This Friday night at 7:30pm, the PHASE fashion show turns Halifax Central Library’s Paul O’Regan Hall into a runway, with models strutting the latest creations by three soon-to-be design grads from daVinci College. The students’ collections feature everything from understated, blue-and-black plus-size separates to lacy, Coachella-ready dresses inspired by Frank Ocean songs. One of the students designing for the show is Selasie Tagboto, whose childhood in Ghana partially inspired her minimalist-shaped, vividly-printed pieces. “My tagline is ‘to be as bold as you like,’ so I have pieces which are more complicated and pieces that are more simple,” she says.
1. "I always liked clothes and I liked fashion. I didn’t really know how to do design per se until I came to this school, but I would always get my mom to make things for me and go ‘Mom, can you make this for me but make it this way? I like this element and this element,’” says Tagboto. “So I like that I came here and now I can actually make what I see.”
2. Tagboto wanted the prints she used to be as authentic as possible, so she searched the internet for specific patterns and sent screen shots to family still living in Ghana. Her aunt picked up fabrics matching these examples from local markets. “I liked that when I saw the prints I was like ‘Oh, this will be perfect for this outfit and this will be perfect for this outfit,’ so it was the prints that inspired me to make these garments,” she says.
3. “I really like attention to details, so I looked at things like handbags and hats and thought ‘Oh this would be cool, what if I tried putting this on an outfit, how would that look?’” Tagboto says, highlighting this vest’s collar and pockets as examples.
