MEET THE CURATOR

SOPHIE HACKETT

On any given day, Sophie Hackett, curator of photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), wears a uniform built around her staple Naked & Famous jeans and monk-strap Fluevogs. Today it’s with a men’s suit jacket from Club Monaco and a turtleneck from British menswear designer Nigel Hall. “I pretty much only buy men’s clothing,” she says. “Women’s clothing just doesn’t fit the way I want it to.”

The photography expert favours a tailored, stealth look. “I’ve always thought of my style as being sort of dandyish, but lately I’m getting simpler, more streamlined,” she says, adding with a laugh, “I just want to get dressed and not think about it.” Although that’s not strictly true: Hackett enjoys the process of thinking about clothes, follows Instagram accounts that feature emerging stylists and artists and has had suits made by tailor Marlon Durrant and at Sydney’s Toronto.

The attention she pays to what she wears is similar to the attention she pays when she’s putting together a show. “In an exhibition, you’re telling a story, to a degree, aesthetically, in space—which is very different from putting on your own clothes,” she says. “But it’s a belief that the aesthetic matters.”

During her 14-year tenure, Hackett has expanded the AGO’s photography program with works addressing queer visibility and curated shows by Edward Burtynsky, Suzy Lake and Patti Smith. She’s most drawn to the ’20s and the interwar era of photography for its experimentation and first major wave of women involved in the art world. “I only became aware of the garçonne look you see in Weimar, Germany, and France a bit later,” she says. “The androgyny of that moment was really appealing. I feel most comfortable in that register.”

That’s partly because her personal style was formed at a moment when women looked like this and men looked like that, she explains. “When I came out in the early ’90s, part of the transgression was for women to look more like men,” she says. Now that fashion is becoming more genderqueer, Hackett is excited by the range of possible gender expression through clothing—though whether she deviates from her established uniform remains to be seen.