Semaine de la Mode Montréal FW25 unfolded less like a week of runways than a palimpsest, layers of history, material memory, and cultural contradiction inscribed into each collection. Montréal’s fashion identity has always thrived in the interstices: between heritage and experiment, pragmatism and avant-garde, intimacy and spectacle. What distinguished this season was the precision of its voices. From established houses to insurgent ateliers, each designer treated the runway as a site of tension, garments not only styled but staged as arguments.
Across the city’s industrial skeleton and improvised spaces, these four collections became the week’s gravitational core. Together they wrote a distinctly Montréal script: experimental, emotional, and unafraid to let fragility show alongside structure.
MRKNTN
At MRKNTN, the runway, set against the backdrop of the St. Lawrence at the Grand Quai du Port de Montréal, became an exercise in contradiction: a silver floor gleaming under industrial beams, punctuated by monumental rocks, set the stage for garments that oscillated between fragility and armour. Distressed plaids, shredded skirts, and oversized tailoring rubbed against iridescent silks and hand-dyed fabrics in muted aquas and pinks. Boots padded like protective gear grounded the collection, while raw hems and exposed seams leaned into disarray. Yet within that chaos, there was a clear architecture, a sense of garments cut to protect as much as to reveal. MRKNTN distilled the contradictions of contemporary Montréal style into a show that felt both vulnerable and defiant, an homage to Quebec’s raw landscapes and working-class mythologies, filtered through the subcultural lens of skatewear and street couture.
Harry Face Majors
At Lignes de Fuite, Harry Face Majors offered a vision that felt like both a love letter and an autopsy to romance. Cascading ruffles, oversized florals, and diaphanous silhouettes floated down the runway, saturated in shades of pink, yellow, and green juxtaposed against stark blacks. It was a pastoral fantasy deconstructed, at once in a state of becoming and undoing. At first glance, the collection read idyllic in its looseness and colour palette, but closer inspection revealed seams undone and sutured with safety pins, saturated colors breaking against stark blacks. It was disassemblage not as destruction, but as tenderness fractured, an exploration of beauty held together by precarious stitches.
Process Visual
For Jessy Colucci’s Process Visual at Lignes de Fuite, the runway is always a site of both excess and conceptual singularity, and for FW25 Colucci honed in on tension and form. Fabrics were knotted, cinched, and draped into strange architectures, creating silhouettes that appeared to hover between construction and collapse. Black coats grounded the collection in an austere ready-to-wear sensibility whilst teal tunics folded into origami edges, and voluminous and draped bounds of fabrics twisted into bulbous knots that distorted the body into sculptural abstraction. Even the hoodie as wardrobe staple was destabilized, pierced by the poetic gesture of a flowering branch carried down the runway. A muted palette of black, grey, olive, and soft white stripped away ornament, insisting that shape and texture alone carry the weight of expression. What emerged was a vision of clothing as proposition rather than product: garments that refuse resolution, staging the body as site of experiment, estrangement, and fragile power.
OFFTN Studios
OFFTN staged a study in stark geometry and sculptural form this season at Lignes de Fuite. The show oscillated between razor-sharp minimalism and surreal exaggeration, anchoring its language in a palette of black, white, and red. Cropped jackets and high-waisted skirts were squared into rigid silhouettes, their severity offset by textural plays, zebra stripes, faux-fur tufts, and exaggerated padding. The collection’s most striking gestures came in its warped volumes: bulbous hips carved into red wool, balloon hems suspended in air, a black puff mini orbiting beneath an oversized circular hat. Elsewhere, a white skirt bristling with trailing cords evoked shredded fringe, caught between disarray and control. The effect was at once futuristic and primal, silhouettes stripped of ornament yet thrumming with excess.
Credits
Photography: @vin.ill (MRKNTN)
Photography: @bellescx (Harry Face Majors, Process Visual, OFFTN Studios)
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.