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Local designer sets fashion week on fire with bold line

A North Shore designer is going international with her bold designs and newest collection inspired by her love of history, with an ode to her favourite poem.

A North Shore designer is going international with her bold designs and newest collection inspired by her love of history, with an ode to her favourite poem.

Famed for her striking leather pieces, North Vancouver resident Kirsten Ley showcased her newest collection Nero last Saturday at Vancouver Fashion Week. The collection was first showcased at New York Fashion Week last month, but last Saturday Ley debuted four new looks and an extra leather moulding piece.

Ley’s designs have also been featured at Australia’s Eco Fashion Week and Amazon Fashion Week in Tokyo. After her hectic week in New York last month, Ley is happy to be back home for her third season at Vancouver Fashion Week.

“New York is really fast paced, but Vancouver because it’s my home I feel like going into my third season there’s a huge level of comfort,” the designer said. “I know that I can go into Vancouver and I’m calm because no matter what, the team that they have in place is so incredible, so I can be calm on show days. There’s a complete level of ease here, which is so wonderful and I just trust them implicitly.”

Being a huge history “nerd” Ley named her collection after the Roman emperor Nero, which was born out of her fascination for the Roman Empire and the great fire of Rome. The collection features dark tones with “burnt apricot and shimmery hues” to embody the flames of the great fire. The pieces also have a hint of green hues and earth tones with her signature leather molding touch.

“I started thinking about emperor Nero of Rome and how he burned his own city to the ground … and it was just this crazy story,” she explained. “Then I thought about how people must’ve been, at that point, just fearing life so horribly that they’re kind of yearning the afterlife and what’s beyond. So it brought me to this world of poetry and death sonnets.”

Ley explained how the poems, like her all-time favourite, “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats, introduced her to forms of symbolism for rebirth and afterlife, which is what inspired her to bring the colour green into Nero.

 “It brought me to this point of resolution in a way where you’re in this terrible situation, you’re yearning for death. Death comes, you’re not afraid of it anymore and then you get to this point of (resolution) in the afterlife, so that was the kind of overarching theme of my collection,” she said.

As a huge John Keats fan, Ley lived in an apartment two blocks from where the poet died and even visited the apartment itself, which is now a museum.

 “I looked out the same window that he looked out when he wrote ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’” she said. “I knew that at some point I wanted to bring that into a collection because it’s really personal to me.”

She points out one of her looks that she showcased last Saturday, which was a green crop top with gathered organza fabric going up one sleeve and pant leg. “That piece to me embodied the poem,” she said.

Ley is also showcasing a two minute short film that she partnered with Goldstein Productions, for Nero, which will illustrate her process for the collection. She plans to collaborate with the production company for every collection.

Ley says even though Vancouver has a small fashion community, the support she gets from local designers and the community is overwhelmingly huge. 

“I now know all the other fashion designers from Vancouver and we’re all friends and we all text each other leading up to shows.”