You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to design clothing, but you might want to be an accountant.
When Malashnee Naidoo and her husband Hamed Emtiaz opened their South Granville store, Madame Moje, with the $700,000 in womenswear she had designed and manufactured locally, a background in finance certainly helped.
And it meant just three seasons later that she was able to focus on putting her first ready-to-wear collection together for Toronto Fashion Week, instead of worrying about less exciting things like the books.
In fact, her only rookie mistake in the lead-up to the near flawless show was wearing one of her showstopping TFW dresses one month early, at a Vancouver event in her honour. (It was just too green and gorgeous to keep under wraps.)
During our February interview and photoshoot, Naidoo flits around the pink and black Parisian-inspired boutique at 2843 Granville, long hair brushing the band of her high-waisted skirt, deftly dressing mannequins in the Fall/Winter 2014 pieces she’s about to début. She’s fresh off a crunch-time phone call with TFW and you can practically hear the hum of her nerves.
When a particular outfit – a camel-coloured suit with an eye-catching cut out – isn’t offering enough contrast for the camera, Emtiaz appears out of of the back in casual jeans and a white T-shirt to help re-dress the mannequin and de-stress his sweetheart.
The two met in Johannesburg. Neighbours in the same apartment complex, the Tehran-born electrical engineer started his shining armour habit by being the guy to help Naidoo hang her pictures and curtains.
A University of Natal graduate, Naidoo was working as a CA for Sasol – one of Africa’s largest oil and gas companies. Emtiaz’s investment company, AKN Group, had offices in Paris, Sydney, Dubai, Singapore.
Shortly after they were married, AKN invited Naidoo to join the firm and it wasn’t long before the couple moved to Singapore as COO and CFO to run operations from there.
But they struggled to acclimate to Singapore; so, after discovering Vancouver during an Alaskan cruise, they decided to move their lives and the business here in June of 2012.
There was just one problem... Naidoo had always been passionate about clothes, and Vancouver wasn’t exactly the fashion mecca she was accustomed to.
She had some luck finding items in her sophisticated-yet-skin-tight signature style, but with a $2,000-$3,000 price tag.
So she decided to create her own line – one that looks and feels the part, minus that pivotal fourth zero.
For all of 2014’s talk of normcore and dressing to fit in, Madame Moje (pronounced mo-zhay) is all about standing out.
Gold zippers and black accents trace a relief map of female topo-graphy, peplum puts the flounce in a stroll down the street and lace panels let you know there’s some skin in sight, even through the long, dark days of winter.
With one World MasterCard Fashion Week already under her belt, there is almost the bittersweet feeling – like seeing a future star light up the silver screen for the first time – that Malashnee Naidoo might soon eclipse Vancouver’s small scene. But, with a mind not only for dollars but the kind of details that give Canadian labels like Pink Tartan some competition, you can be sure the accountant turned designer will be talked about in this town for many years to come.
UPDATE: Our hunch was correct! Naidoo and Emtiaz will be relocating to Toronto at the end of May and opening their second store location at Shops at Don Mills. Congratulations!
Malashnee’s story is part of a five-part Living the Dream series and our month-long My Guide to the Good Life contest. Designing clothes is her idea of the Good Life; what’s yours? Show us and you could win a trip for two to Portland, a shopping spree and more.
