Report from Mass Exodus | Hollywood yohana
Every year, we get a new “future of fashion.” Some fifty students—the hopeful designers of next year’s womenswear, menswear, swimwear, whatever-you-can-wear—graduate from Ryerson‘s School of Fashion. It’s the best in the country they say, and we believe.
Their annual show-off, Mass Exodus, is a bigger deal every year. From the fifty, twenty final collections are selected for runway staging. The theatre fills with fellow students and parents, yes, but also people who don’t have to be there: stylists, buyers, and media peeps like us. Plus, an eternal favourite sighting: beloved alum Jeremy Laing.
This year’s titular theme was Zenith & Nadir. Glossy show notes (plus, for the first time ever, a pretty impressive magazine—should we be watching our backs?) explained that Zenith and Nadir is up for exploration, for you to define. Sorry to be all English-y here, but that’s not quite true. Zenith and Nadir are opposite celestial poles, so zenith is used to mean “the highest point,” and nadir, the lowest.
So, we present the highest points of this year’s Mass Ex. But first, claps to all those who showed.
Menswear we kind of want to sleep with. A cool handful of boys showed clothes for their own, but our favourite was John Hillifer. If you recognize the name, it’s cause he won last year’s Danier Leather Design Challenge for his rad leather jacket (think Todd Lynn, simplified). His grad collection combined Japanese mood with Western ruggedness;
Bare feet on the runway. Nathaniel Laux played down his preppy menswear with no shoes at all, giving it a Muskoka-kegger vibe that makes us all nostalgic for Southern Ontario high school. It’s far better/less Hollister than showing flip-flops with your suits (you know who you are).
Shoulder cut-outs. We’re feeling the cold shoulder for spring (see: everything Tania Martins designed for Pink Cobra) and so wish a few of these it-girlish collections were on racks, like, now. Jimin Lee did a right-shoulder-only cut-out on a white tee; nice twist. Diana Baba‘s cropped, cut-out tees looked a bit stiff, but the vibe’s there.
Afterparty-worthy playlist. When you start with classic Radiohead and mix in everything we loved last year, from Robyn to Glasser to Sleigh Bells to Adele, you basically win an invitation to our next house jam. Oh, and a Death From Above 1979 song? Call us.
Material mash-ups. Over the past few years, innovation in fashion has shifted from structural extremes to radical texture-play, and a couple of the grads have caught on. We loved the opener, Kayoko Kawano, who applied a fine artist’s touch to her eveningwear: think silk chiffon daubed onto dresses or layered like paper sculpture. Later, Eric Tong showed a leather top that swung like a soft cage, a sheer version of last spring’s Givenchy striped jacket, and a hybrid LBD/raincoat that would look great in a Rihanna video.
The set. Abstract geometric sculptures, lit up from the inside, looked like paper mountains on another planet’s moon.
Clothes we could actually wear to work. Mooniness aside, this was a pretty down-to-earth season for Mass Ex. Only, like, two designers looked like they learned their trade from Zoolander. And there were two other designers who made clean, well-tailored, monochromatic separates we could see “real women” wearing: Pamela Card and Eunsil Ahn. The latter, especially, worked her angles and asymmetry into a clever deconstruction of office dress codes.
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