It’s been a bit of an odd week for Stanley Carroll. While poring over countless hours of videotaped runway shows from the collections that comprise his quarter-century career in fashion design, Carroll realized he’d never actually witnessed one of his own shows before.
“I’m always in the back,” he explains. “Most of them have been videotaped, and I’ve always refused to watch them.” And it may have been a good thing too, considering his reaction to them. “There were tears in my eyes,” he says, “and it wasn’t because I was sad. I was laughing so hard, because they were so funny and bad.”
He chortles at the thought, and indeed, it is a little strange how something can seem so haute one decade, and so hideous the next.
Perhaps it’s a bit strange, too, that Carroll’s latest collection is themed “Stranger in a Strange Land.” Strange in a fitting way, that is. Carroll says the inspiration for his current collection stems from the character of a writer who travels abroad in search of a story.
“[It’s] about an individual who is out of his or her normal element, who spends a lot of time observing what happens around them... and they kind of stick out—you can tell that they don’t belong,” he explains. “What’s interesting about them is that they feel comfortable in that situation. They feel comfortable standing out in whatever sort of crowd they’re in.”
The “Stranger” theme could be regarded as a disguised autobiography for Carroll himself, who emigrated from Utrecht, Holland when he was 16, and who has maintained a far-from-mainstream approach to fashion ever since his career began in the early ’80s.
“I love the medium,” he says, “but I don’t have much good to say about the industry as a whole. The fashion industry by and large is a lot of... well, let’s call it superficial crap but with pockets of really brilliant people out there doing some really cool things and giving us some really cool images.”
One of his favourite collections was the Canadiana collection he designed between 1986 and 1987, which included garments ranging from thigh-high mukluks to igloo-shaped coats to full-length dresses sequined with images of oil rigs. “Not being originally from Canada, it was a neat way for me to celebrate that kind of stuff—I don’t think anybody else was doing it at the time,” he remembers. “Frankly, a lot of people didn’t get it.”
He pauses and laughs. “Trust me.”
He describes the disappointment that same collection prompted during an international trade show stint that year during the Toronto Festival of Fashion, where he found his collection being “edited” for the international stage rather than celebrated as uniquely Canadian. “I thought, ‘What better way to show what Canada is doing as far as design goes?’—to actually turn into itself rather than pretend to be from Paris or New York or whatever.”
Despite his best efforts, it was clear that the event organizers would have preferred Paris or New York. “They went out of their way to tone down our Canadiana image as much as they could,” he says. “They changed the music, they edited out certain pieces that were strongly Canadian. It was disappointing on two levels: one, that their attitude was so insecure and narrow-minded; but also from a creative point of view where I felt that they were editing my work.”
For all our starry-eyed notions that a better cultural infrastructure exists in the Big City, Carroll says it’s not quite so welcoming to someone who thinks too far outside the box. “The freedom to work in whichever way you want to just doesn’t exist there as much as people think,” he says.
And that, Carroll explains, is one of the things he loves about designing in Edmonton—and perhaps the reason he’s chosen to remain here as a designer over two decades when countless other local artists have made the exodus to other parts of the country. There’s a more intimate community to play in here—and when everyone has to occupy the same (smaller) pond, there’s less politicking to put up with too. “You’re sort of playing with no rulebook, so you can do whatever you want,” he explains. “I think a lot of us are in that same situation with Edmonton, that love-hate thing where on one hand you realize it’s an incredibly cool breeding ground because of that—you can do whatever the hell you want and nobody seems to stand in your way, and they’ll actually hear you out—but then there’s a certain point where the infrastructure isn’t there, and sometimes you have to move on.”
Though he admits that he’s had to deal with a few setbacks in a city where industry and business don’t understand the ins and outs of fashion, Carroll does his part to pass on his years of accumulated knowledge to the city’s emerging style gurus by standing on the board of the Emerging Designer competition at Edmonton Fashion Week.
“He’s a world of wisdom for our young designers coming up,” says Sandra Sing Fernandes, organizer of Edmonton Fashion Week. “Looking back at his evolution, he’s definitely got his own style. He is somebody [whose designs] you can spot a mile away. A lot of designers will do a collection, and there won’t be much connection from one season’s collection to another, but Stanley’s always had some continuity and flow in everything he’s done. He’s definitely got a European sensibility. Even though it’s trendy in some senses, it’s always clean and classic. We’re so happy that he’s here, and that we haven’t lost him to another city.”
Or another Strange Land. But he seems pretty happy in our familiar landscape—and we’re in need of more strangers like him.
