Ottawa Fashion Week reaches out to the world

The people behind Ottawa's biggest celebration of fashion are changing tack. It used to be that most designers featured at Ottawa Fashion Week came from the nation's capital. This year, all that has changed.

OFW launched in 2008, and its organizers hoped it would broadcast to the world all the local talent and style that is rarely—if ever—attributed to Ottawa.

“We felt like Ottawa was underrepresented in the fashion scene in Canada. We have great designers here, why not showcase the talent we have?” said Christine Achampong, public relations coordinator for Ottawa Fashion Week.

Three years later, the event has grown. But this year's festival includes just four Ottawa-based designers on its roster of 22. When OFW was introduced, almost all of the 29 designers featured were from Ottawa. Showing off just a small collection of local talent might seem counterproductive if OFW hopes to put Ottawa on the map, but organizers say that approach was quite deliberate.

“Having such little Ottawa representation makes Ottawa designers want to step up their game and say, ‘one of my goals is to show at Ottawa Fashion week,’” explains Achampong. “We want to incorporate more local designers, and we’re hoping that events like ours raise the profile of more local designers, and that they have some sort of goal to achieve within the next couple of years.”

Ottawa-based designers included in this year’s lineup range from rookie to veteran and include Amber Watkins, duo Emilia Torabi and Jana Hanzel, Stacey Bafi-Yeboa and renowned bridalware designer David McCaffrey. Other designers are coming from as far as the U.K. and Argentina.

“If we’re ever going to be taken seriously on an international level, then we have to include [outside designers] in our industry,” says Watkins, a swimwear designer and former government employee.

It’s a strategy that seems to be working.

“It’s exciting that people from across the country and from other countries want to show at OFW. They wouldn’t bother if it wasn’t respectable, and if there wasn’t attention being paid,” said Watkins.

Bafi-Yeboa agreed. “Bringing designers from outside builds horizons,” she says. “It’s nice to have designers from Ottawa, but it’s also nice to branch out, showing Ottawa what is across the country and across the world. It gives new ideas and a fresh start, like travelling—you get different perspectives.”

Among all that optimism, however, there remain a few unfortunate notions about Ottawa’s flagging fashion scene.

“I think people have the attitude that if you’re going to do fashion then you can’t stay here. And that’s the main problem,” says Watkins, who started her own business this summer.

“It’s impossible to do mass production, so it’s really difficult to penetrate the industry in Ottawa,” says Hanzel.

She explained the city’s growing fashion industry as a Catch 22: without enough attention paid to the scene, Ottawa can’t lay the foundation for a respected industry, but designers and shoppers are always leaving the city for more established fashion centres.

“A lot of people would rather travel to Montreal to shop, because there is a lot more variety and it’s cheaper, and because they don’t believe that there’s anything here,” says Torabi.

For now, OFW is aiming to disprove the idea that Ottawa has nothing to offer to the city’s fashion-starved.

“Initially, a lot of people were hesitant, thinking that Ottawa doesn’t have the talent or the designers to sustain this in the long run. But we’ve proven that we do and that there’s an audience for it,” says Achampong.

For Watkins, Ottawa’s perception as a second city of fashion is an identity waiting to be shed.

“The longer we compare ourselves to Montreal and Toronto, the longer it will take to be taken seriously,” says Watkins. “We joke that we don’t have an H&M here, but do we want one? Do we need one? If we’re going to stay individualized, then we need to remember that we have shops here that aren’t in Toronto or Montreal.”