Fashioning a new culture
Ryerson School of Fashion's new chair aims to change the industry from within
Ben Barry first made headlines at the age of 14. The Ottawa-area ninth-grader launched his own modelling agency, focused on diversity in a fashion world that, at the time, exclusively employed tall, thin, young white women.
A friend, a size 12, couldn’t get a break as a model. He pitched her to a magazine — and when they hired her, they assumed he was her agent. He ran with it. He also knew instinctively that allowing the story to be about him — a precocious business tycoon — would spread the social justice message he really wanted to get out.
Now 35, Barry has two decades in the trenches, plus a PhD from Cambridge under his belt.
And he has just been appointed the incoming chair at the Ryerson School of Fashion.
Diversity is still his mission and he thinks even bigger these days. As he told the search committee, “I said that I hoped to revolutionize fashion education, the industry and the world.”
Fashion, Barry likes to say, creates culture.
So, his idea is to get ahold of the next generation of fashion creatives and expose them to values that will change the fashion industry from within — to encourage diversity both in front of and behind the cameras, at every table, in every part of the design process.
That means active recruiting of students with a range of what he calls “different lived experiences.” He is working on strategies to “authentically reach out to under-represented communities,” and to re-examine the curriculum.
“So many people feel excluded from fashion,” he says, “because they don’t feel their size, shape, age, disabilities, gender expression and identity are valued.”
He will also have to wrangle with environmental issues and changing technology, as well as recognizing that Canada’s original fashion and Indigenous traditions are underrepresented, along with other non-European influences.
For the Star photo shoot, he chose to show off a vest by fourth-year student Justine Woods, who is Métis. Her menswear collection incorporates traditional beadwork on European suiting; the work won her a place representing Ryerson and Canada at Graduate Fashion Week in London this summer.
“Because appropriation is such a big topic, we really need to find ways to authentically shift power,” Barry says. “Find platforms to recognize traditions and offer shared authorship and profits.”
Woods feels that fashion is a way to “further encourage respect between Indigenous peoples and the rest of society. We appreciate (Barry’s) support for a new form of inclusiveness with us.”
She hopes that by sharing her research into historical adornment of Métis garments, in which the colours and floral designs tell the story of a person’s life, where they have been and where they are from — she can open up this conversation with non-Indigenous students.
“I feel Ben will be able to continue and expand this push for change and the breaking of fashion norms and boundaries,” Woods says.
Liis Windischmann (liisonlife.com) is a plus-sized model and inspirational blogger, speaker and television personality.
“Ben’s reputation preceded him,” she says. “I remember seeing him interviewed on FashionTelevision, thinking this kid is really cool,” she adds, and so she introduced herself at his book signing in 2007.
Barry took on Windischmann as a client, and then she ran the Ben Barry Agency with him while he was at school; they shut it down in 2012, when Barry first joined the Ryerson faculty.
At its peak, the agency had 100 people on its roster, all shapes and sizes and colours and abilities, in a direct challenge to agency norms. They placed people, one at a time, and the tokenism started to give way to a movement. Oprah noticed and invited him on her show. The agency also worked on the Dove campaign, an early beauty industry effort at inclusion.
“Ben realized that the first thing that had to change was the sample size, which is a 2 for women. He worked the phones and talked designers into producing broader sample sizes. Then we would find the models, all age ranges, all walks of life, and train them.”
By 2009, they had their first models walking on Toronto’s runways and in 2012 they supplied the talent for an all-plussized show.
“It is expensive for a designer, a risk,” Windischmann says.
“It was an uphill battle. But with Ben, something is never impossible. He’s an idea machine.”
Barry next realized that changing the runway was only going to change so much. He decided to prove that diversity could benefit fashion’s bottom line, with the research tools of academia.
“As a disruptive fashion lover,” Caryn Franklin says, “I frequently cite Ben’s groundbreaking study to support the need for change and the benefits to industry in leveraging that change.”
Franklin is a former fashion editor and co-editor of i-D magazine. She is now a Professor of Diversity at Kingston School of Art in London, England.
Barry completed an undergrad in women’s studies, because, he says, his experiences as an agent made him think about his own privilege and he wanted a framework to understand the experiences of others. A Masters in philosophy followed.
It was at Cambridge that he conducted a study of 3,000 women showing that they were more likely to buy products advertised by models who looked more like them.
When he got to Ryerson as director of the Centre of Fashion Diversity & Social Change he took on a research project called Refashioning Masculinity, looking at the “fluid and diverse” nature of men’s consumption habits, which had similar findings. Men wanted to be represented by more than Ken dolls. And fashion was a way to disrupt gender normatives.
“I am in full agreement with Ben’s approach,” Franklin says of his drive change from the inside. “Fashion has huge power to change how people perceive themselves, so let’s use this power with responsibility and inclusivity.”
Barry also cares deeply about including Indigenous Canadian perspectives into how fashion history is taught.
“When we talk about fashion history, it has been very Western-centric. For fashion or clothing outside of the European tradition, we use words like clothing, dress, costume, devaluing the original fashion.”
Anjli Patel (fashionlawyer.ca) is a Toronto fashion lawyer and trademark agent, who works with local, emerging and independent designers. She has spoken to Barry’s first-year class core course on diversity.
“His students are very lucky to have a professor who understands a day in the life of a student,” Patel says, “having more recently been through the system himself. The hallowed halls of academia can be far removed from reality, so the practical applications of his research, reflected in his lecture materials, is refreshing.”
And there have been a number of promising milestones in the past year, she notes.
“Edward Enninful became editor-in-chief of British Vogue, Radhika Jones became editorin-chief of Vanity Fair, Virgil Abloh became artistic director of Louis Vuitton, and Halima Aden became the first hijabwearing model to grace the cover of an American fashion magazine. Locally, Nafisa Kaptownwala is making great progress with Lorde Inc., a modelling agency she founded that represents people of colour.”
Barry speaks a very careful, very modern language of inclusion. His email signature includes his preferred pronouns (He, Him, His). But he also has a playful side. On the back of his chair sits another vest, this one heavy with quite large spikes.
“For going into battle,” he laughs.
Fashion, he says, is about pretty things. “The core of fashion will always be imagination, artistry and fantasy. Fashion helps us discover new elements of ourselves, and project new elements of ourselves.”