To speak of fashion in Canada is often to speak of the periphery. Not spatially, but semiotically. So much of the runway here is caught between emulation and longing, between the urge to participate and the need to differentiate. Which is why SAFI Creatives‘ Spring/Summer 2025 presentation at Toronto’s Own Fashion Week presented by Rchive felt like a welcome reprieve and a rupture in pace.
Staged in the Toronto Reference Library, a space whose institutional modernist sterility both flattens and clarifies, SAFI did not offer a spectacle to match the setting, nor did it react against it. Instead, it enacted something closer to indifference. The collection operated in the register of what one might call embodied revision. Clothes that insisted on experimentation of form, through quiet recalibration.
From slate-toned dresses, curved through the waist, wrapped loosely at the shoulders, to ruched deconstructed asymmetrical denim, the garments moved in conversation with both the body and gravity. Fabrics were neither sheer nor stiff, but rather bore a considered weight.
There is something deeply contemporary about the refusal to entertain, especially in the arena of Canadian fashion where spectacle and gimmick are used as distractions to obfuscate a lack of craftsmanship or narrativity. The muted palette here, dusty reds, browned-out neutrals, and sleek sculptural denim, didn’t read as minimalism per se; it read as understated wearability, albeit within the confines of a-proportional construction which proposed a certain air of avant-dressing.
There was no postmodern irony here, rather, SAFI’s SS25 offering was post-commentary. The raw hems and asymmetrical closures didn’t speak of incompletion, but of withdrawal from finish. Menswear arrived through the same logic. Black tops cut diagonally across the chest, trousers slouching into themselves. A proposition of personal style that felt contemporary and real. Garments that did not seek to assert identity so much as absorb it. These were clothes that spoke the language of wearability.
Cody Rooney is the Editor in Chief and senior contributor at liminul.
He is a PhD candidate, digital content specialist, writer, editor, multi-media artist, and photographer.