Clothes that exude perpetual spring

The lady standing under the umbrella in the freezing drizzle with a tray of margaritas is five months pregnant. You wouldn’t guess it. She’s wearing a frilly empire waistline tunic and leggings under an open raincoat.

Katrin Leblond knows how to dress the part, even when the performance is a fairly crazy one. Offering St. Laurent Blvd., passersby complimentary cocktails was one of the many ideas she came up with to lure people into her store just before Christmas. I half expected a crowd, but there wasn’t one. Just Leblond, her assistant and a tray of Mexican-inspired snacks.

Nevertheless, her enthusiasm was undaunted. Some people have sales in their blood. “I just love making beautiful clothes and watching how much women enjoy wearing them,” says the owner of and principle designer for the Katrin Leblond boutique.

At age 5, she was selling unusual rocks at a stand near her Westmount home. Determined to pursue her creative impulse, she got into the fine arts program at Concordia but was marked for life when one professor told the class that only one per cent of graduates would still be making art a decade after graduation.

“I had no intention of being a poor, starving artist,” she recalls. So she set out to make fashion her medium of expression. After interning with a New York fashion designer, she worked in textile design, made costumes for Cirque du Soleil performers and co-founded a design company.

Realizing she lacked technical expertise to transform ideas into wearable items, she enrolled in night courses, but quickly decided the pace was too slow. “So I hired the best pattern-maker I could find, and just watched how it’s done until I knew how.”

In 2006, she launched her own label and the following year, opened the storefront.

Today, she employs a staff of 12 to produce a steady flow of new styles. The business was profitable from the beginning, she says. “I’ve been living off magic.”

Leblond, 36, occupies an unusual position in the fashion world. For a few seasons, she threw herself into the heady world of creating runway collections (the results are on her website), but says her enthusiasm for that path has peaked. “It takes months to prepare a runway show. You have to tie up production and really obsess on the work, to the exclusion of all else.” Designing for her own shop, she’s able to create more new designs and bring items into production according to the needs of her own carefully cultivated market.

Her ideal client is less like the starving models favoured by the fashion industry and more like, well, Katrin Leblond.

“I design for extroverts,” she says. “Women who have a certain amount of confidence, or at least who have to put themselves out there every day. Teachers love my clothes. Actors, dancers, musicians – women who are comfortable in their skin.” Her target age group is 30 to 60. “Younger women are too brand conscious. I prefer to work with women who aren’t afraid go beyond their own comfort zone.”

Montreal’s default colour – black – is in short supply at Katrin Leblond. If you can find a little black dress, it will surely have red ribbons and maybe a lime fringe somewhere. Regardless of the fabric’s weight, her clothing exudes perpetual spring. Hence, the December margaritas, inspired by a recent trip to Mexico.

She spends about 40 per cent of her 50-hour working week in the store. One of her favourite tasks is inviting a shopper to wait in the dressing room while she puts together an armful of clothes. “Often the client doesn’t know what would look and feel good until she gets it on.”

For the moment Leblond has figured out the secret of earning a living from her creativity. Of course she knows the formula will change when she and her husband, Michael Makham, become parents a few months from now. She plans to bring the baby into the workplace as much as possible. Makham runs Aux Vivres, a vegan and vegetarian restaurant a few doors further down the Main, and they live in the neighbourhood. “I haven’t given the new routine much thought at all,” she says brightly.

As for future challenges, she dreams of opening another store in Montreal, since her rhythm of production could easily provide enough fresh stock for a branch. But first things first: the baby, then the clothes that go with being a mom.