress and couch-surfing and storing things at my dad's and so on. My boss could see that I meant well but that my life was too much of a mess for me to be dependable. I showed up on day in a lovely lilac and black ensemble, really meaning to make a go of it. She met me, we opened the store together and then she took me for a walk in the mall and let me go. I had given her an idea of what was going on and it had alarmed her. She asked me if I needed help and, when I declined, wished me good luck. I learned that I enjoy making myself up to go to work, that my private life should remain private (I say as I blog away-- it shouldn't be shared with employers, especially when you're new to a place) and that I'm good at selling items I personally like. 

After these jobs, I found myself on welfare, living in Vanier with a roommate and, for the first time in my life, wondering how I could properly direct myself so that I could make a career out of acting, which I'd excelled at in high school and had already taught to younger teens for fun and for free at my old high school and at the drop-in centre, downtown. It occurred to me that I was working jobs... Just jobs... And that I wasn't getting much out of it, except for a few important life lessons. But, even then, I had yet to realize that I'd learned these things. I was young, passionate and hungry for something to give. 

More on what came next tomorrow...

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Roots. Part Ten: Boutique Pandemonium (And Why I've Changed My Mind). 2012.

I began 2012 in NYC with two of my friends. There was friction with one friend and we haven't hung out much since, even if we were pretty much best friends prior to heading down there and the other friend and I just went back there together. All in all, it was a fun trip. I felt strong, confidant and optimistic about the future. It was a fantastic way to start the new year.

A few months prior to this, I had decided to take the plunge and open a store in Montreal. I chose the name Pandemonium and planned on selling art, clothing, fashion accessories, home decor and paper products that were aimed at mods, skinheads, punks, psychobillies, goths, etc. I am privileged to know a multitude of insanely talented people in Montreal and the idea of displaying and selling their work and throwing in some of mine thrilled me to bits. I had taken a bunch of notes but the trip to NYC was what I had needed to push forward and actually sit down to write a business plan. The most important thing for me was that 75% of the goods sold in the shop be local.

In April, I flew to Jamaica with one of my best friends and her mother. We spent a week in Ocho Rios and this girl, as usual, was amazing to hang with and just bouncing ideas off of her made me see what I wanted to do even more clearly. 

Our resort:

One of my best chums and one of my favourite three people to travel with, Amanda:

Every time I leave town, my head is cleared, I find introspection and inspiration and I come back ready to attack. My trip to Jamaica was no different. I came back and started sketching again. I also started looking up locations for the shop and planned on opening summer 2013 in order to give myself time to make it perfect. I found all sorts of grant possibilities and started to talking to people with experience in this. 

In May my contract ended and I found myself without work. I actually didn't mind it too much, as I was able to get employment insurance and I worked a few temp gigs to compensate. That summer, my daughter and I were invited to Prince Edward County, Ontario, where we, along with her grandmother and her grandmother's best friend, got to eat at lovely waterside cider houses and rustic restaurants; body board on some pretty nice waves on Lake Ontario, visit art galleries and antique stores and enjoy activities such as napping in a hammock (if you've never done this, you should). I got to talking with my daughter's grandmother and we decided that I could use some mentoring. We agreed to meet in the fall and talk about my life and where it's headed.

My daughter at North Beach, in Prince Edward County:

Here I am at Dead People's Stuff, an antique store in the County:

I was asked to meet with my mentors in September and to prepare for said encounter. I drafted up info on the store and when and where I wanted to open it, thinking that that would be the focus of the meeting. Within minutes, it was clear that I had the wrong the impression. This meeting was about me getting a full-time job and moving along with it. I bucked and tried to explain that I need to creating and building something for myself, for my future. One of my mentors has been working with artists her whole life and she understood exactly what I meant. We decided that we would split the mentoring in two so that I would get to talk about that aspect of my life in great detail and also seek advice on it. 

Something happened during that meeting, though. I was asked why I wasn't working in the fashion industry... And I didn't have an answer. I left the hotel the meeting had been held and, got home and opened a bottle of wine. I sat and thought (mostly aloud and to my daughter) for a while. Have you ever had one of those eureka moments? Everything pretty much hit me like a ton of bricks and I suddenly knew what I want. Not all of it was easy to admit to myself but I finally had the strength to suck it up and just do it. 

Here's what it comes down to: I don't want to live in Montréal for the rest of my life or even for the next ten years so setting up shop here wouldn't make sense. More importantly though, I realized that I  truly want to design. To design and to write. I will get to do neither of these things if I'm busy with inventory, managing, ordering supplies and basically working retail. 

It was hard to start telling all of the people I had talked to about this for a year that I would no longer be doing this but that's just pride. Pride gets wounded and then it bounces back and continues to get in your way. Besides, my chum Joe, who has worked at Cruella for many years, seems to have had a similar idea because he's opening a shop called Créatures this month. A sliver of my being was wounded upon learning that, as I had gone on and on about Pandemonium to all of our mutual friends and even booked Joe's band for a fundraiser I organized for the shop, but then I reminded myself that a)That's just pride again, b)I'm the one who chose to no longer do this and c)All of the people I had approached about selling in my shop may now have another opportunity to do so, in this new store instead, if they decide to sell local products, too. I have made peace with my decision and I wish Joe and Créatures all the best!

The most important thing I realized is that I don't have to bury myself in a subculture-related grave. I know who I am and I am part punk rocker, part rude girl, part psychobilly. part death rocker, part skingirl, etc. but I also fit into mainstream fashion and I no longer have to spend all of my time pretending to myself that I'm angry with it and that I hate all of it just because one of my closets is full of studs, spikes, patches, straps, zippers and vintage Fred Perry and Ben Sherman shirts. I can be each and every one of those things but also get out there and be a part of the mainstream fashion world. This sounds simple enough perhaps but the minute this dawned on me, it was like a light finally turned on in the darkness. A real "growing up" moment, if you will... I somehow never clued in to the fact that this could happen, despite people approaching me at least once a month and telling me I should be a stylist. Maybe that's what happens when you grow up as the underdog, the one everyone jeers at and deems the ugly duckling. As a teenager, you start relating to whatever angsty, morbid, underground communities you can and you delve into them and hate the mainstream, way passed the healthy point of doing so because god forbid you should actually adhere to anything that rest of society believes is stylish or good. Well, I'm done. 

I've basically divided it up into four parts and here they are:

Boutique Pandemonium

It's not because I don't want to open a shop in my town that I've abandoned the idea altogether. I will be featuring a lot of the artists whose work I wanted to include in my shop on this blog and I'm pleased to announce that Pandemonium will be opening as an etsy shop within the next few weeks! The shop will feature riff-raff clothing co. designs, and anything that I make that isn't for my new label, whether it be clothing, accessories or home decor. Added bonus? I'll be opening up my vintage vault and selling a ton of gorgeous vintage jewelry, lingerie and home decor. 

Rosemary Hosson: Fashion Designer, Blogger and Stylist

I have this blog, I've written for Cult Mtl and am looking at writing for a few more newspapaers and magazines, both online and in print. I'm stylist a photo shoot next week and working on my portfolio. 

riff-raff clothing co.

riff-raff clothing co. lives, as mentioned above. This line is now my punk rock, 'billy, glam, etc. outlet. I've just become the official womenswear designer for Batmobile, under this label, and I am also in talks with The Koffin Kats, having just purchased a selection of t-shirts from them. I'll be reconstructing those, as well as about three times as many for Batmobile. Expect dia de los muertos inspired home decor, studded clutches and peter pan collars, belts, hair accessories and a variety of clothing. These will all be sold on the new, aforementioned etsy shop, Pandemonium.

Designing for Mainstream

I'm finally doing it. I'm working on two collections that represent who I am but will also appeal to the masses. I don't want to divulge too much too soon but expect to see the first few pieces in an event's fashion show, this fall. I will also be applying for Fashion Week, for next spring. I'm not really interested in showing in Montreal, given how weak our Fashion Week tends to be (this year was appalling) but I'm honestly not sure where else I will be looking to. More to come on that later.

I enrolled in a photography class (I'm loving it!) and I intend to take one evening course per semester, for the next few years so that, when my son is done high school in six years, I am more employable than ever and can relocate to wherever a fantastic job in fashion awaits. That's if my clothing line doesn't take off. If it does, I will go wherever that leads me. 

***

And so now we're all caught up. I just got back from a four-day trip and I'm ready to rock. And now that the news on Pandemonium is out, I can move forward and shed this last layer of weight that had been holding me back. 

Onward!

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Roots. Part Eight: Soul Searching and Baby Steps. 2010.

I wish I could say that I'd had my fill of lessons learned with regards to the relationship mentioned in the last Roots entry and that I moved on without a backward glance but, alas, that would be far from the truth. A month after my ex moved out, we got together and went on one of the best dates I've ever been on and certainly the best one we'd ever been on together. We began seeing each other again and remained more or less exclusive for a long while even though we would only get together once a month, I usually had to instigate, he was more often than not three sheets to the wind within hours of arriving or meeting me and he never stayed over for long. I should have broken free at that point but I still loved him very much and since he'd moved out, I'd made great strides in every other area of my life so it was easy to convince myself that this was okay. I'll spare you most of the details because a)they're personal and b)this series is about how the events in my life molded who I am today and why I make the style and career choices I do. 

A couple of things happened with regards to my personal style, as soon as the boy was out the door. Firstly, I had been greatly influenced by him in the sense that, even though he changed styles often in his life, he completely immersed himself in whatever it was he was into at the time. I followed suit while I was with him. We were both rocking kind of emo looks when we started dating. I had gone from goth to rockabilly to emo or "scene", while keeping punk elements throughout. Even though I loved psychobilly music and fashion, he hated all traces of either, since he'd thrown out all of his 'billy clothing and ditched his band. I loved that he was into fashion and always dressed and styled himself immaculately, no matter what the look, but he had strong opinions about what was good-looking on women and, more importantly, on me. You should never dress yourself in any way because your boyfriend says you should but I think it's only natural to avoid things you know he utterly detests. Exactly what these things were were confusing and changed a lot but, as mentioned in the last Roots segment, I was buckled into that roller coaster ride and just went along with it all. No frontal tattoos, no chelsea-influenced haircuts, no animal print of any kind but, if I must, zebra print, please; no pompadours, no shaving of any section of my head, no pastels, no retro underwear and on and on the list of unliked style elements went. Again, he didn't make me wear or not wear anything but I avoided any and all of these to please him so, when he left, I more or less flipped out, stylistically speaking and wore whatever the hell I wanted, when I wanted and styled it all the way I wanted to. I could finally blare psychobilly and punk rock in the apartment again and I started going out to dance for hours on end again. 

I started driving, obtained my licence and hunted down a job in the world of Westmount real estate, where I knew I would thrive. In July, I got my passport, hopped on a red-eye bus to New York City and spent four days there with my two aunts. Although we stayed in New Jersey and commuted to midtown only, I fell in love with NYC and have gone back at least once a year since. I didn't go very far (I live a seven-hour drive away) or experience a culture that is that different from mine but it changed me. I got stopped by random people all the time, whether it was because of my outfit, my hair or my tattoos. The one aunt I did touristy things with couldn't believe how many people I met and was particularly amused when I took her to the MAC store, started selling one of their mineral products to her, was joined by the sales rep (who has been my facebook friend since), who closed the deal and then, a few hours later, after we'd split up for a bit, introduced her to half the staff at The Empire Grill, as we'd all became chummy while I waited for her to see The Empire State Building (I don't do heights and I'm claustrophobic so that's not for me).

Here I am in our hotel suite in Tom's River, New Jersey (making a slight duckface, I'm sad to note):

Penn Station. Newark, NJ. July 18th, 2010.

Central Park. July 19, 2010. (A print of this photo now hangs in my bathroom):

Blues busker in Central Park. July 19, 2010.

Taken from the Circle Line cruise:

Grand Central Station. July 20, 2010:

We spent our last day in NY/NJ on the beach at Seaside Heights. It was during a mad heatwave and my aunt and I swam and relaxed by the ocean, eating crab legs and giant prawns and reading. I had picked up my book of choice at The Met a couple of days before and its pages did a lot to influence me. Reading about F. Scott and Zelda and especially about Lois Long helped set certain wheels in motion. 

Within two months of returning to Montreal, I bought my first car, ditched my job (most real estate agents are crazy people) and became a relocation consultant, began fostering a Great Dane and redecorated my bathroom. As is obvious by all of this, things began to move forward for me and at a fantastic rate!

My daughter took this while we were driving along the water, on the West Island (My daughter named the car El Chupacabra and it stuck):

It was around this time that my mother lost both of her breasts to cancer. I got this tattoo (by Lenny of King Len Tattoos) in her honour and am happy to say that, right now, she is alive and well:

My personal blog at the time boasted entry after entry about desire. The desire to travel more, to design more, to add colour to my wardrobe, to meet new people, to either move forward or have the courage to end it with Johnny, to lose weight, to get more tattoos, to have the strength to stop eating meat, to make more time to sew, and on and on I went. I was hungry for new experiences and for evolution but I couldn't summon the concentration required to focus on any one thing and so I went out and either obtained or achieved as many of these things as time and money would allow me to. Designing and business planning would have to wait just a little bit more. 

I spent New Year's Eve with the ex and we once more talked about remaining exclusive. He babbled on about how he wanted to spend next New Year's Eve with me too and, because he was sober when he said it, I wanted so badly to believe him. and maybe even allowed myself to, if only just a wee bit. It had yet to dawn on me that this had to stop in order for me to started piecing together my next moves. That's a 2011 story, though, and therefore one for the next segment...

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Roots. Part Seven: riff-raff clothing co. And My First Swimsuit Shoot 2008-2010.

Until last year, the first half of 2008 was the happiest I'd ever been since the year we first moved away from Montreal, when I was a child. I was head over heels in love with a local psychobilly musician, we had just moved into the flat I still lived in today, we were engaged to be married and, aside from some of his skeletons occasionally rearing one of their ugly, hollow heads, life was great. After years of botched relationships and general hardship, I'm not sure I even knew what to do with that much happiness and had a hard time staying away from the self-destruct button. We both struggled with that (the string of relationships he'd had were messes, to say the least) and, by Christmas, we had hit a few major, personal bumps in the road but we continued to plow through, devoted to each other and to a stable future together. I designed from time to time but spent most of my time doing my best to support him and stand by him while he dealt with the issues he had severing himself from the band he'd been with for eight years, The Gutter Demons and trying to launch the new, electro-rock band he'd formed a while back but had now decided to dedicate himself to... not to mention his as-of-yet untreated bi-polar disorder, the psychotic breaks he'd have when he did touch alcohol, the shakes he got when he went through withdrawal and all kinds of other rather interesting goings-on. 

On the way back from a trip to Ottawa:

When juggling all of that, my two children, and my own insecurities stemming from dating someone whom hundreds of women around the world wanted to throw their panties at became second nature, I finally settled down and started thinking about what I wanted to do next. I wanted to design but still didn't think I had what it took to dip a toe in mainstream fashion waters and so I began to focus on the subcultures that were of interest to me at the time and had been for a few years. 

I set up an etsy shop called Great Expectations, after the Dickens' novel, and started selling vintage clothing and jewelry while i ordered t-shirts from wherever I could get them and began reconstructing them into dresses, halter tops, skirts, tube tops, etc. I did fairly well for myself with this but not enough to quit my day job just yet. After years of shying away from it, I started to sketch again and I think it really helped me to keep it together as best as I could as shit hit the fan.

Some of the reconstructed tees I sold during that time:

I also made accessories from time to time:

Luckily, I had a wonderful friend to talk to. After meeting through mutual friends, we had decided to work together, seeing as she is a (super talented) photographer. Our professional relationship was made all the more interesting by the fact that we became fast friends. From the get-go, Annie was always welcome to offer her input on my designs and on styling and I always felt comfortable enough to speak my mind whenever it came to the actual photos she would take. It was great because I'd call her up, freaking out about the boy and our conversation would just slip into the realm of design and art and photography and it kept me focused and motivated. She kept me sane throughout this period.

This was taken in December, 2009:

By the fall of 2009, both of our mothers were diagnosed with cancer. Not long after, he took to drinking again, lying about it and staying out all night, coming home at six in the morning, with puke on his coat, bloodshot eyes and a wicked stench cloud hovering over him. Everything just fell apart and the more I tried to talk to him about it and try to help, the more he closed up for long periods and then lashed out for brief, agonizing moments. I was completely co-dependent and just rode the roller coaster, trying to hang on for dear life. Recreating a pattern he had gone through so many times before, he changed his hair, his clothing, his friends, the music he listened to and basically, in front of my eyes and alongside the life we were living together, he constructed a new life for himself and, when it was elaborate enough to keep feeding whatever delusions he needed to keep alive, he announced, in a drunken stupor no less, that he would be moving out. That was April 2010. 

This was taken about a week before:

A part of me was crushed but another part of me, one I had yet to really discover until last year, was extremely relieved. The night he left, Annie called me and asked me how I felt. When I told her I was sad, she immediately started to comfort me but I interjected, "No, Annie. I'm not sad because he's gone. I'm sad because I so incredibly relieved at the fact that my front door is closed and locked and will stay that way until I unlock it and open it again." I wouldn't  have to wait for hours and cringe when I heard the repeated scratching of a key being drunkenly aimed at the lock for a few minutes, wondering what kind of mood he'd be in when he finally tripped through the door. 

My riff-raff clothing co. tags right after I got them in the mail:

A few weeks before the last shoe dropped, I had hired a pattern maker who would also act as sample maker for a few months, to assemble some swimsuit designs I had been working on. I had come up with the name riff-raff clothing co. and had a fairly good idea of where i wanted to head with it. As luck would have it, buddy announced that he was leaving the day after my first riff-raff shoot so you can imagine how hard it was to focus on the tasks at hand. but i did and we got through it.

The night before the shoot, I cabbed across town to meet my pattern maker and seamstress, a slightly neurotic woman named Suzanne. Always check your goods before paying for them. I know this sounds simple but it can be so easy to trust people at times. I went out for drinks with a friend afterward, opened the duffle bag the suits were in, had a quick look, gasped, shut the bag again and concentrated on drinking and crying on my chum's shoulder.

The next morning I took the time to really investigate the suits. What a horrific mess. We're talking crooked seams galore, some fabric not even sewn to other fabric, where it should have been, crotches and gussets that looked like they had been made for a toddler's vagina to fit in and not a grown woman's. And I had paid a few hundred dollars for the patterns and samples. Constant adjustments, double-sided tape and tricky poses were required to keep everything looking good enough for the camera. Luckily I worked with women who were good at camouflaging and didn't judge me for my sub-contractor's shitty work. 

Here is the lovely Annie Stephens at work on the shoot. We had looked around for a location for weeks and finally found exactly what we'd been looking for in an industrial area, just a few blocks away from my apartment.

Aside from one of my models showing up excessively late with greasy hair and an attitude to match, the shoot went really well. (At one point said model inquired about who I was going through a break-up with and when I told her, her response was "Oh! I had been wondering what happened to that guy! So he's single now, huh?" I didn't really talk to her after that point, unless i had to, and when i told the boy, he lovingly told me that had anyone of his acquaintances said that, they would have gone through our tv head-first.)

Some of the photos from the shoot:

The first model, Billie Prudence, was an absolute joy to work with. She did, at times, make Annie and I wonder if we should have drafted up waivers for the models to sign, especially when she climbed up a rickety metal staircase in stilettos and began to pose on a narrow ledge, twenty feet above the pavement! This is why we loved working with her, though; this was our first shoot and the first person to be shot within it and Billie really made it easy for us, not needing any direction whatsoever.

Check out the aforementioned staircase and ledge:

The swimsuits attracted a lot of attention but nothing sold right away. I hired someone else to help with fixing the patterns and, after saying that she'd been looking for swimsuit design ideas, she disappeared with my green leopard print fabric and one of my patterns. After that I focused on reconstructing tees some more and took a breath while I tried to figure out what to do with my life, now that it had changed so drastically. I knew I wanted to move forward with riff-raff clothing co. but I also knew I wanted more. I just had to figure out what that was... 




***
addendum: the swimsuits seen here will be once more be available for purchase as of autumn 2013.

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Roots. Part Six: My First Fashion Photo Shoot and Design School. 2005-2008.

in two-thousand-five, i was still dating and living with the man i mentioned in the last "roots" post. i wasn't happy but had grown too dependent to make a change. i had begun working in real estate and assisted a real estate agent in selling prefab condos, which had begun to sprout all over montreal like weed. i didn't believe in my work but it paid for some bills. i decided that real estate was probably the best route for me to take, seeing as i was good at it and i stood a chance at making a decent salary. began taking courses by correspondence and took out student loans to do so. 

 

as far as my designing was concerned, this was the first year i started coming up with clothing that didn't cater to a subculture. i decided to stick to the name "khimera kreationz" because i was still spinning under the name dj khimera, even if the frequency was dwindling and this would end up being the last year that i mixed in a club or for other people at all. i hired two people to work for me; someone who would handle patterns and someone who would handle the sewing. i lacked the equipment and was mostly focused on my real estate courses, my kids, and managing the enormous, five-bedroom apartment we lived in, in st-henri. i wanted to design, market and manage a small crew so i did.

i started out with one girl who did the patterns and sample assembly for my first shoot. the seams were crooked and she admitted to having watched movies and to talking on the phone while working on my dime. nonetheless, the shoot went really well. one of the models was also a make-up artist so she helped out with all of that and we had a great time. the photographer in all of these was a frenchman who now lives in england, named stephane bourgeois (my kids liked to call him "steven burger") and the make-up artist was angie boudreau, from montreal.

my cousin is (once more) modelling a corset i had designed for the khimera kreationz fashion show of two-thousand-three. 

here, angie is wearing a dress i had made for our friend who was in a local band called the scroll. they're still around. check 'em out.

here angie is wearing a dress that had also been featured in the fashion show. she is so tiny and it was hard to make it fit. in the end, i think it looks good, even if it was a bit too large in some places.

this is one of the new peices i'd designed for this shoot.

my baby cousin is also weaing a dress i had designed that year.

and here she is wearing the vest and shorts combo that ended up being different from what i had designed (it's not the right fabric or colour but the structure is close enough). she had worn this outfit in the fashion show for me, two years prior, as well.

when i hired a second woman, thanks to a subvention from the local ywca and hired both women full-time, the first girl flaked out and the second one spent her whole first day of work struggling with simple ties i had asked her to make. everything unraveled during the few months that followed  the man i had almost left my daughter's father for and who had become a great friend hung himself, my boyfriend moved out and my wretched boss (the woman was miss havisham in a suv) convinced me to drop all of my real estate courses, claiming that i couldn't handle it and be a mom at the same time and that i didn't have the right personality for it. our project closed and i ended working at a gym, overweight and hating everything about my life.

the last drop, and i do believe i needed this, was when my boyfriend moved out and i found myself in the spacious apartment, alone with my two kids, again. we continued to date but the separation, even though neither of us had been happy in a while, made something within me snap. i was twenty-six with a high school diploma, a failed business attempt, two small children and a bunch of dreams i needed to turn into goals. on a whim, i called up college lasalle and asked them about their fashion design program. two days later, not knowing how in the hell i had never thought of really doing this before, i was enrolled for the fall semester and student loans were scheduled to come in.

college lasalle was quite the experience. i racked up a ridiculous amount of debt , given how affordable our schooling normally is here, but i learned what i needed to. it also made me feel so much better about how far i'd come along, alone. for someone considered self-taught (with help from my grandmother, of course!), i had been doing pretty well! the pattern drafting courses were helpful, as i'd always improvised and used my own form of draping. the draping courses, given this last point, were a nightmare. my teacher asked us to drape an a-line skirt and i did. my finished product was fine but, because i had not applied the same techniques we'd been shown, she gave a failing mark on the skirt and i never returned (but i'm going to suck it up and go back this fall, in the evenings). the illustration classes definitely helped because that's not where the bulk of talent lies, to say the least, textiles was interesting and fashion history was absolutely fascinating. studying alongside seventeen-year-olds was a huge pain in the ass but the thing that bothered me the most about college lasalle were the teachers. i have no idea how the hell they go about hiring their faculty members but the teacher that was supposed to be teaching us about the industry had spent her whole career, up until that moment, behind a desk, working for sears, and i know of another teacher who does ridiculous amounts of drugs for a grown-up and this on a regular basis and i felt that only a few of our instructors were actually prepared to answer our questions, teach us and put us out in the world. if i had known then what i know now, i would have looked into other schools. anyhow, i walked away a more skilled designer and was lucky enough to have met one of my best friends, amanda, there. 

during the summer between my first and second years and when i was hanging out with amanda and another girl, shannon, on a regular basis, i broke up with michael. months later, i ditched shannon, her judgemental remarks, negative outlook and depressive moods. amanda and i are still friends, she's doing quite well, back in toronto and i love and miss that girl.

sadly, the only pictures i have from my days at lasalle are of people sleeping in class (the workload was unbelievable and people stole winks whenever they could and of us drinking pints and doing shots at the bar, one block over. even if i had small children and i was older than most of my classmates, i finally got to experience college life and it was a blast while it lasted.

i had to reduce my course load during the second semester and, by year two, i was with a newer group for most of my classes. i couldn't connect with anyone anymore and the financial stress got to be a lot. i was working for the aforementioned miss havisham part-time to make ends meet and my personal life took a wild turn. i started dating the singer of a local but well-known psychobilly band and was completely and utterly smitten and therefore terribly distracted. i finished most of my second year courses and then stopped going, knowing that my third year would be all about learning how to put together a collection and a fashion show and i couldn't borrow another twelve grand to do that, when i felt like life and my two-thousand-three show had taught me plenty. right around the time i finished at lasalle, i moved out of the gay village and back to montreal's southwest but, this time, with the new boyfriend and to the flat i still live in, today.

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Roots. Part Five: Khimera Kreationz. 2000-2004.

i was nothing short of a hot mess when i arrived in montreal, in march of two-thousand. i was nineteen, pregnant and completely incapable of being alone without experiencing great anxiety. i had just been diagnosed with a non-life-threatening but rather scary heart condition and i got lodged into this vicious stress-causes-palpitations-causes-stress pattern. i barely had any furniture, the few childhood friends i had couldn't relate to me because i now spoke an international french, having long since dropped my quebecois dialect, i was about to become a mother and i now wore cat-eye contact lenses and goth clothing.

i went on an online goth forum and wrote to three different girls i thought i might have something in common with (one of them is the closest thing i've had to a nemesis in this town, the second i was friends with for several years but abandoned her due to her weak character general flakiness and the third i am still friends with) and i made plans to meet with them and most of the other forum members once i'd had my baby.

my daughter was born june twenty-ninth, two-thousand, a few months after i turned twenty. her father came to stay with us the day before. he remained with us for six months and then, to my relief, went back to toronto. it was around this time that a group of my ottawa friends began visiting on a regular basis, bringing gifts for my child and helping out but also crashing all over my apartment, eating my food and keeping me up at all hours. i briefly dated a man who was handsome but quite troubled and, despite all the ambition he possessed, he made no move to improve his life and spent his time brooding. he was creative and a fellow aesthete; things may have been different had we possessed more life experience but he was destined to be yet another one of my passengers. 

here i am in the fall of two-thousand,  just a few months after my daughter was born:

i had begun working as an event planner and part-time coatcheck girl for a goth club that was set to open new year's eve, 2000. it was there that i met a dj and fell in enough lust to break up with mister troubled, start dating the dj, get pregnant and move in with him. a month later, i realized my mistake but it was too late. we vowed to stay together until our child was born and see what happened then. my little mister was born january twenty-ninth, two-thousand-two, just six weeks before i turned twenty-two. when our son was four months old, his father moved out and i found myself alone, with two babies.

my style began to change quickly. i shaved all of my hair off but kept my bangs, sporting a chelsea haircut. my attire did not follow suit, though, as i went from being a more classic goth to wearing rivethead styles. a typical outfit was comprised of a mesh top over a tank top, an a-line mini skirt over coloured-tights and torn fishnets with laced up, knee-high rangers. within weeks of the dj moving out, i started dating an electronic musician. (that was a fiasco and my friends spent a lot of time with an eyebrow raised for about a year. he was the source of much mockery, having failed grade one four times and quite obviously pretending to play the keyboard on stage, with one finger tapping random keys in a rythmic way and the other arm straight up in the air, pointing at the ceiling. also, his keyboard was sometimes unplugged while he pretended to play.)


right around that time, i also became a dj. i started spinning noise and then branched out into industrial, eighties, ebm, synth pop, darkwave, new wave, electroclash, techno and old school goth. i was really good at it and quickly drew a crowd. for the first time in my life, i found myself seeking stage clothing of sorts and had immense fun coming up with outrageous outfits. i grew out the top of my hair and teased it up so that, when it started coming down towards the end of the night, people called me "robert smith" or "siouxsie soux". i shaved off my eyebrows and drew them on. i was the first one in the montreal scene to wear new rock platform boots, with visible springs in their six-inch soles.

here i am spinning at an 80's night, on club saphir's first floor, right as my hair was starting to grow out. these senneheisers are still my favourite earphones of all time:

when the top was long enough, i began fastening all sorts of extensions to them, as is popular among this crowd.

since my first pregnancy, i had been sketching and designing clothing at least three or four times a month but now, given everybody i was starting to know and how immersed in the whole rivethead and cyber goth cultures, i decided to sit down and draw up a collection. i started talking to other people about it and, before i knew it, i found myself with a small but enthusiastic production crew. everyone was so helpful and wonderful and, they believed in my project's success to the point of working for free. i began thinking that it would be a great idea to open up a third goth store in montreal and spent two months working on a business plan and looking into grants. i named my company khimera kreationz, which made sense at the time, given that i was dj khimera.

the man i had almost left my daughter's father for, before moving to toronto, had moved to montreal and we spent a lot of time together. we still really liked each other but he couldn't deal with my young children on a regular basis and so we remained friends. he was a great artist and made this graphic impression of me, with larger breasts and gun of course, wearing a t-shirt with my company's logo on it. (he also included my company's name and font as part of a card game he'd created).

here we are at bar passport, between my sets and right before i became wednesday nights' resident dj:

in may of two-thousand-three, i hosted my first fashion show at foufounes électriques. i figured the best way to have as many people as possible in attendance, men included, would be to book a well-known band or two and then have my fashion show open for them. i got together with another dj and two investors and, together, we booked covenant and melotron, electronic bands adored by most of the goth crowd in town. we had six-hundred-and-twenty people in attendance but, boy did i learn a lot about what not to do when organizing a fashion show! firstly, i had an over-zealous crew member who was happy to go her own way and make executive decisions regarding my clothing. she hadn't finished two outfits on time so she grabbed coloured duct tape and proceeded to tape up said outfits so that they had diagonal, duct tape strips running across them. another crew member showed up with work that was well-made but he hadn't used the right fabric and had added style elements that were not part of the original design. my sound guy, who was my son's dad, dropped out at the last minute and the new guy was a bit lost. i had foolishly decided that i should not only design, book, oversee, organize and style but host the damned thing too, so i was onstage when things ran amok backstage and i had no idea why my next two models weren't coming out. i had to gesticulate frantically to the poor gymnast we had gotten to perform during a half-time of sorts.

here are some souvenirs from the show. you can see the duct tape fiasco at the bottom left and i'm the one in the vinyl cheerleading skirt (who can't believe that sentence just came out her). my baby cousin modeled the red, velvet corset.

the response to my show was fantastic, despite all of its hiccups and it's small size. many people wanted to buy from me but the truth is that i was twenty-three, with a baby and toddler at home and i wasn't able to deal with any of it. i would only find out a year later but i was also sufferiing from grave's disease, making me hyper, skittish and unfocused as well as keeping me up most nights and experiencing migraines. everyone i had showed my business plan to liked it but not enough to finance my project, given my age and lack of business experience and so i continued to dj but backed out of the event planning and designing for a while. i let my crew down and spent a few months only going to clubs in order to tend bar or dj and left when my shift was done or his out in my booth until closing time.

i went to a few parties. this was taken a t a loft party in the gay village, with the guy who'd sewn the vest i had designed and am wearing in the photo:

i started dating someone that wasn't right for me and who was really aggressive and whom everyone around me had a hard time communicating with (we're friends now but now i also don't tolerate a tenth of what i used to back then). we moved in together and i settled into a routine. bring the kids to daycare, work, pick the kids up, watch tv with the boyfriend. i had undergone radiation treatment for my thryoid condition and now found myself with the opposite disease, hypothyroidism. i put on almost a hundred pounds, got depressed and had a hard time sticking to anything.

things would get better for me but not for another couple of years.

as with everything else i've shared in my "roots" segment thus far, this all seems like it was in another lifetime. someone else's lifetime, even. it's where i come from, though, and it's these experiences that have lead me to where i am today. next up in "roots": 2005-2007.

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Roots. Part Four: On The Streets of Ottawa, A Year In Toronto and When I Became A Goth. 1996-2000

i moved out of my home in gatineau, québec and into my aunt's townhouse in nepean, ontario, an ottawa suburb, when i was sixteen. the change of environment was too much for me and, after years of not being allowed to express myself or be a kid at all, really, i went out all and crammed as much ridiculous teenage behavior as i could into one year. this and the fact that i had decided to take a year off from school after i graduated resulted in me being kicked out of my aunt's home after having lived there for just over a year.

i informed my dad that i was moving back in. he had finally broken up with his mentally unstable girlfriend of eight years but lived in the bottom of the duplex, while she occupied the top floor. we loaded all of my belongings into his minivan and headed east. what my dad hadn't told me became clear as we pulled into what seemed like the wrong driveway upon arriving at their home. he was moving me back in with my stepmom and the best part is that he hadn't told her. he just moved me into my old room, in that place, and let me deal with the immense scene she caused upon discovering me and all of my things in her apartment when she got home from work.

i was even more miserable than the first time i had had to occupy that room. the only differences were that now i was allowed to swear when we spoke, i was allowed to shower (she had forbidden us to shower when we were kids and, instead, made us take baths, claiming that we would "ruin the bathroom floor" if we showered), i was allowed to place my furniture the way i wanted it and i now smoked. i got a job at market fresh, in ottawa, and things really fell apart when she imposed an eleven o'clock curfew on me but work finished at ten, one province and two cities over. i started staying out at night, crashing wherever i could, and then coming home to shower and change when she was away at work. eventually, it all blew up and i was out, as we say, on my ass, at seventeen.

i was dating a twenty-four-year-old acid dealer and professional loiterer with a tattoo of lambert, the friendly lion, on his chest, and one on his back of a large skull with a green mohawk that someone was kind enough to give him while he had sojourned in prison. he was the second in a line of tall, lanky, tattooed, blue-eyed men in my life and liked to go by the name "tigger". tigger and i started out by sleeping outside, next to the rideau canal. when it started to get cold, we began squatting in a townhouse on kent street. a bunch of our friends had lived there and, when they got evicted, they left a key under their mat so that we could get in, drink the rest of the keg that was in the kitchen and get some sleep on the couch they'd left behind. when that option was no longer available to us, we crashed on couches, wherever people would take us in.

halfway through the winter, we decided it was time to find an apartment. we got one next to the infamous-but-waning hull strip. it was a newly-renovated two-bedroom for all of four-hundred-dollars a month. i worked and paid for rent and food while tigger went to school and we waited for his student loans to come in. i got a puppy from some street kids we knew. he threatened to kill it. then i found out he wasn't even going to school and so there would be no student loans. for additional icing on the cake, he cheated on me with a fourteen-year-old and spent the rent money i had been giving him on god-knows-what and i lost my job. i met a girl who would be my friend for a dozen years, she moved into the spare room, we got evicted anyway, thanks to tigger, and found a place in vanier, an ottawa ghetto.

here i am, in 1998, hanging out at the steaming bean café, on nocholas street, in ottawa. 

we settled into a routine and, by then, i had become someone everyone knew, downtown. i had also, overnight, become a goth. i suppose that i would have probably starting wearing punk garb as soon as i was out on the street, except that all the punks i knew at the time didn't bathe and i couldn't deal with the stench. that is honestly the only reason i dodged dressing like a punk at that age, wore sporty labels for a year and then, one night, became a goth.

i don't really know what happened but i must have been influenced by some of the kids i was hanging with downtown. i had always listened to all sorts of music so that's not what caused it... i was playing  around with my make-up one evening when i found myself with cat-eye liner and dark red lips. loving that, i ran to my room, grabbed a pair of fishnets, tore them up and put them on my arms. i threw on a bunch of clingy, black clothing, another pair of fishnets for my legs, my doc's, and headed downtown. at first i thought it quite funny that hardly anyone recognized me but that novelty soon wore off and it simple became a lifestyle, as i met up with other goth kids and became really good friends with them. what was interesting is that half the goth kids i knew were a year or two younger than me and still living at home, in suburbia, so i got to see what money could buy me and set out to find all of the same fashions at thrift stores and on sale. i did pretty well for myself, seeing as i could go to montreal whenever i wanted to and hunt through all the secondhand shops there.

until recently, that was the best year of my life. i fell in love with one of the goth kids and became best friends with his crew (we joked around, calling it a "mope of goths"). i finally felt loved and supported and, when my boyfriend moved to toronto to study massage therapy, i moved into a section of his mom's house for a low cost and got a job on parliament hill and another one at the national arts centre. if it wasn't the best time of my life, it was certainly the most carefree. it was the one year i got to be a teenager and i adored every minute of it. friends would climb up the balcony to my room, as i had only read about or seen kids on tv doing, i always had someone to hang out with, i was never teased and i felt beautiful and strong.

here is the crew at the celtic cross pub, on bank street, in 1998.

here i am with my then-chum, paul, smoking indoors (or at all, really!) and everything.

in the summer of 1998, my other friend paul and i went to montreal for a wedding. my mother had remarried and had given birth to a girl. here i am holding my new sister, geneviève.

after a few months and despite my misgivings and the fact that someone artistic and handsome had fallen for me and i for him, i left everyone behind and followed my boyfriend to toronto. that was one of the worst years of my life. i auditioned for theatre school but got put on waiting lists. i attended humber college and couldn't relate to anyone in my classes. i got accepted to theatre school in ottawa but chose to stay in toronto, with my boyfriend, even if we fought all the time. i was incredibly lonely, he hit on everything with a pulse, and we were broke. the only good thing that happened during this time (aside from me getting a job at a music store and meeting the chemical brothers), was that i started to design, as i had always done as a kid but, for the first time, i envisioned it all becoming something. not long after we broke up for the second time, i got pregnant. i was nineteen.

the chemical brothers and i, on queen west, in toronto:

my daughter's dad and i, new year's eve, nineteen-ninety-nine, in ottawa. i was a few months pregnant and he was visiting for the holidays. his mother had lent me the shawl so that i wouldn't get cold. 

january, two-thousand. pregnant with my daughter and about to go dancing at barrymore's, on bank street, in ottawa. 

a then-friend doodling on my arm, in my dad's basement, before going out. february, two-thousand, a week or two before i moved to montreal and four months before i had my daughter. 

i moved back to ottawa, where i took up german studies at ottawa u. i lived with my dad, my brother and his new, also-pregnant wife, in a house in the country. my brother was doing a lot of drugs at the time and he was very aggressive. my depressive moods would set him off and all of this pissed my dad's wife off so nobody really got along. there was no room for me when her kids came home so i was asked to sleep on thin boat mats on the floor, in a room covered in plaster dust and being renovated. i took the couch but that pissed her off too so we butt heads. when i said a certain music made me sad, she turned up the volume; if i coughed because i had a cold, she sprayed lysol all around me, casing me to wheeze and gasp. (we're cool now but those were some seriously shaky first months). i had to rely on my dad or brother for rides into town and, often, this meant going into ottawa at 6 a.m. with nowhere to go and only enough change for a coffee and toast. i would hang out at the main mall and at the library until it was time for school and then wait at another coffee shop until my ride home was ready. all of my old friends had dispersed a bit and those that remained drove me mad with their refusal to evolve. this lasted only five weeks before i'd had enough. i called my mother, who talked to her ex, who was looking to sublet his place in st-henri, in montreal. i packed up the few belongs i had and, three weeks later, loaded it all up into my uncle's pick-up truck and we headed for montreal, where i have been since.

that time spent in  downtown ottawa was the only breath of fresh air i got between one tough spot and another and, even though the memories are hazy now, i can evoke the carefree, happy state i lived in at whim and make any current situation seem better in doing so. it's also another reason i ended up deejaying at goth nights and that i still own a lot of goth and death rock clothing and will always feel a kinship to that subculture and its romantic and macabre aesthetic.

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