Curator Conversations: Fast Fashion: Perspectives from Future Textile Leaders

Alexandra Palmer, is the Nora E. Vaughan Senior Curator, Global Fashion & Textiles (Europe & North America) at ROM. She is responsible for the collection of 44,000 fashions and textiles from Europe and North America. She also teaches and is Affiliated Faculty, Art History University of Toronto. She has curated many exhibitions including Dior 1947-1957, (2018, travel-2021), and is a co-curator for the ROM exhibit Unmasking the Pandemic Fall 2021, and the ICOM Costume Committee international museums online exhibition Clothing the Pandemic (November 2021).

Cleo Page holds a biomedical engineering degree from UofT (2002) and completed a Technical Apparel Design program at LaSalle College. She has worked at Plasmagear, a Montreal-based start-up developing sustainable textile coatings for outdoor garments. Combining her dream of combining engineering and fashion design, she is now a produce research and development engineer at Soliyarn, based in Boston MA, developing a water-free textile process to make water repellent and heated/sensing garments.

Alex Holgate has worked in the fashion industry as a published photographer, model and creative director and previously ran the sustainable dress rental business, Studio de Lange. Her background stems from physics and art history with topics in fashion at the University of Toronto. Academically, her research concerns areas of ethics surrounding these fields as well as social inequalities that arise. As both an informed consumer and commentator of fashion, she has researched questions such as whether sustainability is scalable and what quantification looks like when it comes to reporting on sustainable fashion.