How Matières Fécales’ ‘Hannah’ Extends Montréal’s Avant-Garde Legacy

At Place Vendôme this past week, Matières Fécales unveiled Hannah—their sophomore Paris Fashion Week collection, and a love letter to co-founder Hannah Rose Dalton. The show, designed by Hannah and co-designer Raj Bhaskaran opened in blush duchess satin, pagoda shoulders carved into silhouette, porcelain faces powdered into doll-like pallor. Roses, her namesake, appeared as both motif and metaphor: beauty that blooms and decays, sweetness that inevitably rots. By the finale, Dalton stood draped in wine-colored petals, surrounded by a community cast that included models of all ages, genders, and abilities.

The duo’s language of the grotesque-beautiful persists: masks that obscure the gaze, tweed deconstructed into frayed wreckage, transparent organza exposing a garment’s inner architecture. There were echoes of early Mcqueen, to be sure, and collaborations with Stephen Jones and Christian Louboutin which lended couture punctuation, yet never muted the duo’s post-human provocation. If last season’s debut at Paris Fashion Week felt like a necessary assertion, “we are here,” Hannah was a more vulnerable declaration: “this is who we are.” It was romance as manifesto, alienness as form of love.

Matières Fécales’ rise at Paris Fashion Week is not an isolated phenomenon. It is part of a longer lineage of Montréal designers who have blurred the line between couture and concept, beauty and estrangement. The city has historically produced figures that have pushed the boundaries of the sartorial. Names like Marie Saint Pierre, whose sculptural minimalism reshaped Québécois couture; Rad Hourani, who introduced the world’s first unisex haute couture collection, Jessy Colucci of Process Visual, whose avant-garde runways channel a distinctly Montréal ethos of creative audace, and Tristan Rehel whose kooky whimsy-couture has garnered international recognition, all paint the picture of a city bursting with a certain unorthodox and daring approach to the sartorial.

This avant-garde audacity has long been intertwined with Montréal’s material realities. The city’s role as Canada’s garment capital, anchored by the Chabanel district’s factories and shaped by waves of immigrant labour, gave designers access to fabrics, techniques, and production networks that could support radical experimentation. Unlike Paris or New York, where fashion often calcified into institutions, Montréal’s scene grew in tension with its own fragility: a city marked by cultural contradictions, economic precarity, and flashes of cosmopolitan ambition. It is out of this friction that the city’s designers forged a language of estrangement, treating eccentricity itself as couture.

What ties these names together is not a single aesthetic but a shared disposition: Montréal fashion has always thrived on tension, not only between French couture heritage and North American pragmatism, but within the city itself, whose bilingual, contradictory, and often fragmented cultural fabric produces an avant-garde ethos all its own.; between intellectual rigor and street-born bricolage; between outsider status and cosmopolitan ambition.

Historically, this avant-garde impulse has also been underwritten by Montréal’s institutions like Collège LaSalle, UQAM’s École supérieure de mode, and fashion incubators and platforms like Lignes de Fuite which counts Dalton and Bhaskaran as alumni, who have cultivated an ecosystem where couture met craft, and where young designers could translate radical ideas into tangible garments.

Matières Fécales inherits the city’s distinctive dialectic and amplifies it. They splinter the body into alien silhouettes, rendering leather, tweed, denim, and tulle at once uncanny and glamorous; garments worn by bald, white-painted figures who read less as models than as post-human beacons of individuality. Their embrace of the grotesque, their insistence on community-driven casting, and their refusal to sand down rough edges in pursuit of Parisian polish is Montréal’s fashion spirit exported internationally in its rawest form.

In a decade when global fashion capitals increasingly cannibalize local identity, Matières Fécales remind us of what Montréal has always done best: disrupt from the margins, transform eccentricity into aesthetic power, and insist that difference is not to be hidden but staged. Hannah is not just a love letter to its namesake, it is an echo of the city that shaped them, a city whose legacy of experimentation continues to haunt and animate Paris.

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.