Fashion Designer Andy Jones

When I first started to sew and using scissors I had only previously dabbled use those tools in Home Economics. My creations starting out was to say bluntly “tragic”haha. This was September 2007 when I attended Fashion school at MC College in Edmonton located in Canada. I was an eighteen-year-old boy with platinum blonde in my hair, savings account ready for fashion school, and Madonna’s “Confessions of a Dance Floor” Album as the soundtrack to my life. I remember my first day when I picked up my first pair of professional scissors haha. I was doing all of the “vogue models” poses with them in the mirror. I was being a fashion clown haha because I felt in over my head. Unlike all of my peers at that time my sewing was not to their couture caliber, and their usage of professional sewing scissors and machines had already been developed. But what I had that they did not was a real passion for fashion and creating garments.  However, passion aside, my fashion design ambitions would not have their way, because my sewing and usage of scissors was not up to par in 2007. My first skirt design after being thrown into the recycle bin is probably now been recycled into something more useful than what I had made haha. I look back on what my teachers said to me 14 years ago and I completely agree now. They said, “Andrew you need to find your voice as a fashion designer and be honest with yourself!” Despite that, I let this failure be a seed, a driving force, a way to grow, and “find my voice” as a designer and happiness.  As fate would have it, my drive to put my nose to the grindstone and cut up and destroy muslin samples would be my discipline to get my skills up to par. By the end of my fashion program, I was standing at the end of the runway ready to show my first collection ready to show in September 2008. 

I left fashion school, sewing, cutting, and design upgrading in April 2010 to move to my next venture Toronto Canada.  My goal was to be the “Jean-Paul Gautier” of Canada and cut and design clothing and be a force in Canadian Fashion. I had thought with having three years of sewing and cutting experience under my belt that “I’m that Bitch!” haha girlfriend was I wrong! I would enter a design competition with an organization that I thought had my best interest which they did not. I left feeling ashamed, defeated, misguided, and lost …. Don’t feel sorry for me because it was time to dry my eyes, get the blonde highlights out of my hair, find people that did have my best interest and happiness. I would join Fashion Art Toronto which helped me hone my design, sewing, and cutting skills by giving me an arena to be experimental to find out and discover “what my voice is” and to also find out what do people want to wear from a designer.  I had created, sewn, and cut, and produced seven collections from 2012 to 2018 living in Toronto.  My skills with my fashion sense, design capabilities, and the usage of scissors had grown. I use to have anxiety using scissors and a sewing machine, but now using those tools is a therapeutic outlet. As the fates would have it, a time for reflection, family, and the universe will call be back home to Edmonton, Canada in September 2019.

Since being back in Edmonton I have created a home studio, I am teaching part-time at MC College, and rebranded my fashion line.  I now create fashion designs that walk a line of wearability and creativity.  Ru Paul has said, “When you become the image of your imagination, it's the most powerful thing you could ever do.” And what people forget in creating that image is the tools one has utilized to achieve their imagination –their happiness. It is interesting almost humbling, on how I, you, the world owe a lot of our accomplishment to an inanimate object haha (of course along with side mentors,models, family, friends, and organization deserve many praise and thanks as well)! So I guess from the beginning to now I have a lot to be grateful for, which is creating my happiness through the use of my imagination, sewing machine, fabric, and scissors.