Montreal about to be ‘engulfed’ in Newfoundland fashion

Olivia Bradbury / Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

A fashion collection with a distinct Newfoundland sensibility will be on display in Montreal during Fashion Week this month, thanks to a native son who has made his way in the international fashion industry and a creative partner who also calls Canada’s haute couture capital home

The Engulfed fashion collection, which will have an expo and fashion show at the Montreal Art Center and Museum, is organized by designers Richard Brophy and MJ LeBlanc, and will feature works by 19 artisans, 14 of whom originate from or reside in Newfoundland.

Brophy grew up in Foxtrap, CBS, studied textiles at the College of the North Atlantic, and in 2010 moved to Montreal to study fashion design at Collège LaSalle. He has lived there since, and is currently the head of the design department for a local menswear brand called Projek Raw.

LeBlanc grew up in Ottawa, studied fashion in Paris before returning to Montreal, where she had worked as head designer for a number of womens’ brands. Like Brophy, she is head designer for a local brand in Montreal. The pair met in the fashion industry and have been friends for many years.

One night, over dinner, LeBlanc asked Brophy when he was going to make a certain idea of his a reality. The idea was this: to create a fashion collection entirely composed of heritage crafts and ancestral techniques. Brophy had always wanted to delve into his Newfoundland roots. He and LeBlanc hatched the idea to co-create and co-design a heritage craft-based collection. And they did not want to simply do the crafts themselves — they wanted to seek out the experts in natural dyes, knitting, crochet, felting, rug-hooking, basket-weaving and other crafts.

Originally the collection was only for the heritage techniques of Newfoundland and Labrador, but the concept grew as the calls for artists did. “So it’s really become more of a national collection of Canadian heritage craft and honestly the outcome of it has been just outstanding in the level of skill and craftsmanship that we received, particularly from the province of Newfoundland and Labrador.”

Along with the 14 Newfoundland artisans, there are contributors from Quebec, Iqaluit, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia.

Recruiting artisans of various disciplines allowed experts of many different crafts to get together and build one project, a contrast to how some artisans often stay within their own disciplines.

“We broke the silos of their own ateliers and brought different crafts together,” said LeBlanc.

Brophy said many of the artisans were stuck in doing one form of their techniques, but the Engulfed fashion collection allowed them to branch out. Winnie Glavine of CBS, for example, has rug-hooked a whole dress. Eileen Murphy of Humber Valley has expanded from only weaving baskets to weaving 3D pieces, including a full bustier woven out of naturally harvested spruce roots she gathered and cleaned herself.

“It was pushing them outside, and giving them new avenues, a new way of exploring their own crafts, their own skills,” said LeBlanc. She says the pieces can almost be considered wearable arts.

LeBlanc offered an example of how a piece for the collection might be created: someone could spin yarn, which would be passed on to another artisan who dyed it, then to a crochet knitter who turned the yarn into crochet pieces, and then to a designer who put said pieces together, resulting in a sweater.

“It was this idea of passing it through the many hands and then many disciplines through various artists in order to really get the community all to sort of gel together in one goal, one cohesive plan,” said LeBlanc.

Though the artisans were not all working together in the same place, and operated within their own disciplines, LeBlanc and Brophy made the collection cohesive by offering a unifying theme: the ocean. LeBlanc noted the ocean is a strong part of Newfoundland’s heritage, as well as a theme that people across Canada can relate to. The colours in the collection have an organic feel because the directors wanted to look into things like natural dyes, so the spectrum includes blues, creams, ochres, and browns, which LeBlanc said gives the collection a bit of a “land and sea feel”.

Fast fashion and mass production, Brophy and LeBlanc said, have hindered the fashion and crafts communities.

“We’ve really lost that value of employing local craftspeople and skilled artisans in their fields by allocating replications overseas, production for mass market,” said Brophy.

One goal of Engulfed is to advocate for and show examples of sustainable and ecological fashion. LeBlanc said returning to these crafts in which many artisans use natural materials can help fix ecological and sustainability issues within fashion.

“It takes the innovation of the artisans and the artist community to come up with these kinds of solutions that then can be taken for mass production overseas,” she said. “But first we need to have the solution in order to be able to share it with our factories.”

Another goal of the collection and its expo and fashion show during Fashion Week is to showcase the craftspeople who have for too long been underappreciated. Brophy said they want to leave the public with “a clear understanding that this is a skill level that is learned and acquired and perfected and practiced,” a stark contrast to mass production done overseas.

“These things are all heritage craft techniques that, without these professional craftspeople passing them on, we will lose them,” said Brophy.

The expo at the Montreal Art Center and Museum will focus on the behind-the-scenes making of the collection and will run from September 16th to 24th, with a break on the 21st for the fashion show. Several Newfoundland artists who worked on the collection will be attending the fashion show in person.
“We have a nice community of people from home coming here and it’s going to be a fantastic week,” said Brophy.

There will be an exhibition of the whole Engulfed collection at the Craft Council Gallery in St. John’s in April 2025, and Brophy and LeBlanc are hoping to have an exhibition in another Atlantic province sometime in 2026. They are also booked to display the collection at an exhibition at the Mississippi Valley Textile Museum in Almonte, Ontario, in 2027.