visionaries of Fashion Inside the minds of Canada’s most creative retail heroes By Shawna Cohen
JOHN GERHARDT: THE STATEMENT MAKER The windows at Holt Renfrew’s Toronto flagship aren’t much larger than, say, a hotel bathroom or office cubicle, but somehow each season John Gerhardt transforms them into a fantastical world that looks more like a global-art
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installation than flat-out fashion retailer. “I never want anything to be too literal,” says Gerhardt, Holt Renfrew’s creative director. Take, for instance, the windows he designed one holiday season that had Bloor Street passersby brave subfreezing temperatures just to catch a glimpse. They featured a long dinner table that ran the length of the windows—each treated with its own colour and meal course—to create what Gerhardt calls “a sense of abandonment and decadence.” The current windows celebrate fashion-house icons but are, in typical Gerhardt style, layered with pop-culture references spanning art, music, literature and architecture. Dolce & Gabbana, for instance, is depicted as Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus,” and Gerhardt has Venus emerging in leopard print from a gold-enameled shell. “It’s very important that we capture people’s imaginations. I don’t want people to get it right away—they’ve got to stand there for awhile to see all the little references and nuances. The nuances are critical.” It’s these nuances that have earned Gerhardt recognition on an international scale. In 2008 Gerhardt, FLARE’s former fashion director, was listed in Time magazine’s prestigious Time100 list, which recognizes top artists, leaders and design stars, for his window displays. His ability to make small spaces appear larger than life is inherent in his artistic personality. Not bad for a modest guy from Moncton, N.B., who says that growing up in a small city with few resources forced him to use his imagination. It’s a skill that’s served him well in his role as creative director where, in addition to creating these magical windows for all nine Holt Renfrew locations, he oversees all visual merchandising as well as the Holts in-house catalogues (he recently produced a photo shoot in Istanbul, which he chose because it’s the only city in the world to bridge two continents). In 2009, he masterminded the retailer’s first-ever video campaign at The Gladstone Hotel. Starring supermodels Coco Rocha and Behati Prinsloo, he had them playing dress-up in a playful, slumber party-esque fashion. Gerhardt gains inspiration from the same cultural references that are so prevalent in his work. Coming up with a brilliant concept can mean anything from staring at a wall for an entire day to taking a nap because, as Gerhardt says, “In dreams, things come to you.” His musical playlist ranges from Martha Wainwright to Jill Scott, and he’s obsessed with films by Sofia Coppola because of her ability to capture “real moments.” The idea of authenticity comes up repeatedly with Gerhardt, who also cites as inspiration designers Dries Van Noten, Alber Elbaz, Mikhael Kale and Virginia Johnson (“Canada’s answer to Marni”), and painter Lucian Freud. Online, Gerhardt says “I’m really bored with gossip [sites],” opting instead to browse The Imagist (the imagist.com) for its more esoteric references, and New York Magazine’s fashion blog, The Cut (nymag.com/daily/ fashion), which he defines as “Women’s Wear Daily with bite.” Shoppers are seeing the same approach at the store, he insists. “We’re going back to more authentic fashion. The Internet has dissolved all of the walls around us. [Everyone] knows just as much as the experts,” he says. “We have to talk to people, not from a trend standpoint anymore, but from a choice standpoint.” > www.flare.com
portrait photography, norman wong; editor, elio iannacci.
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