Yso

Siphay Southidara, better known under his professional name, Yso, is a fashion designer and artistic director. He puts together outfits with clothing and accessories in addition to creating design concepts for magazine editorials, ad campaigns and fashion shows. He is also a costume designer.

A native of Laos, Siphay Southidara earned a diploma in women’s fashion from Montreal’s Collège Marie-Victorin in 1994. After apprenticing with designer Marie Saint Pierre, he launched his own women’s clothing label in 1999 under the name Yso.

His ready-to-wear collections were sold by several retailers in Montreal, Toronto, Calgary and Halifax.

Yso also received clients in his atelier for custom orders. Designer Denis Gagnon worked for him back then, a relationship that was later reversed when Yso became a freelance designer in 2005 and Gagnon was a client from 2008 to 2012.

Over the course of his career, Yso has worked for magazines like Dress To Kill and ELLE Québec, as well as with theatre and dance companies like Sybillines, run by Brigitte Haentjens, and Fou glorieux, run by Louise Lecavalier.

Since 2022, he has been doing a lot of work with Anishinaabe director, writer and actor Émilie Monnet, as well as with her sister, visual and multimedia artist Caroline Monnet. Among his notable collaborations with the former, Yso helped design and create costumes for the plays Marguerite: le feu and Kukum, and the show Uvattini, starring Inuk singer Elisapie.

Under the direction of Caroline Monnet, Yso helped put together a collection of clothing-based works entitled Echoes, which was shown at the Swaia Native Fashion Show as part of the 2024 Santa Fe Indian Market in the United States. In a Vogue magazine interview, Caroline Monnet explained that this collection, which blends contemporary building materials with traditional Indigenous sewing techniques, “was all about building a future together for the next seven generations.”