Fashion Art Toronto (FAT) Fall/Winter 2025 is not just about showcasing innovative designs on the runway, it is about transforming the city into an authentic, living, breathing embodiment of art, fashion, culture, and experimentation — a showcase seamlessly woven together by the innovative hands and minds of both emerging and established designers.
The six-day, multidisciplinary visionary display will embrace the theme RE: FORM, an exploration of how the city’s vast fashion landscape can be reimagined and reconstructed, and a celebration of the many fabrics that blend, construct, and shape the city’s artistic, creative, and stylistic distinctiveness.
“We kind of are, you know, rethinking the festival and growing and really trying to highlight what makes Canadian fashion unique. What makes Toronto fashion unique? We’re really kind of celebrating our own identity, our designers, our local fashion. That’s kind of like a really big theme for us, starting this year and going into the future,” Vanja Vasic, founder and creative director of Fashion Art Toronto’s 1664 Fashion Week, told Now Toronto on Tuesday.
FAT F/W 25 will kick off on Nov. 10 at the underground parking lot at Woodside Square in Scarborough from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m., featuring an eccentric opening night party and a transformative, paradise-inspired debut show from Suburban Deviant, a brand led by Canadian artist Danny Welsch.
“There’s hundreds and hundreds of these amazing toys underground, and with a brand like Suburban Devant, they play a lot into that childhood and playfulness and colour and their queer identity and all of these amazing things.”
WHAT TO EXPECT THIS YEAR: FASHION MEETS ETHEREAL
A range of off-site activations and installations will follow FAT’s F/W 25 opening night, including a House of Hendo showcase inside a historic church in West Queen West, an immersive runway experience in a downtown warehouse presented by Sagradessa and Fashion Presents Mario Fugnitto, a Styling Lounge at Le Germain Hotel, and over 42 other designers strutting their creative work in runway format.
“House of Hendo, you know, their collection also has a lot of these really beautiful textures and history with the fabrics… When you walk into that space, there’s a lot of these beautiful breasty colours, yellows, greens, and kind of like a sense of history and time,” Vasic said.
With a pop-up shop elevating more than 30 brands, a styling lounge featuring designs from an additional 20 creators, and an Indigenous curated segment, along with creative contributions from Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, Vasic says it is exciting to see such a diverse range of creative talent coming together in one place.
“It’s a really great opportunity for people wanting to discover Canadian designs to experience it in different ways, you know?” Vasic said.
Drawing inspiration from this year’s theme, which highlights distinctive expressions in artistic, culturally layered fashion, the focus on occupying unique spaces that best represent the stories, visions, and explorations of featured designers felt integral to the creative direction, while pushing the bounds of familiarity.
“I think that definitely helps when you have a unique space where you can showcase your work, you know… This year has really been kind of about going out of our comfort zone a lot,” Vasic said.
For Vasic, having the ability to showcase designs in hidden, unconventional venues is what sets this year’s edition apart, offering an invitation to explore the innovative depths of the city and beyond, and discover the places that speak most to the stories of some of its creative talent.
“We have our main fashion hub this season, but we’re really trying to kind of incorporate other parts of the city as well, and just kind of push the boundaries a little bit, and take fashion, for example, to Scarborough. That’s a little bit of a bold move and unknown territory, but a really exciting space to explore, a new area of the city.”
A DESIGNER’S VISION: KELLY HENDERSON X HOUSE OF HENDO
A culmination of clothing has always surrounded Kelly Henderson, the fashion designer behind House of Hendo. Thrifting, modifying, repurposing, integrating, deconstructing, reconstructing, and breathing new life into garments have remained at her fashion forefront, even as the FAT F/W 25 season gets underway.
“I’ve just always been really interested in the creative aspect of fashion. I learned fashion through thrifting at a young age…It was always fun to take thrift and modify it, alter it, or combine them or break things apart,” Henderson told Now Toronto on Thursday.
The elements of film, fashion, television, costumes, and music videos, combined with her innate love for design, led to the creation of House of Hendo in 2020, with a particular focus on post-runway production having opened her eyes to a need to minimize.
“Learning about the piles that come after production sort of led me to want to build a collection around that which already exists, which people might think of as a throwaway or a leftover or, you know, they don’t want it anymore,” she said.
Like the fabrics she often repurposes in cyclical form, inspiration for this year’s runway was drawn from a childhood book and a photo of her grandmother — a communicative mirror into the past and a guiding vision for a fashion way forward.
The concepts of circular fashion, sustainability, upcycling, thrifting, and reusing have informed Henderson’s creative process for FAT. She begins by visualizing colour palettes and allowing the fabrics to speak to her based on their quantity, colour, yardage, and overarching theme.
“I get inspired by something that becomes sort of the basis of the storyline or the inspiration for the show.”
The Pile VI: Ripen or Rot collection — set for the FAT off-site runway show on Nov. 12, from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. at 761 Queen St. W. (the old Anthropologie store) — weaves together themes of cyclical nature, humanity, community connection, thriving, rebirth, the rhythm of all living things, ethereality, and the feeling of being seen.
“I hope it takes people into another world, and that they also see themselves represented. It’s gonna be otherworldly in certain ways, but then also very earth based and ethereal.”
BEHIND THE TAPESTRY: SHOWCASING THE CITY ON RUNWAY
Now in its 20th year, FAT continues to evolve, with the 2025 edition taking on the form of an immersive fashion playground that cements its place in the global conversation around fashion and art, a confident strut toward pride, conviction, and its enduring ability to thrive.
Vasic says FAT F/W 25 marks the year for Toronto to claim its leadership in fashion, sustainability, diversity, inclusion, arts, and culture, reflecting the inherent richness found in the city’s cultural mosaic, brought to life through designs and runways held in unconventional venues across the GTHA.
“We’re turning a new chapter. I think we’re trying to really put Toronto on the map. You know, as a destination, as a fashion capital, and kind of get a little bit more loud with our story. I think sometimes Torontonians maybe don’t have that confidence to say, like, ‘hey, we have something really cool here.’”
“We have every look in Toronto. That’s something really unique that you’ll see…So, there’s a lot of things to celebrate. This year, I think we’re growing and we’re making our voices heard in a bigger way.”
For Henderson, FAT is a bold and eccentric opportunity to spotlight the unique, tactile, and authentic cultural fabric of the city’s creative scene, celebrating Toronto’s diversity in every thread and detail.
“Our city is so full of creatives and cultures and then a range of individuals and I just want to like, make sure, like, you see yourself on that runway, but also learn about the beauty of everyone.”
FAT F/W 25 runs from Nov. 10 through 16, with shows, installations, and pop-ups across the city. Tickets and event details can be found through their official website.
