MULTI-LAYERED FASHION
Designer Lesley Hampton brings her passion for advocacy to the runway,
Lesley Hampton designs stunning evening wear — gowns of intricate construction and ethereal grace — that have already earned the 24-year-old international runway opportunities, major fashion press and celebrity fans. But it is the many layers of meaning woven into her work that mark the young designer as the talent to watch this coming fashion week.
By drawing on her First Nations identity, a nomadic international childhood, the arts and her passionate sense of advocacy, Hampton has made her runway into a place for breakthroughs, where women of every size and skin colour are represented. She has dedicated shows to lifting the stigmas of mental health and physical disabilities, hiring models who are open about their own mental health struggles, as well as models who are amputees and use assistive devices.
And now, for her Fall 2019 show, she has cast a roster of models who all identify as having Indigenous heritage. Titled Eighteen Seventy Six — the year Canada enacted the Indian Act — the show will take place on Wednesday at the Gardiner Museum as part of Toronto Fashion Week.
When I visit Hampton’s studio in the Toronto Fashion Incubator in late January, the space is almost as if it had been cast in a movie: long cutting tables draped in bolts of luxe fabric, racks hung with fluttering sheafs of patterns, the soft clatter of sequins striking the floor as they peel away from an assistant’s scissors.
Hampton already has six collections under her belt and is poised beyond her years, her voice softly assured, her thoughts arranged in complete paragraphs. “This collection will present empowerment,” she says, “through community and culture.” It references painful touch points between settlers and Indigenous peoples, she continues, such as treaties and the relationships made through beads and trade.
This messaging takes subtle form in the collection I saw coming together. A sheer, nude, gently ruffled bias dress has red Swiss dots that look like beading and embroidery from afar. Pleated pleather is worked into sharp shoulders, mixing a Joan Crawford stance with a fierce warrior vibe.
There is a palpable emotionality to the pieces. Hampton wants the experience of wearing her “modern, authentic Indigenous fashion” to provide women with “a space for healing, thought and action for reconciliation.” She goes on to list the wrongs still being addressed: appropriated culture; the removal and dis- placement of children through adoption and residential schools; and “the stolen sisters,” also known as the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.
These are heavy burdens to place on a fashion show, but Hampton already has the advocacy chops to pull it off.
Some of Hampton’s assurance comes from the eclectic passport stamps of her childhood. A “third culture kid,” Hampton was born in Newfoundland but grew up, variously, in Canada’s Arctic, Australia, England, Indonesia and New Caledonia, following the career of her father, who worked as a project director in the mining industry. “I felt what it was like to be excluded and to be the girl with the funny accent.”
She didn’t have much of a chance to process her own roots while she was busy negotiating all these other faces and places. Her parents met in Montreal; her father is Canadian, of Scottish ancestry, and her mother, though born First Nations (Anishinaabe and Mohawk) was adopted by parents of French and British ancestry and raised outside her culture.
“I was about four, and we were living in Yellowknife, and it was Aboriginal Day, and a friend said, ‘Oh, that is a day for you,’ and I had no idea at the time what it meant.” Then she was at boarding school in Australia, “and Aboriginal meant something else there entirely.” It wasn’t until Hampton came back to Canada after high school in England and began visiting the Indigenous centre at U of T (where she completed an art studio and art history degree), that she came to think about what her own Indian Status card really meant. LESLEY HAMPTON
“I’m still learning,” she says, attending workshops and listening to elders’ stories and absorbing ceremonial rituals. “I’ve been researching my identity, and at the same time, helping my mom learn about hers.”
Hampton showed at last year’s inaugural sellout success Indigenous Fashion Week Toronto, and one of her dresses appeared in the film Through Black Spruce, which premiered at TIFF last fall. But her earliest shows were “small and raw” happenings at clubs around downtown Toronto, where she presented the wearable art from her U of T studies. Then, her career took off during her very first semester in George Brown College’s fashion program in 2016: That first collection was featured in British Vogue and on early red carpet adopters like singer Dragonette, Cheryl Hickey of ET Canada and Olympian Penny Oleksiak. (Today her gowns are spotted on women from Margaret Trudeau to Serena Ryder.)
Hampton’s messaging was being noticed as much as her original work. “I try to make the collection a dialogue — to say something, no matter how big or small,” she says. An early show featured Boston-bombing victim Adrianne Haslet, a former pro ballroom dancer. Hampton designed a dress that showed off Haslet’s prosthetic leg; the two have since become friends and Haslet has walked in subsequent shows. Hampton keeps building on her commitment to bringing different bodies to the runway, and has included plus-sized models, transgender models and models with alopecia.
Her Fall 2018 collection, titled Lithium, featured models who had experienced mental health issues. “That was hard to pull off,” says Hampton. “Agencies don’t encourage models to be open about things like that, for fear they might lose other contracts. So we did a lot of street casting, which is often what I end up doing anyway.” Proceeds from the sale of a jacket that reads “We Are In Control” went to mental health causes, a model of giving back that Hampton hopes to do more of in the future. (The jackets are back in stock priced at $150.)
Her current collection, for Spring 2019, is an exploration of perfectionism and the vices that often accompany its pursuit, titled Foyer de la Vice. It’s inspired by a Degas painting and a dancer’s conflict between her internal self and external pressures. The onyx and blush collection is sexy, strong and delicate at the same time. It also sizes up beautifully, as Hampton, who proudly describes herself as a curvy woman, believes “our perfectly imperfect bodies” all deserve something beautiful.
Hampton’s mix of design and messaging is also getting attention from thought leaders like Sage Paul, the artistic director of Indigenous Fashion Week Toronto, an artist and designer and recognized leader of Indigenous fashion, craft and textiles. Paul says “Collaboration in the Indigenous community provides another way to look at fashion, to engage in something beyond just a commercial endeavour.” Hampton’s work, she says, exemplifies this sharing spirit: “She creates very elegant designs with very beautiful fabric. But I really love the thought and the purpose behind them: Her understanding of how fashion is more than just clothes; it is a way to look at the experiences of different types of people.”
“I try to make the collection a dialogue — to say something, no matter how big or small.”