Montreal Fashion Week Fall/Winter 2009 Kicks Off

It’s that time of year again when Montreal gears up to welcome Montreal Fashion Week for the Fall/Winter 2009 collections. It’s been particularly cold the past couple of weeks, so it would be fitting to see Fall collections in the making as the city is still particularly in this cold mind frame.

Though the usual suspects will present to this week’s edition, there are a few new things happening at Marché Bonsecours. Namely the return of Philippe Dubuc, who had fallen out of the limelight for quite some time after scaling back on his productions, most notably eliminating his womenswear collections. For a while he has simply focused on working on stylized garments for men, which he will be presenting at MFW for the first time tonight at 7pm.

Experimenting with selling tickets to fashion shows is still proving to be quite lucrative and the Sensation Mode team has devised that this season, anyone can purchase “last minute tickets” to any of the fashion shows for $25. A couple of the shows are already sold out like Rudsak and Philippe Dubuc. What’s tricky is that you’d have to present yourself at Marché Bonsecours only in order to get the tickets for a show that may or may not be sold out. I also find it ironic that MFW includes a conference about the “recessionista” while promoting shows at a pretty hefty price tag. But that’s just me.

Among the designers presenting this season, I will be curious to see what Philippe Dubuc, Denis Gagnon and Helmer have up their sleeves. What I’m disappointed is that Andy The-Anh, M Siamo, and Renata Morales will be no shows once again this season. Perhaps they don’t need the publicity in Montreal to show, but it would still be nice to see their collections flow down the runway.

Commercial designers over at Chabanel 555 are holding their own little fashion runway snippet by offering a “fashion lunch” in the garment district’s headquarters. Samuel Dong, Simon Chang, Zen B. and Iris are among the designers showing.

As usual, we can all experience the magic of MFW online by flipping through the images that will be posted after each show. But I’m really starting to wonder how much the economy has affected our local designers given that we don’t really hear much of a peep from any of these designers outside of Fashion Week.