Travel, museums, theatre, nature, walking around your own neighbourhood; inspiration can be found anywhere and everywhere, you just have to be open to seeing it.

Growing up in Vancouver, Michelle developed a keen sense of fashion at an early age after having spent many years hanging around a children’s clothing store that her mother opened in the mid-70s. Michelle was among the first graduating class of French Immersion in the province of British Columbia which led to her spending her first year of university at the Sorbonne, in Paris, and then completing her studies at the University of British Columbia with a degree in French Literature. By this time, she had also developed what would become a lifelong addiction to fashion magazines—with tear sheets taped to her walls throughout her teenage years—and was spending a lot of her free time in movie theatres. It was inevitable that these two worlds would ultimately collide.

After graduation, Michelle moved to Toronto where she worked at Toronto Life Fashion magazine for four years as an Assistant Editor—further learning and being exposed to the stories that clothing can tell and the emotions they can evoke.

One too many cold Ontario winters later, it was time to move back to Vancouver where everything fell into place. She was offered a job as an Assistant Designer on an Independent Feature and hasn’t looked back since. Thirty years later she is still looking at all the ways that clothing can help bring characters to life and serve the story. As a friend said, our job as Costume Designers is “to give quiet emphasis to the drama and to subtly tell that story.”