David Gauthier — ITZALLE | Montréal Emerging Designer Profile
- Milan Tanedjikov
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
A design process interview with Montréal designer David Gauthier, founder of ITZALLE — exploring blue-collar heritage, material experimentation, and his development through the LIGNES DE FUITE Mentoring Program.
There is a kind of stillness north of Montréal that stays with you long after you’ve left it — the soft hush of Rosemère, the endless stretch of forest toward Mont-Laurier, the way winter seems to swallow sound. It’s not dramatic, but it is formative. This is where David Gauthier grew up, and it’s impossible to look at his work without sensing that landscape somewhere beneath the surface. His brand, ITZALLE, isn’t nostalgic, but it carries that tension between quiet suburbia and the ruggedness of the North.
David’s childhood was shaped by blue-collar life in the most literal sense. Most men in his family worked in trades — wood yards, heavy-duty truck assembly, metal fabrication, waste processing. When he talks about it, there’s no romance, just a clear understanding of the physical world and how things need to function in order to last. As a kid, he followed his father from job to job. He wasn’t observing fashion; he was observing utility. The first questions he learned to ask — long before “What’s the silhouette?” — were things like: Does it hold up? Does it make sense? Can I fix it?
Fashion, in those years, was almost an afterthought. Cars were the real obsession: modified engines, impossible projects, people online pushing machines past their limits for no practical reason other than curiosity. That energy — the “I wonder if I can make this work” impulse — became his quiet doorway into design. At some point he realized clothing could be treated like machinery: taken apart, rebuilt, hacked, improved.
He enrolled in fashion at Cégep Marie-Victorin with one foot in and one foot out. At several moments, he almost left to pursue welding or mining. But something happened when he started working with textiles. The materials behaved in ways he could manipulate. They responded to force, pressure, heat, and technique. They had a physical logic he understood.
What is striking about David’s work is its honesty. He doesn’t disguise where he comes from. The silhouettes he gravitates toward echo the shapes of the working men he grew up around — blocky, protective, slightly stiff. But he also has a growing fascination with materials that, culturally, sit on the opposite end of the spectrum: fur, leather, dense denim, heavy hardware.
He describes his aesthetic voice almost shyly: “a timid attempt to connect the blue collar with luxury materials.” But the connection feels natural. His garments look like tools that wandered accidentally into a luxury environment — and stayed.
Black dominates his palette, along with metal and raw textures. If he could name the genre of his work, he says it might resemble “a dramatic silent film set in the Midwest.” There’s something fitting about that: an atmosphere where most things are communicated through weight, gesture, and texture rather than speech.
In 2024, he received the Prix Créativité québécoise – Cuir et fourrures durables at the mmode gala. It marked a quiet internal pivot — something in him realigned.. Until then, fashion felt like an industry slightly out of reach — a space with established codes and gatekeepers. Winning a prize for something as tactile and technical as fur work made him realize that his unusual path wasn’t a hindrance. It was his angle.
David is methodical by nature. He needs structure, classification, a way to understand the world through systems. Durability, repairability, feasibility — these remain non-negotiables. But he also speaks about collaboration in a way that reveals a softer side: he believes deeply in collective progress, and he distances himself from competition because it risks making him jealous rather than inspired.
His creative process always starts with materials. He touches everything first: fur, leather, denim, metal. He bends and tests, trying to understand what each textile wants to become. His research is a blend of objects, archives, machinery, and memories of industrial spaces he knows intimately. Drawings come later, once the material has spoken. Ideas become “real” only when he can imagine them existing in his imaginary workshop — the mental “garage shop” that acts as the unofficial headquarters of ITZALLE.
David doesn’t approach storytelling through emotion; for him, it’s situational. Who is wearing the garment? What do they need? Warmth? Fire resistance? Tools? Pockets? His world-building is rooted in function rather than fantasy, and he often references new materialism — the idea that materials themselves carry agency and meaning.
His current project continues that trajectory: connecting his blue-collar upbringing with the luxury codes of fur. But his use of fur is not decorative; it’s technical, almost archival. He works by recycling old coats, reassembling them into new identities. For him, fur is not about opulence — it’s a cultural craft that risks disappearing, and he is determined to keep the knowledge alive.
“Being born in the blue collar and finding my way into this closed sector of fashion made me realize it needs to be more open,” he says. His work repositions luxury as something that can — and should — intersect with the everyday. By merging workwear silhouettes with fur, he blurs distinctions between labour and privilege in a way that feels both sincere and quietly subversive.
He experiments constantly: new assembly techniques, new hybrid forms, new ways of letting materials interact. The work remains grounded, always. His pieces are meant to be lived in, weathered, stained, softened by time.
Credits:
Images David Gauthier Words Milan Tanedjikov
David is currently part of the LIGNES DE FUITE Mentoring Program, where he continues to refine the language of ITZALLE with the support of our studio community. His work will be presented publicly for the first time on December 19th during the Design Research Exhibition at Crossfade, the multidisciplinary evening co-organized with Gabriela Hébert and Narrativ Music. It will mark an important moment in his trajectory — a quiet but confident entry into Montréal’s emerging designer landscape.
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