We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Heather Jude. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Heather below.

Alright, Heather thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

One of the most meaningful projects I’ve worked on is my current project of creating a Fall Winter Collection. This collection has been on my mind for about two years now, calling me to create it but I always felt that I had to put it aside for more important things. It wasn’t until this Fall that I really took the idea seriously of not only creating the collection but hosting my own fashion show. Fast forward to today and I have meetings everyday with talents wanting to jump on board and support the show in May. It’s been truly heart warming to see how many creatives are willing to help out and make this vision come true. It’s funny how at the beginning my goal was to create a collection and now it’s far beyond just that. I want to inspire everyone in that room in May to leave that fashion with more belief that anything is possible than ever before. I want to share how rewarding this experience has been for me and in turn hopefully inspire someone else to take that leap of faith too.

Heather, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Heather Jude and I am a fashion designer and stylist based out of Vancouver, BC. I have my own design house: Jude Canada where I create bespoke women’s event wear. It’s honestly such a rewarding job to take a concept and make it into a piece you can wear. I didn’t start out in this industry though. It took a lot of wrong turns to get here. I originally graduated to become a marketing specialist. I loved advertising and being able to story-tell through quick and witty narratives. However, during the pandemic that love was deemed unessential and I unfortunately wasn’t able to perform my job during lockdown. It gave me a lot of time to recenter myself. I found myself refinishing furniture, woodworking, and painting. It wasn’t until I felt myself fully accept I had been running down the wrong path in my career that I found an old letter from my high school sewing teacher. I read the letter from a new perspective. It was flooded with support and words of affirmation for my talents. She mentioned that she hoped I could realize how talented I was and pursue my dream of being a designer no matter what was deemed a better path at the time. It was like a switch went off. I felt like I had a redo in that moment. Like a 13 going on 30 moment in reverse. In that moment I called my best friend and told her that in the heart of the lockdown I was going to join fashion school. Fast forward to today and a few Devil Wear Prada moments in my career, I am a freelance designer and stylist. If I had followed my dream of being a designer right out of high school I don’t think I would have survived in this industry. I needed the looming thought of going back to a desk job to put the fear into me to not give up on this vision for myself. Along with my experience of being a competitive Irish dancer. Irish dance is an interesting sport (yes dance is a sport) because it becomes your world but hardly anyone even knows about it. The discipline is takes to train and be able to dance on stage is like nothing else. For context, sprinting up hill is our training to be able to perform three dances in a competition. We do all this training leading up to 3 minutes on stage if we are lucky. All for a world most people don’t even know about. I think that’s lead me to not really care about what people think. If it matters to you – it matters. Hosting my own fashion show I have lead with this same mentality. It matters to me, like a lot. So whoever wants to support me I am all for it. Whoever finds that it matters to them too, I am elated! I know the seats at the show on May 20th will be filled with people that will make the room filled with meaning and warmth. I am so excited for it. I think one of the most exciting parts of this show for me as the designer is that I don’t have any creative boundaries. Fashion isn’t your typical means of art – it’s next level. Everything a fashion designer designs has to be held and created by someone and in my case it’s me. Fashion designer aren’t like a painter or a photographer where we can sell prints of our work. If you want a Jude Canada design, it’s going to be designed and made by me. I think that’s why fast fashion even appeared in the first place. It’s the closest thing you can get to a “print” of a design. I love making custom garments. When a design is made to fit a certain person you realize how crazy of an industry it is to say that there’s a universal size chart. We are all so unique and not to mention what we want out of a garment varies. I have clients who don’t mind a custom gown with a corset, while others want something stretchy and comfortable. There really is no one size fits all. I think that’s something that sets me apart from other designers. I love to be involved in every step of the process. Having had followed so many paths that lead to a dead end in my career journey lead me to having a lot of different skill sets. I love being the visionary behind a design and problem solving something that the industry currently hasn’t thought of or has accepted as the way it is. I love being the one who sketches the design in detail, to presents it to the client and see their initial reaction of excitement. I love being the one to construct the patterns and make sure the designs is going to fit perfectly. I love being behind the machine and slowly see the vision come to life. Most of all, I love that first fitting. When the client puts on their custom garment and realizes too that garments are meant to fit their body and this industry has lied all along. I find that as both a designer and stylist. I often work with models or clients who have these rigged rules about what they can and cannot wear. I try to steer away from rules and think of them more as tools. No, we don’t have all day to try on the entire store so it’s helpful to have the tools to pick out which colours and silhouettes we normally don’t like to wear – but you CAN wear anything and should if you like it. Overall, I think I feel so much inspiration in this industry now that I have decided to pursue it as a freelance artist and I want to mirror that to everyone around me. I really feel like my fashion show will be a space for this inspiration to grow and weave its way into other creatives lives. If you want more information on my show on May 20th at La Fabrique St-George Winery it can be found at judecanada.com/events.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

I think often times there’s this overwhelming view that supporting local means expensive. Especially with custom designs, and this intimidates people to even try to support the artist. They immediately think, “I can’t afford it”. But there are so many ways to support local artists and designers that aren’t in a way that costs you. My coolest projects have come from people just saying my name in conversation. It’s that simple, just bringing up my name in the right room. I worked on a project last year that led me to collaborate with local menswear designer, Zahir Rajani of Vancouver’s Sartorial Shop. Zahir has been amazing at supporting me and bringing up my name when an opportunity presents itself. This connection landed me to create a custom cummerbund for the Oscars this year. So you really don’t know the impact bringing up an artist’s name in the right room will have. Just a reminder, my name is Heather Jude and if you ever bump into Taylor Swift feel free to drop my name. But in all seriousness, support can definitely come from so many different means and everyone knows someone. And someone may just know that right person who’s been looking for exactly you and what you do. I also think society as a whole needs to shift their view on the creative industry. We are talented and skilled artisans. Especially fashion design. There is so much free work in this industry for experience. A huge push for free work comes from schools unfortunately. I had to design a whole Spring Summer collection during my internship for free because I needed the free, unpaid hours to graduate and it pains me to think of how much money that company made off my free labour that season. We need to be treated like tradesmen. We have specific skills and we should get paid properly for those skills. It’s one thing to willingly accept a collaboration because we choose to see the opportunity as a form of compensation. It’s another to be forced to complete free work to graduate from somewhere you have already invested thousands and thousands of dollars. I don’t mean to corner schools and institutions but I think they need a wake up call. Please don’t come for me, just do better.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

One lesson I had to unlearn is the idea that being ‘realistic’ is a superpower. No one can predict the future, so don’t give yourself too much credit for calling yourself realistic; it might just be fear in disguise. I used to navigate my career with this idea that I could someone vision each path and its ending so clearly that I would avoid certain paths. I remember sitting down with a great mentor I have, Katrina Owens. She a branding and PR expert and beyond her title she is just a really great person. I was having coffee with her after a photoshoot and we were discussing the possibility of me having a show, of me really pursing my dream of being a designer and I kept bringing up that my dreams weren’t realistic. I feel like she was the first person in a long time to challenge me to not use that word. What even is realistic? She really made me stop and realize that most of my greatest accomplishments came from moments that didn’t even feel real. So many little things had to fall into place at just the right time to make those opportunities possible. So why would I hold back from chasing something I’m passionate about just because I can’t yet see how it’ll happen? Not to be a total fan girl but, this was solidified for me when I decided to drive to the last sold out Taylor Swift concert on her last night of the Eras tour – without a ticket. I had no clue how I would get into that arena but something told me to go,. Something told me I would see her live. And you know what? I didn’t get to see her live. I’m kidding! I ended up getting a ticket for me and a friend during her Reputation set and we ran into the arena during “boom, boom, boom, are you ready for it?”. It was in that moment I said, “yes, I’m ready for it”. I’m ready to stop trying to control everything and start trusting the pull in my heart. The feeling that I have to do this, simply because it will all work out.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.judecanada.com/
• Instagram: @heather.styles (and) @judecanada
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heather-jude-387499113?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app

Image Credits

Victoria Jazmin (studio/bridal session)