Jennifer Lamont Brings Purpose to Life in Textile Design

The recent debut of a new clothing collection at Native Fashion Week Santa Fe capped a period of frenetic production for artist and designer Jennifer Lamont (MDes 2025).

Titled The Circus, the collection comprises 15 separate outfits including accessories, all created by Jennifer in less than six months as she completed three courses for pre-admission to pursue her teaching candidacy at the University of British Columbia (UBC), and taught a course as part of her final year in the Master of Design program at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECU) in addition to caring for her son.

“When I came back from Santa Fe, I slept for a week,” Jennifer says, noting she had to miss convocation to attend the event. “But I got great responses. Everybody seemed to love it. It was a great experience from start to finish.”

All of her endeavours are decidedly intentional, with each helping frame the broader purpose behind Jennifer’s creative practice. A graduate of the fashion program at the Wilson School of Design at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU), Jennifer has been designing clothing for more than 20 years.

Her runway collections demonstrate her formal mastery and capacity for using textiles to express playfulness and imagination. Part of her practice is paying attention to what moves her, leaving herself open to a spark that might capture her interest. For instance, The Circus draws inspiration from Jennifer’s interest in a particular genre of literature.

“A common theme throughout a lot of these books is the circus and the masked man — it’s more theatrical than kids’ carnivals with clowns and games,” she says. “I drew from that and put a dark spin on it. But inspiration can come from anywhere really. Sometimes it happens when I’m just walking down the street.”

Meanwhile, her thesis at ECU explored clothing’s capacity for meaningful intervention in our daily lives. Focusing on wearable technology for neurodivergent children, Jennifer says the project was driven by the challenges she witnessed her son, an autistic teen, confronted throughout his time in school.

“Every neurodivergent child is different,” she says. But due to under-resourcing, public schools regularly require individual teachers to care for several children with diverse needs, almost ensuring those needs will not be met. Parents are also regularly sidelined as “non-experts” in the educational field, meaning insights they might have into their child’s behaviours are dismissed.

Her thesis aims to support those children where the educational system does not.

“I wanted to assist teachers in the classroom to understand when a child is starting to elevate, when they’re getting frustrated — and there are many cues before a child has an outburst,” she says, noting she spoke with fellow parents, the school district and did extensive work with her own son as part of her research. “But I could probably do another three years given everything I accumulated.”

Jennifer, who is Métis from the Métis Nation of Ontario, is also known for creating garments which embody themes such as social justice. In 2022, she won second place in KPU’s Our Social Fabric: Upcycled Design Competition for her dress, which aimed to bring awareness to Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

Featuring bird-like traces of her hand, the dress detailed the names of many of the missing women whose disappearances are rarely given the same social urgency or media attention as non-Indigenous women. The dress earned Jennifer a great deal of attention and remains on display at KPU to this day.

Already focused on next steps, Jennifer says she aims to teach home economics in high school following her graduation from UBC. In the meantime, she is working on another clothing collection with an opportunity to possibly showcase at New York Fashion Week in 2026. She also hopes to continue her wearable clothing research in the context of secondary schools — a project she would gladly work with others to advance.

“Anything that anybody wants to know, I’m willing to help them with research, and I’m open to collaboration on this subject,” she says. “Who knows? Maybe in the future I’ll do my PhD.”

Follow Jennifer on Instagram to keep up with her practice.