Made to Measure: Dimitri Chris

by CAILIN SMART for Urbane Magazine

Photos by RODRIGO ECHEVERRIA NORIEGA

Urbane catches up with Montreal menswear designer Dimitri-Chris.

The Dimitri-Chris premiere showing at Toronto Fashion Week last March surprised and delighted. Toronto fashion is much like Toronto literature: we love to define our woman, whether she lurks on a Nada Shepherd catwalk or in the pages of a Margaret Atwood novel.  Enter menswear designer Alexiou Dimitri-Chris to unsettle our feminine obsession.”For womenswear there’s just so much out there,” he says. “At any price point you can get it, any style you can get it. It’s a question of options, and there aren’t a lot of options for men.”

Dimitri-Chris has a diminutive frame, which led him to become a tailor as well as a designer. “I learned also from my tailor. Because I am small in size, every time I had a formal affair,” he recalls, “I would have to go to a tailor. I would watch him and direct him.” In a scene where often designers use pattern-makers and tailors while acting as hands-off creative directors, Dimitri-Chris is a tailor, making made-to-measure suits for Montreal’s fashionable gentlemen.

The Dimitri-Chris Fall Winter 2010 collection has a Gothic vibe that evokes how Charlotte Bronte might have envisioned her darker characters. The show started with a video of black stallions to set the tone. The models were clad in a tour-de-force of unique tailoring: corsets, long slits instead of full sleeves and lots of knitwear. “With the scarves and the knitwear, it was supposed to bring an after- hunting, country, lounging feel to the collection.” A sombre palette of greys, white and black made the collection as wearable as it was avant-garde. “I wanted the show to feel like sunrise on an English moor.” says Dimitri-Chris.

“I wanted the show to feel like sunrise on an English moor.”

Like many talented designers, Dimitri-Chris had the advantage of learning fashion at an early age. “My mother was a homemaker,” he explains. “She was always making things, I was at home with her, so I would always take scraps of fabric and make clothes for my sister’s Barbie dolls. My sisters also always had fashion magazines lying around, for me to look at. I think had it not been for that, I would not have had the interest in fashion I developed later. When I went to Europe, it nurtured it even more.” The European influence, present in his debut collection, also influences his business plan, as he hopes to turn his line into a brand and reach international markets. “Montreal is just who I am now, and where I am now,” he says, but his recent invitation to the fashion tradeshows in Italy marks him as the rare Canadian designer who has created serious European interest.

Fashion for Dimitri-Chris is a matter of autobiography. “There is a lot of me in my collections,” he says, “When I make a new piece, I wear the sample out to see how it fits and people’s reactions to it. That’s what I did for example with the corset piece.” This level of intimacy with his product places his own personality at the forefront of his line. It is a clever tactic in a time when designers themselves emerge from behind the scenes and become fashion celebrities.

“The challenge of menswear is the level of conservatism.” says Dimitri-Chris. “In a suit, not many things can change. There are certain ways to go around it, change the proportion, change the details. Introduce different ways to wear it. We are conservative in Canada beyond belief.” He already proved he can change our suits, who knows what he’ll take his pins and scissors to next.