15 years ago, Connally McDougall sold her first dress.
“I was working in a gallery and the owner said, ‘Hey, if you or anyone you know are makers, why don’t you show us your work and we’ll see if we deign to put it in our gallery,'” she said.
McDougall submitted a dress made from some yellow fabric.
“When I came for my next shift, the dress had sold,” she said. “It was this really casual, but also near instantaneous gratification of, ‘huh, I can take something that’s two dimensional, turn it into a three dimensional thing that moves around with a human being, and I might be able to make a living at this. Let’s go.'”
The experience would lead to McDougll’s Vancouver clothing brand Connally Goods, which has a focus on sustainability and inclusivity. The journey to today has had a number of twists and turns, including moving forward after a life changing skull fracture in 2017.
“I ended up having to relearn how to speak, how to do a lot of the basic functions that I had gotten so used to,” she said.
“The process of having to ask for help, being forced to ask for help, while humbling, It opened up a world of possibility, because once you’re not doing everything by yourself, you can figure out what you’re really good at and what really drives you.”
A big part of McDougall’s approach is built around creating clothing in a diverse array of sizes.
“It can seem excessive to a lot of designers and to a lot of business owners who are thinking about ‘well, how are we going to make a profit? How is this profitable?'” she said.
“At the end of the day, if you clothe human beings who haven’t had access to just basic clothing, or their only options are to shop online or have it custom made, it starts to make sense both with an s and with a c.”
Macdougall’s approach is also informed by past experiences within the fashion industry. She says shortly before her skull fracture, she was working as a ‘fit technician’.
“We would get boxes filled with samples from China and overseas that then my job was to measure them and put them on a human that I arbitrarily deemed to be a size medium for North Americans, and then in a spreadsheet, tell that factory in China, we need these measurements.”
“It was just me, some random person, arbitrarily deciding what is a size medium, what is a size large. And when you think about how much damage the garment industry and the beauty industry has done to people’s psyches, because we get wrapped up in, ‘oh, I’ve always been a medium, now I’m a large, now I’m a triple extra small,’ it showed me that there’s no such thing as sizing, there’s no rules, and the harm that it’s doing to have some random person in a basement warehouse making these decisions, if only people knew that that’s what it was, maybe we’d like ourselves a bit more.”
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