10-year career – People Australia Magazine March 2011

Celebrating my 10-year career! Souvenir pics from March 2011: I was published in the Australian People magazine! A female Australian photographer was traveling with her husband to organize photoshoots with glamour models around the world for various men’s magazines in Australia. She stopped by Montreal and I had the opportunity to do a photoshoot with her. :) Working with a female photographer (who had also been a model before, if I remember correctly) was a different experience. There are not a lot of female photographers in the glamour industry. I was very happy to be published in a magazine on the other side of the planet! lol

Photographer: Dylan Keyes

 

10-year career – Latex Sue Storm cosplay at NYCC 2010

Celebrating my 10-year career! Souvenir from 2010: attending NYCC with my friend Riddle! There’s a long story behind this Sue Storm costume.

Through my work as a glamour model, I was introduced to the owner of Polymorphe, a Montreal based latex clothing company offering various products mainly to the fetish community all around the world. Polymorphe lent me many latex outfits for glamour photoshoots. They also taught me the basic techniques to work with latex. I spent many hours working and learning in Polymorphe’s workshop.

Releasing glamour pics of me wearing latex outfits made that people associated me to the fetish community. At some point, even my Wikipedia page was saying that I was a fetish model. I have many fetishist friends and I’ve learned a lot about all the different fetishes in the past years, but I’m not a fetishist myself. As a designer and costumer, I love how latex looks, but I don’t wear it in my bedroom. I did’t want to be called a fetish model since I wasn’t even a fetishist.

So I talked to Polymorphe’s owner. I told him how I appreciated everything he had done for me and how I thought that latex was an interesting material. But from now on, I’d use this material only in non fetishist contexts. What if I’d use this material for cosplay costumes? And Polymorphe’s owner accepted to help me.

Following reference sheets and instructions I had provided, the people of Polymorphe made the Sue Storm costume 1 week before NYCC 2010. It was a huge hit. It was all over the Internet. Official pics were on Marvel Comics’ website. It put me on the map as a cosplayer. Very little people had used latex for a cosplay costume before 2010. Today, many companies are specialized in making latex cosplay costumes. Fetish models have custom cosplay costumes made for their photoshoots. Non fetish cosplayers are wearing latex cosplay costumes. This Sue Storm costume introduced latex to the world of American pop culture and created a cross-over between the glamour, fetish and cosplay industries. On October 2010, a little French Canadian girl attending NYCC changed the face of cosplay in North America. ;)

 

10-year career: American Curves Magazine June 2010

Celebrating my 10-year career! Souvenir from June 2010: I was published in the American Curves magazine again!  This photoshoot with the breathtaking red slingshot bikini is probably one of the most popular glamour photoshoot I did so far!
Photographer: AMaginations Photography

 

10-year career – Dragon Con 2010 with Riddle

Celebrating my 10-year career! Souvenir from 2010: the 1st time I attended a convention! And not any convention: Dragon Con!

A long time ago, I started exchanging mails with a lovely girl who was dressing up as different characters. She was living in Atlanta. One day I was driving home, coming back from a photoshoot in Florida. (Yes, I traveled by drive a lot in my life and I explored the American East Coast more than once, driving from Quebec to Florida.) On my way back home, I was crossing  Georgia and decided to contact that girl I had been talking to online. Maybe we could meet in person? Riki and her husband Chris accepted to meet me and we became friends instantly!

 
Riki and Chris invited me to stay at their place and to attend Dragon Con, which was apparently a huge convention. I had barely discovered cosplay the year before with the release of the Mortal Kombat Frost pics. I had never attended a convention or comiccon and I didn’t know anything about it, except that some people were dressing up as characters to attend those events.

I made, especially for this convention, a first simple costume from an obscure Japanese anime. I don’t even remember the name of this character with the pink hair! lol I also made the more complicated costume of Seras Victoria from Hellsing, which I was watching at the time, and I thought it would be cool because she had short blond hair like me. (Have any of you ever noticed how the jacket sticks between my boobs like in the anime? This remains one of my great secret pattern drafting/sewing techniques.) And since I didn’t have more time to make other #costumes, I brought the first version of my latex Hornet costume from Heroes of the North. I had started playing as an actress in the live action webseries earlier that year.

And here I am with the incredible Riddle, attending my very first convention… and I loved it! Riki introduced me to other cosplayers, comic book artists, she explained me everything I had to know about cosplay and conventions.  And it was the beginning of an adventure!

 

10-year career – Heroes of the North, the beginning in 2010

Back to August 2010: this is when I started collaborating with Heroes of the North, a live action webseries about Canadian superheroes. I was playing the role of Hornet, a supervillainess! I was not only one of the actresses of the show, but I was also hired as a costumer and I made new leather costumes for some of the actors.  On the bottom right pic, the blue and red costume and the costume I’m wearing are 2 of the 7 leather costumes I sewed for Heroes Of the North – Season 2.  The latex costume on the top left picture was made by Polymorphe, a Montréal based company where I later worked and learned the basic techniques to make latex clothes. The series had its own comic books, branded merchandise, action figures and other cool collectibles. I went to many conventions with the Heroes of the North team over the years, wearing both the latex and leather Horntet costumes. It gave me a great exposure in the English speaking part of Canada where the series was particulary popular. It was my first experience as an actress and my first leather costumes.

Artwork by Geof Isherwood

10-year career – Summum Magazine Novembre 2009

 

Celebrating my 10-year career! Back to November 2009: the second time I was published in a magazine, the French Canadian Summum Magazine! I remember I had found pretty funny the fact that they had put the photoshoot in a section of the magazine called ‘La voisine’ which could be translated by ‘the neighbor’ or ‘the girl next door.’ My type of figure isn’t very common here in Québec so I never really felt like ‘the girl next door’… but hey, who am I to judge? lol I wish I’d have a neighbor with huge breast implants too!

Photographer: Gil Perron – P&P Image Factory

 

10-year career – American Curves Magazine Summer 2009 Lingerie Special

 

 

Celebrating my 10-year career! Back to 2009: the very first time I was published in a magazine! I met photographer Paul Buceta in the Toronto area and he thought that the editor of the American Curves Magazine would like my style. He shot me for the magazine, submitted the pics and the photoshoot was accepted! I was in the American Curves Magazine Summer 2009 Lingerie Special.

Photographer: Paul Buceta

10-year career – The 2009 Mortal Kombat Frost Photoshoot

Marie_Claude_Bourbonnais_Frost_Cosplay_from_Mortal_Kombat_by_Gil_Perron_02

Celebrating my 10-year career!

Great memories from 2009: the Mortal Kombat Frost photoshoot. Believe it or not, I didn’t know what cosplay was when I organized that photoshoot. I was starting as a model, I had always been a fan of Mortal Kombat and I had been sewing all my life for other people. I wanted to shoot something different than lingerie and bikinis and I wanted to finally sew something for myself. I had chosen Frost even if she wasn’t really a popular character because she had short white hair. And these pics happened. Released in February 2009, the Frost pics were so popular online that I had to search to understand why. And this is how I found out that dressing up as a character had a name, that it was called ‘cosplay’ and that it was apparently a worldwide phenomenon. Cosplay wasn’t very well known in the province of Quebec back in 2009. I thought to myself: ‘I have the figure of a character from an American comic book, a Japanese anime or a video game. I’ve studied in Fashion Design. I know how to sew. I should give cosplay a try.’ The rest is history.

Photographer: Gil Perron – P&P Image Factory

Latex leggings, gloves and waist corset made and lent by Polymorphe