Army of Salma Zahore at Vancouver Fashion Week

No, you are not seeing double. Not one, not two, but twelve Salmas took over the runway in a striking intervention at Vancouver Fashion Week. On April 11, Dutch designer Jef Montes presented his latest collection “Salma” during Vancouver Fashion Week, in collaboration with Lebanese-French multidisciplinary artist Hadi Moussally, creator of Salma Zahore.

For this show, Moussally was invited to style all twelve looks as variations of Salma, his ongoing “queerture” figure, a hybrid between queer identity and creature-like transformation.

Salma is not a character in a traditional sense but an evolving body, a presence that mutates through clothing, gesture, and performance. For this runway, Salma multiplied. Twelve bodies carried the same conceptual DNA, while each looked expressed a different emotional and physical state of the same being.

Beyond the strength of Jef Montes’ designs, what stood out was the atmosphere created by the collaboration itself. It became a rare space where fashion, performance, and embodiment fully merged into something almost ritualistic. It was not only the garments that spoke, but the shared presence they generated on stage, a subtle but powerful dialogue between design, body, and gesture.

Each model entered this language with remarkable sensitivity. They did not simply wear the clothes; they translated Salma’s gestures with precision and intuition, to the point where the distinction between interpretation and incarnation began to blur. At moments, it felt as if there were not twelve models performing Salma, but twelve versions of Salma herself moving across the runway.

In this “Army of Salma,” individuality gently dissolved into a shared mythology, where clothing became skin, and skin became story.