Student Awards

Adele Turcotte Memorial Award

Donor Anonymous

Alicia Unwin

Alicia has always found her calling in fashion. When she was young, styling and arranging unconventional pieces together into outfits was one of her pastimes. Later, learning how to sew from her mother, Alicia began to create her own clothes. Today, she is so fortunate to be able to continue channeling her creativity and exploration of fashion at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is extremely thankful to be recognized and have her creative achievements supported by the Arthur Lee Family and Adele Turcotte Memorial award. Alicia also extends her appreciation to the TMU awards committee for their consideration and dedication to fashion studies.

Erica Barrientos

Erica Barrientos (she/her) is a first-year fashion student at Toronto Metropolitan University. It has always been her passion to study the arts and is beyond excited to continue her education in her undergraduate program. She is extremely thankful for everyone who has has helped her shape the artist that she is and is grateful that her work has been recognized and awarded for. Erica continues to flourish learning about fashion and will do so in her remaining time at the university.

Jahna Bird

Jahna is currently a first year fashion student at Toronto Metropolitan University planning on heading down the design route for the rest of her schooling. She focuses on designing her looks with hidden meaning, messages and unconventional creativity, as she believes metaphorical and inventive garments are the most artistically gratifying way to keep the audience invested. Jahna hopes to continue working her hardest throughout her design oriented classes, as her imaginative illustrations and dream projects require much more skill than she currently has. She has opened her palette to a wide variety of possible careers in the future, only time will tell where she decides to venture.

Allan J. Chindemi Memorial Award

Jonathan Dumitra

Alice Mitchell Whitley Award in Apparel Design

Donor Anonymous

Ysa Dan Mari Fajardo

My dream is to become a Fashion designer with her own Haute Couture house and Fashion and Lifestyle magazine. I am an art admirer and a creative person. I've sketched and painted my designs since I was a little girl. I am a Type 1 diabetic and want to design inclusive and lowkey diabetic-friendly clothes. I'm also interested in designing Barong Tagalogs and Filipinianas. I am a second-year fashion design student at Toronto Metropolitan University School of Fashion :)

Anusha Kuhanathan

Anusha Kuhanathan is a third year Fashion student. She is currently serving as the Director of Fashion at The Society of the Creative School. Through her creative work, she aims to connect with and represent her South Asian heritage.

Megan O'Connell

Arthur Lee Family Awards

Alicia Unwin

Alicia has always found her calling in fashion. When she was young, styling and arranging unconventional pieces together into outfits was one of her pastimes. Later, learning how to sew from her mother, Alicia began to create her own clothes. Today, she is so fortunate to be able to continue channeling her creativity and exploration of fashion at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is extremely thankful to be recognized and have her creative achievements supported by the Arthur Lee Family and Adele Turcotte Memorial award. Alicia also extends her appreciation to the TMU awards committee for their consideration and dedication to fashion studies.

Erica Barrientos

Erica Barrientos (she/her) is a first-year fashion student at Toronto Metropolitan University. It has always been her passion to study the arts and is beyond excited to continue her education in her undergraduate program. She is extremely thankful for everyone who has has helped her shape the artist that she is and is grateful that her work has been recognized and awarded for. Erica continues to flourish learning about fashion and will do so in her remaining time at the university.

Black Fashion Student Association Awards

Stecy Franck

Black Fashion Student Association First Year Award

After her studies in Marketing and starting a clothing brand to address Social Justice and Sustainability, Stecy has embarked on her next journey at Toronto Metropolitan University in Fashion. With her strong opinions on the industry and how to move forward positively, She wants to mix various mediums to showcase the ways identity and creativity intersect in storytelling while bringing more representation for people who look like her in decision-making positions. In the hope of pursuing creative direction, she aims to understand and master brands' vision through digital, print, film and events. In her free time, she enjoys critiquing fashion for its art, current trends and the intersections of the racialized body in the fashion industry. Her ambitious vision of how immigrant black women and fatness can be seen in fashion pushes her overachieving self to dream as big as she can.

Precious Ayolade

Black Fashion Student Association Third Year Award

Precious Ayolade is a 3rd-year Fashion Design student. As a black creative venturing into the fashion industry, she wants to create a safe space for BIPOC who are being turned away due to their background, culture, religion, or even body size. Through her designs, she wants to teach others to embrace their inner child, princess, prince, or just royalty, without the need for society to define who they are or should be. By helping others like her, she engages and assists those struggling to find their way and battling mental health issues.

Brettons' Designer of the Year Award

Donor Anonymous

Sara He

Carrie Souter Memorial Award

Ji Jung Yeon

FASHION Magazine Travel Award

Audrey Chen

Audrey Chen is in her 3rd year studying the fashion design concentration and her work can be found on Instagram @audsmiley (external link) . With circularity in mind, her designs focus on creating adaptable pieces which invite wearers to play and form a new, personal relationship with the garment throughout each use. Audrey is partaking in a Winter 2023 exchange semester at UAL: London College of Fashion for fashion design & development. There, she is furthering her personal design development from a different perspective, while also exploring the London fashion scene, including her studio/design internship with the womenswear designer Eudon Choi.

Helen and Sulo Hutko Award

Paula Fernandez

Helen and Sulo Hutko Award 2nd Year, Fashion

Swetha Sutharsan

Helen and Sulo Hutko Award 2nd Year, Fashion

Swetha Sutharsan is a second year student in The Creative School’s Fashion program. She is committed to working towards the decolonization of the fashion industry and passionate about raising awareness for traditional South Asian dress practices. Along with her studies, she is the creative director of StyleCircle, and an executive assistant of INTRO Runway and Exhibit Show. She is extremely grateful for all the opportunities the School of Fashion has provided, and is looking forward to seeing what the future holds!

Alliza Vitto

Helen and Sulo Hutko Award 3rd Year, Fashion

Alliza Vitto is a graphic designer and third-year fashion student with an interest in sustainable and accessible practices in design. With a background in creative direction and visual media, she is constantly inspired by the communities she is a part of. She is currently on exchange at the Amsterdam Fashion Institute and hopes to gain further experience during her time in the Netherlands.

Precious Ayolade

Helen and Sulo Hutko Award 3rd Year, Fashion 

Precious Ayolade is a 3rd-year Fashion Design student. As a black creative venturing into the fashion industry, she wants to create a safe space for BIPOC who are being turned away due to their background, culture, religion, or even body size. Through her designs, she wants to teach others to embrace their inner child, princess, prince, or just royalty, without the need for society to define who they are or should be. By helping others like her, she engages and assists those struggling to find their way and battling mental health issues.

Camilla Leonelli Calzado

Helen and Sulo Hutko Award 4th Year,  Fashion Design 

Camilla Leonelli Calzado is a 4th year Fashion design student, born in Santiago de Cuba. Camilla's research focus over the last four years at TMU has been on experimental textiles, historical fashion, sustainability and fibre arts. 

Camilla has been working as Dr. Alison Matthews David's research assistant on the Fabric of Crime Project since October 2021. The Fabric of Crime: A Forensic History of Fashion, investigates the theme of crime and clothing as weapon, evidence, and disguise. Within this project Camilla has gone on to co-curate an exhibition entitled 'Captive Labour' with MA Fashion student Sephra Lamothe, which explores exploitative labour practices within the federal prison system historically and in modern times. Additionally, Camilla has researched areas of her heritage and historical dress practices, specifically colonial Cuba. She is interested in the ways in which fashion and material culture correlate with social narratives, identity  and prejudice. Through love of this material culture ,Camilla has been passionate in exploring her own Cuban history within textile design. Within her capstone, she will look at the historical implications of Carnaval in Cuba and depict a narrative through textile and garment design.

Joseph Gleasure

Helen and Sulo Hutko Award 4th Year,  Fashion Communication

The Lesley Hampton Scholarship, in partnership with the Ontario Mining Association

Brandon Morin

My name is Brandon Morin Fox. I’m a Two-Spirit Indigenous fashion student studying in my second year at Toronto Metropolitan University. I am also the Events and Community Relations Ambassador at the Fashion Zone and Research Assistant at the Beading Circle.

Fashion can be a signifier of essential issues. It can be used as a tool for storytelling inequality with racial and social injustice that affects Indigenous peoples. I also believe that fashion and art contribute to propelling the economies of Indigenous communities through the conscious buying and funding of Indigenous artists, entrepreneurs and initiatives. In the near future, I also hope to create opportunities that will contribute to the preservation of Indigenous knowledge and practices

Linda Lewis Award

Denisa Marginean

Denisa Marginean is a fashion merchandising consultant and writer currently based in Toronto, Canada. Marginean holds a Masters from Toronto Metropolitan University where she explored the intersection of luxury, artistic design practices, and anti-fashion sub-cultures. With advanced research and luxury experience, she is interested in bridging her education with the current fashion market. 

Major Research Project Book Prize

Emily Dugas

An MA Fashion and Bachelor of Commerce graduate with professional experience in advertising and strategic marketing, Emily brings both a creative and analytical perspective to her work. Emily’s MRP research presented an observation of the Canadian ecolabel market and determined which ecolabels are being used by Canadian apparel companies. Her study calls attention to the commodification of sustainable efforts through the use of labelling schemes and discusses the implications of widespread ecolabel use in the apparel industry.

Major Research Project Book Award

Alliya Lopez

Alliya Lopez is a recent MA Fashion graduate from Toronto Metropolitan University. She is passionate about representation in fashion, ethical consumption, and analyzing the colourism that is perpetuated by the beauty industry through skin whitening.

Major Research Project Book Award

Reyhab Patel

Reyhab Mohmed Patel is continuing her academic interests as a first year PhD in Sociology student at Carleton University.  Her current research interests are on storytelling practices, futurist studies, Islamophobia studies and arts-based activism. Additionally, she works as a creative director for various upcoming storytelling projects. Including Khawab - that is premiering in July of 23' at the Innovation Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University. 

A Mipsterz Collaboration: Khawab: Fashion, Art and Culture - A storytelling project 

This project, Khawab is in collaboration with the Mipsterz – an arts collective based in New York City. Khawab is a storytelling project that focuses on transforming Muslim women into their fictional alter-egos.Muslim Futurism is used as a social movement that incorporates fashion, art and culture as modes of identity formation, storytelling and self-expressions and as a way of resisting rampant Islamophobia. The purpose of this creative project is to reimagine the inclusion of Muslim women into the realm of fictional storytelling.

Research Methods

Chhandasi Ganguly

Chhandasi Ganguly works at the intersection of fashion and media by synthesizing her training and skills in literature, film, and fashion. She considers herself a storyteller with a knack for weaving stories with words and outfits. She has experience in written and visual content communication and hopes to work with a renowned fashion magazine in the future.

History/Theory I

Camille McConkey

Camille is in her second year of the MA in Fashion Program at Toronto Metropolitan University and holds a Bachelor of Commerce in Accounting from the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on CSR reporting and indicator disclosure in the fashion industry.

Digital Studio, Diversity in Fashion 

Chloe Numbers

Chloe Numbers is a second-year MA Fashion student at TMU. Her research area is fashion history, with a particular focus on early-twentieth century dress worn by those with historically marginalized and 'non-normative' bodies. Other research interests include fashion history in the Jewish diaspora, the history of women and domestic handicrafts, and the historical footwear. Her favourite time period for fashion is late Edwardian (but only if you make her choose).

History/Theory II

Megan Hughes

Megan K. Hughes is a TMU School of Fashion Master's scholar, writer, and contract lecturer. Her work focuses on millinery, research-creation, pedagogy, and community-building.

Storytelling and Design

Rebecca Cadieux

Avant Garde Fashion

Julie Klein

Julie Klein is a designer and artist from Buffalo, NY, USA, pursuing her MA in fashion at TorontonMetropolitan University. Her research and designs focus on sustainability in fashion and how designncan connect and educate on environmental and ethical issues. Julie loves to experiment with color and form in a variety of methods, both physical and digital. She is thankful to have had the opportunity to pursue her MA at TMU, as it has led to some of her favorite work to date. Julie is also a co-founder of a nonprofit art studio for ages 3-18 in Grand Island, NY, and a graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology and Buffalo State University.

The Fashioned Body

Deanna Armenti

Deanna Armenti (She/Fae) is an emerging lesbian poet, zine creator, and textile researcher. She is currently attending the Fashion Master’s program at Toronto Metropolitan University and is in her culminating thesis year. Her research is practice-based and explores the intersection of embodiment and affect, investigating the queer erotic form through the lens of queer and kink studies. Her thesis project, Ripple: A Wearable Environment, is a large-scale wearable textile installation piece based on a ripple on water which explores the dreamlike state that subs (or submissives) can experience during BDSM scenes, called subspace.

Deanna is an editorial assistant for TMU's open access journal, Fashion Studies. Her article Subspace: an Internal and Liminal Place is also currently under review with the journal. 

For samples of her research visit @queer.textiles on Instagram.

Deanna also runs her own queer publication, The Sapphic Printing Press, which publishes an ongoing photo zine called SAPPHIC featuring writers worldwide. The Sapphic Printing Press has been featured in Open Space Victoria's Small Press showcase (2020), the AGO Insider's Pride-ful Narratives article (2021), and at Broken Pencil’s Canzine (2022). Her creative writing has been featured in Feels Zine and Carousel Zine. Her poetry zine I Know My Own Heart was nominated in the Litzine category at Broken Pencil’s 2022 Zine Awards. Check out @thesapphicprintingpress on Instagram and Tiktok.

Fashion and Entrepreneurship

Emma Kim

Emma Kim is currently a second-year MA Fashion candidate in the Yeates School of Graduate Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. Drawing on her background in Art History, her research explores the intersections between art and fashion.

Research Methods

Jonathan Lee

I am a first-year student in the MA Fashion program, a fashion designer, and a tarot card reader. Having graduated from the Undergraduate Fashion Design program at TMU, I decided to continue pursuing my academic crave from a theoretical approach to fashion. I am interested in exploring East Asian fashion studies and cultural studies through the lens of decolonization. In my current study, I will be researching the ethnocultural identity and diaspora of Hongkongers, and how it relates to the city’s fashion system.

History/Theory I

Mia Yaguchi-Chow

Mia is a non-binary artist, photographer, illustrator, graphic designer, and actor. They enjoy creating work that contributes to cultural discourses, starting dialogues between themselves and others, and encouraging authentic and comfortable self-expression. Mia uses their artwork as a way to learn about and express themselves and wishes to make and contribute to positive change with their work.

Art in Fashion

Emma Kim 

Emma Kim is currently a second-year MA Fashion candidate in the Yeates School of Graduate Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. Drawing on her background in Art History, her research explores the intersections between art and fashion.

Globalization and Fashion

Megan Hughes

Megan K. Hughes is a TMU School of Fashion Master's scholar, writer, and contract lecturer. Her work focuses on millinery, research-creation, pedagogy, and community-building.

Digital Studio

Amanda Pearn

Amanda Pearn (she/her) is a textile artist specializing in the intersection between couture fashion and tailoring. She is currently a second year Masters of Fashion candidate at Toronto Metropolitan University exploring her academic interests within traditional and modern facets of the tailoring trade. Her upcoming MRP project investigates the tailor and client relationship through a material culture lens. Amanda is also the Founder of Rosebud Studio (rosebudstudio.ca) which offers holistic wardrobe services through bespoke tailoring, styling,and access to professional attire for women entering the workforce.

Digital Studio

Haya Abdelhamid

NAMSB Foundation, Inc. Jack C. Lebowitz Award for Excellence in Men's Wear Design

Donor Anonymous

Jonathan Dumitra

The Robert Ott Experiential Fashion Travel Award

Alliza Vitto

Alliza Vitto is a graphic designer and third-year fashion student with an interest in sustainable and accessible practices in design. With a background in creative direction and visual media, she is constantly inspired by the communities she is a part of. She is currently on exchange at the Amsterdam Fashion Institute and hopes to gain further experience during her time in the Netherlands.

Sandra Haynes Memorial Award

This award was established in memory of Sandra Haynes. It is distributed to students enrolled in the School of Fashion who demonstrate academic excellence.

Oshon Erutor

Oshon Eruotor is a third year fashion student. With an interest in both fashion design and communications, Oshon’s goal as a designer is to create an experience for both the wearer and viewer. Regardless of the form she is working with, Oshon aspires to introduce innovative ideas playing with the versatility of fashion and the many different aspects of life it can be paired with. Oshon wants to reflect her curiosity in her designs, while creating a safe atmosphere for a diverse and inclusive audience.

Kenneth Song

The Simon Chang Foundation for Change Award

Adebayo Omole

Born in Nigeria, Bayo’s parents instilled strong life values built on hard work and persistence from an early age. Early on, he realized that diversity is a strength. This belief propelled him to work hard to achieve personal goals and objectives with the firm conviction that he could be anything he wanted, regardless of race or background.

He is in his fourth year studying Fashion Design at Toronto Metropolitan University, where his heritage, experiences, and love of color inform his designs. His designs mix his love of color and his appreciation for art history as he constantly strives to show people the beauty of diversity.

Theo Cokkinos Memorial Award

Sara He

Victoria Amadio Memorial Scholarship

Curtis Matysek

Curtis Matysek is a graduate of the Fashion Design program at Toronto Metropolitan University. Their work is centered around corsetry, textile manipulation, queerness and the macabre. Curtis' graduate collection "A Horrific Exploration of the Queer Sublime"  sought out the feeling of the transcendent familiar. Chasing the fleeting moments of sublime through severe silhouette and textile manipulation, this art too wear collection is an ongoing project that is forever evolving. Currently Curtis is focusing on Wuthering Delight, their small business specializing in ready-to-wear corsetry and clubwear inspired by their runway pieces.

Zoe Cokkinos Memorial Scholarship

Curtis Matysek

Curtis Matysek is a graduate of the Fashion Design program at Toronto Metropolitan University. Their work is centered around corsetry, textile manipulation, queerness and the macabre. Curtis' graduate collection "A Horrific Exploration of the Queer Sublime"  sought out the feeling of the transcendent familiar. Chasing the fleeting moments of sublime through severe silhouette and textile manipulation, this art too wear collection is an ongoing project that is forever evolving. Currently Curtis is focusing on Wuthering Delight, their small business specializing in ready-to-wear corsetry and clubwear inspired by their runway pieces.

Zoe Cokkinos Memorial Scholarship

Camilla Leonelli Calzado

Helen and Sulo Hutko Award 4th Year,  Fashion Design 

Camilla Leonelli Calzado is a 4th year Fashion design student, born in Santiago de Cuba. Camilla's research focus over the last four years at TMU has been on experimental textiles, historical fashion, sustainability and fibre arts. 

Camilla has been working as Dr. Alison Matthews David's research assistant on the Fabric of Crime Project since October 2021. The Fabric of Crime: A Forensic History of Fashion, investigates the theme of crime and clothing as weapon, evidence, and disguise. Within this project Camilla has gone on to co-curate an exhibition entitled 'Captive Labour' with MA Fashion student Sephra Lamothe, which explores exploitative labour practices within the federal prison system historically and in modern times. Additionally, Camilla has researched areas of her heritage and historical dress practices, specifically colonial Cuba. She is interested in the ways in which fashion and material culture correlate with social narratives, identity  and prejudice. Through love of this material culture ,Camilla has been passionate in exploring her own Cuban history within textile design. Within her capstone, she will look at the historical implications of Carnaval in Cuba and depict a narrative through textile and garment design.