Exploring Design with Judy Cornish

Photo of last year's Explore Design courtesy of Faulhaber PR.

Witness the rise of the creative (high school graduating) class: yesterday and today, around five thousand twelfth graders piled into the MTCC for playground-of-possibilities Explore Design 2008. (That’s a lot of magic schoolbuses. We’d tell you how many, but if we could do the math, we wouldn’t be blogging.)

Highlights of ED '08 included interactive workshops, teacher talks, and a killer lineup of keynote speeches. Among the all-star roster of Toronto's most creative minds were starchitect Johnson Chou, HGTV's Suzanne Dimma, and Comrags fashion designers Joyce Gunhouse and Judy Cornish. In the spirit of learning about, and celebrating, Toronto’s thriving design community, we talked to Cornish about a quarter-century of Comrags and the richness of inspiration in our city.

You start by seeing, Cornish says.

"When you design, you're always walking with your eyes open," she says, adding that she looks for stray bits of inspiration everywhere from Kensington and St. Lawrence Markets to the junk-spewed Leslie Spit. "Sometimes [the inspiration is] an old lady walking down the street, or sometimes, the way someone misbuttoned a pair of pants."

She and her design partner, Joyce Gunhouse, have been slipping those spontaneous sightings into their grander vision—modern, uncomplicated clothing for strong women—for 25 years now. In an industry with few happy endings (just the other day, Arthur Mendonca went from being Canada's next big talent to newest fashion bankruptcy), Comrags is a very long success story. And Cornish makes it clear they're still writing.

"We deal in ideas," she says. It should sound pretentious—after all, Comrags clothes are ready-to-wear to work, not haute-conceptual—but if you've seen the sentiment expressed in one of their exquisite, precisely executed fashion shows, you know it rings true. "Every season looks like us, but is influenced in a different way. One fall it's androgyny, the next it's... more romantic.

"The world is always changing. You can go by the same thing a hundred times, and the hundred and first time, it looks different."

And of course, her philosophy can be applied with a wide brush.

"Everyone is influenced by everything," she says—we can almost hear her shrug—when we ask if she and Gunhouse take cues from their designer peers, in fashion or otherwise. "The collaborative spirit has always been there [in Toronto's design community.] Karim Rashid was making clothes before he made products. And we designed a dress for the ROM."

ROMrags? Not a bad collab, come to think of it.

Photo courtesy of Comrags, from their Fall 2008 collection.