IN HER OWN FASHION
City native aims to break through ‘concrete ceiling’
Eman Bare had women like herself in mind when she chose models for her debut at New York Fashion Week.
“I didn’t just want people to look at clothes; I wanted people to think of concepts that I was presenting,” said Bare, a Regina-born designer who showed twice at NYFW this month.
“Why can we look at a runway of all white models and think it’s normal, and then see all black models and immediately notice that something ’s happening ? It’s because we see white as the norm. My whole existence is to basically abolish that idea.”
Fashion is just one area in which Bare, 26, aims to do that.
A graduate of the University of Regina School of Journalism, she has worked as an investigative journalist in Toronto and is now on full scholarship at New York Law School.
She may decline the invitation to showcase at Los Angeles Fashion Week next month, because “that’s when all my midterms are.”
“It’s a long story about why I decided to go to law school,” Bare said with a laugh.
In short, it’s so she can be a “better prepared” journalist in a time of widespread “attack on truth and fact.”
But it’s also personal: Bare felt prejudice in and out of newsrooms.
“I just felt like as a woman of colour I wasn’t getting the opportunities that I deserved to become a better investigative journalist, and it didn’t matter what station I was working at,” said Bare, who has worked nationally for CBC, CTV and Global.
Wanting to be more than a “cute hijabi journalist,” Bare — who is Muslim — describes being up against a “concrete ceiling” to succeed.
And that relates back to fashion. “I don’t want to seem like this scared 20-something-year-old, which is really what I am on the inside, so I’m just going to make clothing that makes me look a lot more confident and I feel comfortable in,” she said.
Her interest in fashion was developed by necessity. Growing up in south Regina, where she went to Campbell for high school and her father Mustafa owned a convenience store, it was a difficult task to find stylish-but-modest clothes. So she followed the lead of her mother, Zebiba, buying cloth at Fabricland, then getting a seamstress to sew her clothes.
Bare obtained a fashion design diploma from Toronto Film School during a break from journalism — although these worlds collide as a freelance fashion journalist. She had a piece published in Vogue Arabia just last week.
Bare launched her fashion label, Eman Idil, when she was 23, and showcased in 2017 and 2018 at Saskatchewan Fashion Week in Regina.
“People’s immediate judgments of you, aside from those external factors that you’re born with, is based on how you dress yourself. And I notice a difference in how people treat me when I’m wearing a hijab that covers my neck, as opposed to when I’m wearing a turban that I’ve made,” Bare said.
“You control so much of the narrative that you share with people when you dress in particular ways.”
Bare is two weeks removed from New York Fashion Week, where Regina jewelry company Hillberg & Berk sponsored her show.
To capture the debut, Bare hired a black photographer, someone she knew would be skilled at accurately lighting non-white skin.
As a broadcast journalist, Bare said, “I see myself on TV sometimes and I’ll either look really, really orange … or I’ll look really dark or I’ll look grey. So I knew I didn’t want anyone to mess up my girls.”
Bare has long felt alienated by experiences like this.
In her Grade 12 graduation photos, her skin has a grey pallor, “because the makeup artist literally didn’t know how to do my makeup.”
Bare got a job at MAC Cosmetics as a result, so she could learn to do her own makeup.
As a child in Regina, Bare said there were no stylists who knew how to cut her hair — she had to get haircuts while visiting her aunt in Edmonton.
“When you’re 10 years old, you think something was wrong with you, that you can’t just walk into a salon and get a haircut, or people are like, ‘Oh I don’t know how to cut this hair,’ ” Bare said.
“It’s almost like this subtle form of racism that completely erases who you are. It’s like, in hair school, do black people not exist? How were you never taught to cut black hair? It’s this bizarre thing where they don’t account for who you are as a person or your experiences.”
This is the reason she had black women model her designs at NYFW, which she best summed up in a Facebook post:
“The highlight of my show was watching all my models walk in and realize they weren’t the ‘token’ black girl,” she wrote. “This show was created for you, for us, and for every little black girl who’s told that she is the wrong sort of beautiful.”
Bare’s collection was aptly titled Al-nisa, which translates to “the women.”