Firefly-shaped jewels flickered on the Valentino’s SS26 runaway last season, against royal blues and dense floral prints in Alessandro Michele’s collection, aptly named Fireflies, an attempt in Michele’s own words in the show notes, to “reawaken the gaze” and “nourish imagination with political force”.
Fine Chaos opened CIFF66 with ARA SOLIS, a sharply staged AW26 collection set inside The Dome, the fictional corporate city that anchors the brand’s growing narrative universe.
Since the rise of 3D design, artists and designers have been drawn to the strange, uncanny potential of digital materiality. Toronto-based designer Kerry Xu of Automara takes that impulse further with the Husk Collection, a sculptural line shaped by contamination, adaptation, and the tension between the human body and the digital processes that reimagine it.
Inside a former garment factory in Montreal’s Chabanel district, Rebecca-Jo Dunham-Baruchel sits across from Matteo Valmora, creative director of Montreal-based label Valmora, and names something that feels immediately true.
In recent seasons, fashion has become increasingly preoccupied with explanation. Collections arrive freighted with language before the clothes have a chance to exist on their own terms, accompanied by manifestos, mood boards, and conceptual frameworks that often feel more polished than some of the garments themselves.
If Part 1 of our favourite content creators list circled those reshaping fashion discourse, Part 2 is about those who understand dressing as authorship.
Fashion creators in 2025 are no longer defined by fits alone. The figures shaping the conversation now operate as commentators, analysts, performers, translators and community cultivators, people who don’t just wear clothes but explain and emblemize why they matter, who they exclude, and how meaning circulates around them online.
Fashion Art Toronto has always been less about polish and more about possibility. It is one of the few platforms in the country where designers can experiment without the weight of commercial expectation, where collections feel closer to performance, gesture, or emotional artifact than seasonal product.
There is a particular kind of jacket you see everywhere right now. On the metro, at the office, in line at the café: taped seams, matte shell, bungee cords cinched just enough to signal you know the difference between “water-resistant” and “20K waterproof.”
For Spring–Summer 2026, MRKNTN returns with SAINT-MAURICE, a collection rooted in the mythology, labour, and memory embedded along the Québec river of the same name.