DAD PROVIDES A GUIDING HAND
They’re not a chip off the old daddy block
Dominic Lacroix is an unconventional father: he teaches ballroom dance, has a faux mohawk and plays in a band. He is shown here with his four-year-old son Danick. See our Style section for more dads with a difference.
My dad was a pretty conventional kinda guy: an engineering instructor at NAIT who taught at least one class with his zipper down, unbeknownst to him. He was a working, church-going man who wore Christmas-type sweaters, button-up shirt sleeves and parted his hair neatly on the side.
But while he worked long hours and only had to do the dishes on Sunday evenings, Bill Sinnema occasionally busted a style move, letting me and my sister dye his hair and spike it up or drape a macrame plant holder over his head. When he shaved off his beard for the first time in my childhood memory, he shaved half first. I cried.
My father is no longer around, but these funky fathers and daring daddies are, displaying their unconventional styles in fashion and fatherhood.
Tom Fowler Age: 38 Children: Indy Rose, 5, Scarlet Rain, 3
In many ways, Tom Fowler is a fairly conventional father. He works in construction and framing while his wife is a stay-athome mother. They live on an acreage near Ardrossan and have two horses and three dogs.
But when Fowler unbuckles his work overalls and pulls off his sweatshirt, his unconventional style is scribbled all over his body. Many of his tattoos are directly related to his two daughters and his family life.
His daughters’ names are inked across his collar bones, their birth times etched into two large time pieces on either side of his neck. A mural across his entire chest and belly depict the animals on the Chinese zodiac under which each family member was born: a dragon for Fowler, an ox for wife Justine, a rat for Indy Rose and tiger for Scarlet Rain.
“I’m pretty much covered,” Fowler said. “I’m pretty much done with the meaningful tattoos. Now I’m just collecting artwork. It’s a way of expressing yourself.”
His daughters love it, although Indy didn’t initially like the skull on his right hand.
“When we go to the bathroom, we’ll go and wash it off,” she told dad.
Fowler’s father and mother also question Fowler’s fashion sense.
“They still give me grief about my earrings and tattoos,” said Fowler, who wasn’t allowed to get inked and pierced until he left his Catholic home.
Now, even his construction company is called Inked.
Yet he’s very close with his parents and two older sisters and models himself after them.
“If I could have the relationship with my kids that (my dad) has with us now, I know I’d be doing a good job,” he said, noting his father was always around during his childhood. “I don’t consider myself unconventional. My kids have standard bed times and I read books to them at night.”
He’s also teaching his older daughter how to skateboard, and plans to buy her a set of drums so she can follow in his rock ’n’ roll footsteps.
“It’s something I’ve always wanted, my own family,” Fowler said. “Children to me are more fun than anything else.” Aaron Clifford Age: 40 Children: Lochlan, 5, Gwennavere, 3, Maeven, 3
Aaron Clifford doesn’t follow in his father’s footsteps.
“I saw my dad on weekends and he had a bit of a temper,” Clifford said of his childhood, when his parents divorced. “We’ve mostly since reconciled, but it was pretty turbulent.”
While his father was fairly conventional — a conservative, clever guy who worked in the tool industry and loved sports — Clifford, decidedly, is not.
He is a dad with a mohawk.
He’s not a hockey fan, but loves Lego and ants instead. His family has three cats, two dogs, three turtles, a lizard, a dove, fish and frogs.
Clifford listens to nerdcore — hip-hop for nerds (yes, that’s right) — and chap hop, British hipster rap that includes men playing banjo-leles and singing about stereotypical English topics such as tea, the weather and cricket.
He and his wife have a six-foot-two female nanny who is completely covered in tattoos.
Clifford plays with gadgets for his work at Red The Agency, creates computer and board games and nifty things on a 3-D printer.
And even though his wife is a trained opera singer, it’s Clifford who made up “The Pea Pod Show” and sang a song to help get Lachlan wiggling and shimmying out of the bathtub wrapped in his green hooded towel.
“I almost treat having my kids around as like a day- to-day musical,” Clifford said. “I’m a terrible singer but they don’t know that yet.”
For the longest time, Clifford didn’t want to be a dad, even though children flocked to him to pile up and play robot.
“It was obvious to everyone but me that I wanted to be a dad,” Clifford said. “I feel like I had a lot of unnecessary and unwarranted fear in my life before children. Them coming along really made me feel like, ‘I can do this.’”
The mohawk and his style, he says, are “whimsical,” perhaps “silly” but conversation starters. He loves his brown pinstripe fedora — his favourite article of outerwear — and used to love old bus-driver shirts found at second-hand shops because “they carry stories with them” that “fire (up) the imagination.”
“I don’t feel like we grow from sameness, obviously,” Clifford said. “There’s benefit to routine, but it’s important to strive to include randomness in your life.”
Dominic Lacroix Age: 43 Children: Danick, 4
In his day-to-day life, Dominic Lacroix is a jeansand-T-shirt kind of fellow.
But in the evenings, he puts on his dancing shoes to teach ballroom. He no longer competes, but when he steps in to partner with his students during Latin dance competitions, his look becomes a little more cha-cha-cha.
“I’m not wearing the whole front-open showing-mychest kind of thing, because it seems over the top,” Lacroix said. “But it’s still a stretchy Latin outfit.”
More often he’s in black tails and tie when he gets into the ballroom rhythm.
So parents of his dancing students are always surprised to learn Lacroix also plays in a rock ’n’ roll band called The Fronts. Lacroix’s clean lookin’ faux-mohawk and five-o’clock shadow goes well with the jeans, buttonup shirts and vests on stage.
His style as a single father (he shares custody) is “very” unconventional, Lacroix said.
“Everybody seems to be like how I see my own uncles and parents: they’re more adults. I don’t consider myself an adult, per se,” said Lacroix, who prefers flying spaceships and playing trains with Danick than being in a room full of serious conversations.
“They do have this look of, like, a family man kind of thing. For them, they wear pretty much what is on special at Sears. They don’t really go shopping for a particular style.”
Lacroix wears a black leather jacket. Danick wears a Tshirt that reads Rock and Roll.
Lacroix gets help from a nanny when Danick is around, but sometimes gels and spikes his son’s hair to match his own coiffed style.
“I don’t feel like I got older since I was a teenager,” Lacroix said. “I’m not trying (to be unconventional). I just feel that’s how I am. I would have a hard time being otherwise anyway.”