Cosmopolitan Fashion Week October 2023 Collection

Montreal, Canada

There are collections you look at, and there are collections that look right back at you. Juan Iskandar's debut at Cosmopolitan Fashion Week in Montreal, October 2023, was the latter — a runway moment that stopped the room and started a conversation about culture, craft, and what fashion can actually carry.

Montreal-based designer Juan Iskandar brought something rare to the stage that night: garments rooted in Balinese folklore, alive with the textile traditions of Palembang. Each piece featured songket fabric — silk woven with benang emas, gold thread — a craft passed between generations in Sumatra long before it ever touched a runway. This wasn't decoration. It was inheritance, cut and sewn into wearable form. The details told their own chapter. Embroidery laid by hand. Beading placed with the kind of patience that can't be rushed or replicated by machine. Fabrics sourced directly from Sumatra gave every silhouette weight and truth.

The tapis, Indonesia's deeply symbolic weave, grounded the collection in its regional origins, while gold-threaded Tenun elements caught the light and held the history — stories of lineage, identity, and belonging shimmering under Montreal's fashion spotlights.But Iskandar wasn't simply showcasing textiles. He was building a bridge. His work sits at the crossroads of Indonesian heritage and contemporary sustainability, and the message felt personal: embrace what makes you singular.

Celebrate the richness of Southeast Asia not as something distant or decorative but as something living, protective, and deeply human.The collection spoke of strength and splendour in equal measure — an open invitation to wear heritage forward, not behind glass but on your shoulders, close to the skin.This Montreal debut marked Juan Iskandar's first step onto the Canadian fashion stage, before he went on to unveil the Barong Collection in Toronto in 2024.