Playing Catch-up with Saskatchewan Fashion Week

Photo: Apolline Lucyk

How one designer is fairing after the festivities

Last month, the city of Regina lit up with an event which gave Saskatchewan’s thriving fashion industry their chance to shine: Saskatchewan Fashion Week (SFW). SFW is an annual event that begun in 2012, which highlights the collections of Saskatchewan-based designers with three days of runway shows and festivities. Although SFW has now come and gone, it reminds us of the amazing clothing designers we have right in our own province. One of these creative individuals is Saskatchewan’s very own hat designer, Sherri Hrycay from Sova Design.

Hrycay has been making hats for over fourteen years. Although she does design clothes as well, she has been focusing on millenary (the art of making hats) for the past five years. Hrycay started off her career in education, but eventually found her real passion in design and millenary. “I used to sew for movies and some other things down in Calgary. I was a teacher, and I was doing that sewing sort of after school hours, and then when I started having kids, I just concentrated on hat making and sewing, and dropped the teaching.”

When Hrycay decided to design full-time, she realized that she simply did not have the capital to begin a large design business right off the bat: “I was really disillusioned in Calgary, because there were a lot of designers who paid someone to draft their patterns, paid someone to sew their outfits, paid someone to market … and then took the credit for all of it. And I simply didn’t have the money for that.”

But in the art of millenary, she found her niche. Hrycay reflects that she was drawn to hats because they were something she could do herself, from start to finish.

“I wanted to do something different, where people would realize it was done by my own two hands, something that is wearable art, and was functional, fashionable and something that no one else is doing,” said Hrycay.

Sova Design is now a thriving company based out of Saskatoon, with retailers in Calgary and Vancouver, and has the option of purchasing hats Canada-wide through Sova’s website, Facebook page or Etsy shop. Hrycay designs and hand-sews all of her hats herself, and makes many custom hats for customers in and around Saskatchewan.

Hrycay participates in Fashion shows across Canada, including Ottawa Fashion Week and Vancouver Fashion Week, and was very impressed with our own fashion week here in Regina. She said she has enjoyed her involvement with SFW enormously. “They’ve been wonderful. The people who put it on are so organized, and it is such a classy event that this year I chose to exclusively do Saskatchewan Fashion Week instead of Vancouver or Ottawa.”

Now that SFW is over, Hrycay is finishing up her wedding season, graduation season, and then going off to France to study with the Royal Milliners in Paris for a week in July. Her Fall/Winter collection is an eclectic combination of ’20s and military ’40s hats with a modern flare.