By Moyo Lawuyi
Toronto Metropolitan University’s (TMU) new fashion course is giving students the chance to make their own Caribana Carnival costumes while exploring the history and culture involved in the popular Caribbean festival.
FSN 610: Carnival Arts—also offered in TMU’s Black Studies minor—was developed by Candice Dixon, an instructor at the university’s School of Fashion. The course first launched for the Winter 2023 semester and gained attention in Canadian media for its trailblazing achievement of being the first course in the country of its kind in subject matter.
“I think almost all of the students that I’ve worked with have told me in one way or another that this is their favourite course that they’ve ever taken,” said Dixon. “It warms my heart to hear that.”
Caribbean Carnival is an annual festival celebrated across the Caribbean Islands and other countries worldwide. The festival’s roots are as diverse as its participants due to various origin stories blending African, Indigenous and European influences.
In Toronto, the festival is commonly referred to as Caribana, with the first Grand Parade—the main event of the festival—taking place in 1967. Now one of the largest festivals in North America, Caribana is expected to bring over a million tourists into the city every summer.
“Having a course like this would be one way of keeping the original meaning of carnival…alive”
Whether at home or abroad, key elements of the festival involve crowning a king and queen, lively dancing to Caribbean music and playing Mas—short for masquerade.
Mas is a cornerstone of Carnival, with participants adorning themselves in vibrant costumes, masks and elaborate disguises as they dance along the parade route. This tradition traces back to the end of slavery in Trinidad and Tobago as newly emancipated peoples took to the streets with the abandoned clothes of their former enslavers and used them as costumes. The emancipated people mimicked and mocked the behaviour of their former enslavers at the pre-Lenten masquerade balls they were never allowed to attend.
Dixon has always been intrigued by Carnival costumes and is a co-owner of a production company called SugaCayne where she creates Carnival costumes of her own.
Through her company, she realized that although many young people loved to attend Carnival, few were involved in the costumes’ actual design and production process. This inspired her to develop a university course to bridge that gap and spark student interest in the festival’s creative aspects.
“There are enough people in this world that we can both know the same things and supply it to the people who love what we do,” said Dixon. “This is not a competition thing, this is a sharing thing.”
In 2017, her company became a member of TMU’s Design Fabrication Zone and part of its experimental track a few years later where students worked on projects creating carnival costumes. Caron Phinney—an assistant professor at the School of Fashion—recognized the workshop’s potential. With advocacy from Dixon, Phinney and the chair of the department, Joseph Medaglia, the course was brought to life in 2023.
Dixon said teaching the course has been “great” as she intentionally created it to be “more than just creating a pretty costume.”
She teaches students the history of Carnival, how to tell stories with their designs and how to expand their horizons by working with digital technology such as 3D printing and laser cutting.
“I want to make sure [students] understand to the core what it is that we’re actually doing and then what your costume actually represents when you create something like that,” she said.
Dixon also wants to ensure that original art forms live on. She encourages wire-bending, a classic technique that creates the structural frame of the costumes. She emphasized the importance of including vital elements such as a headpiece, neckpiece and bodywear—the traditional components of a Carnival costume that judges look for on fashion runways during competitions at the festival.
“This is not a competition thing, this is a sharing thing”
“I recognize that if this was something that had been available to me, I would have appreciated it and I would have loved to have been able to learn,” she said.
Students get to practice showcasing their work with a fashion show at the end of the semester. Dixon said this is to ensure the costumes they made during the term are practical and comfortable for a human body and can actually be worn.
Zachat Ochalefu, a third-year fashion student, had the opportunity to model in the first Carnival Arts course fashion show in 2023.
She said her experience modelling made her interested in how Carnival costumes were made and ultimately, the course. She recalled being especially captivated by the circular panels, bright colours and angel wings she wore while thinking to herself that if fellow students could create such beautiful designs, she could too.
“I was definitely intrigued by just looking at other people’s costumes and like noticing the different structures that were put in place to make the entire garment as a whole,” she said.
For students like Ochalefu who are interested in the course, Dixon said they should enter the classroom with an open mind and be inspired to do something different.
“I want them to go away with an experience unlike any they’ve ever had, creating something that you probably never thought you could have created,” Dixon said. “I think almost every student I worked with was just like ‘Wow, I can’t believe I did that.’”
FSN 610 is available for undergraduate students to take during the Winter 2025 semester and although Dixon said only fashion students can take the course currently, she hopes it will later expand so that everyone can learn about the rich culture of Carnival.
“It’s not required to be a fashion designer in order to be able to make a Carnival costume,” she said. “I think there’s so many creatives out there and especially, I know for sure that there are students of Caribbean descent that want to be able to take the course.”
Maia Purcell, a third-year professional communication student from Grenada, is one of these students.
Purcell said she would be interested in learning about the intricacies within the construction of a Carnival costume, especially because she played Mas and wore the outfit for the first time in her home country this past summer.
“I think almost every student I worked with was just like ‘Wow, I can’t believe I did that’”
Purcell said that before coming to TMU in 2022, she had lived in Grenada her whole life. Toronto—with its vibrant Caribbean diaspora—provides her with a sense of community that she was worried she might not find being so far from home.
“There seems to be a large and significant Caribbean community in Toronto, the food, the music, it’s still here, it’s still very vibrant,” she said
Purcell said she values TMU’s Caribbean-focused course, as to her, it can reconnect second- and third-generation immigrants to their culture.
Although she understands that technical fashion elements might be why the course is limited to only fashion students, she said Caribbean students and students from other backgrounds should be able to take Carnival Arts.
“I feel [the meaning of Carnival] is slightly getting lost, it’s not as meaningful as it used to be in the days my parents or my grandparents would have [participated],” said Purcell. “I think having a course like this would be one way of keeping the original meaning of carnival…alive.”
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