Dear friends of the Ontario fashion industry,

My name is Anjli Patel, and I’m a fashion lawyer and trademark agent in Toronto.

I am petitioning the Ontario government to:

1. list fashion under Culture on on the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport website, and
2. introduce funding for fashion designers.

Please vote at https://talk.ontario.ca/culture/idea/fashion-funding. Click the thumbs up icon.

Please sign this petition, on the right.

Why I started this petition:

Recently, some of Ontario’s leading museums and galleries have hosted fashion exhibitions of equal quality to traditional exhibitions in fine art and natural history:

• Christian Louboutin at the Design Exchange,
• Viktor & Rolf Dolls at the Royal Ontario Museum,
• Marimekko, With Love at the Textile Museum of Canada,
• Roger Vivier: Process to Perfection at the Bata Shoe Museum,
• A Bit of Clay on the Skin: New Ceramic Jewellery at the Gardiner Museum, and
• David Bowie is at the Art Gallery of Ontario, which celebrated “the groundbreaking artist’s collaborations in the fields of fashion, sound, theatre, art and film”.

Given that these institutions recognize the cultural importance of fashion, the Ontario government should as well.

Fashion should be listed under Culture on the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport website alongside:

• aboriginal communities
• archaeology
• arts and artists
• cemeteries
• creative cluster
• cultural planning
• heritage
• libraries, and
• museums. 

Furthermore, fashion designers should be able to apply for government funding alongside artists. We cannot expect to develop successful fashion businesses and museum-quality fashion in Ontario if we don’t fund the designers trying to create them.