Fleur de Villes at the Calgary Stampede

This week we had the honour of participating in the Fleur de Villes event at the Calgary Stampede. Fleur de Villes translates to “flowers of the cities.” They organize elaborate floral events around the world that combine flowers and art. Premiere florists local to the area of the event are handpicked and invited to design a floral mannequin based on the events theme.

For this event the theme was COUNTRY, and the florists were all assigned country music icons who had performed at the Stampede in the past. The florists were to find an inspiration image of their artist and then let their creativity run wild!

For the fresh flower displays, the materials used were to be natural, with 60% of the display to be fresh product. Natural meaning no wigs, no ribbon, no glitter, no rhinestones. All of the florists were provided mannequins and stands a few weeks previous to the event. All the rest is up to the florists to design.

For those of you who aren’t florists this might not seem overly impressive, but it is mind blowing. Obviously, the goal is to create a floral display that captures the inspiration of your country music icon and is beautiful to look at. You definitely need to let the creative juices flow when thinking of how to create hair, clothing, shoes, etc. On top of all of that, that is a TON to consider on HOW to achieve the look you imagined in a way that will keep those flowers looking good for the length of the event, making sure the design strong and secure, providing water for all that fresh product and so on. The devil is in all those little details! It is way beyond a simple floral arrangement, it really is floral art.

HANK SNOW in ARTIFICIAL

We were invited to design two icons for the event. Hank Snow, in artificial product, and Beyonce in fresh. We were super excited to be able to get to design TWO, and especially to get to design a queen like Beyonce!

Our favourite supplier, Florists Supply, was the sponsor for the event so they provided the products for BOTH of our icons. This was a HUGE sponsorship, so a very big thank you to the wonderful team and Florists Supply for their generosity as well as all their hard work to make this happen!

Admittedly, I personally didn’t know a ton about Hank Snow, so if you aren’t familiar with him, here are a few details of his career. Hank, the yodeling ranger, was a Canadian – American country artist (guitarist, singer AND song writer) whose career started in the early 1930’s. In the early 1950’s Hank Snow discovered Elvis Presley and took him on as an opening act and introduced him to Colonel Parker. Hank and Colonel Parker partnered together and signed a management contract with Elvis, but not long after Hank was pushed out. During his 50+ years in the music industry he recorded 46 studio albums and 89 singles, 7 of which reached number 1 on the US Billboard Hot Country Songs. Talk about a music legend!

One of our talented staff members, Alya, was the lead designer for Hank. She used a number of different artificial flowers to make up Hank, including brown orchids for his hair, a few varieties of pink blooms to make up his suit, black calla lilies for his bow tie, and a mixture of red blooms to mimic the red toned wood of his guitar. We hope it captured the lavish and often colourful suits that Hank was known to perform in!

An inspiration of Hank Snow in a pink suit and black tie holding his guitar.

ABOUT BEYONCE

I am confident you all know who Beyonce, but here the briefest of bios of her long list of accomplishments.

She started performing singing and dancing as a child, but her rise to fame was as a member of the group Destiny’s Child, one of the bestselling girl groups of all time. They announced a hiatus in 2001 to pursue their solo careers. After this Beyonce had her theatrical debut acting as Foxxy Cleopatra in the comedy Austin Powers in Goldmember. With this she released “Work It Out” as the lead single for the Soundtrack. In 2003, she released her debut album “Dangerously in Love” which reached multiplatinum status.

Without listing ALL her accolades, suffice it to say she has had an incredibly successful music career. Beyonce has released 8 albums. She is one of the bestselling music artists of all time, having sold over 200 million records worldwide AND she is also the most awarded female artist of all time!

On top of her music, she has done incredibly well for herself. She founded her own entertainment company, Parkwood Entertainment, fashion lines and most recently a hair care brand. She has a number of big deal endorsements and partnerships including (but not limited to) Pepsi, L’Oreal, Pelaton, and Tiffany Co.

If that wasn’t enough, she is wife, a mom of 3 AND a dedicated philanthropist. She has donated millionssssssss of dollars and has involvement in many different causes from the Black Lives Matter Movement, disaster relief work, and various educational programs.
I honestly didn’t grasp the level of success she has achieved until I went to research for this bio, and it blows my mind just how much she has accomplished at the young age of 42. She truly is an extraordinary, inspiring, powerful and talented woman.

BEYONCE in FRESH

Creating Beyonce out of fresh floral product was a labour of love. Having received the mannequin before the event, Travis and the girls got to work quickly. They started off by designing the bodice of rose pedals (with peppercorn kernels for beading), delicate skeleton leaf tights, and painstakingly designing a head of hair by gluing in individual strands and carefully flat ironing to achieve the windswept look of Beyonce’s hair during performances. A special thanks to Jesse from Utopia Hair Studio for his assistance!

Less exciting, but equally important there was a lot of work that needed to be mapped out and executed for the construction portion of this project. With help from Mr. Calyx, a platform and framework were built to support the weight, provide water sources for the flowers and create the outlines of our design. Lastly, many lists were made, and quadruple checked to make sure we had everything that we needed packed to bring on site, where the rest of the magic would happen.

We used rose petals, burgundy leaves, anthuriums and orchids to create the ombre look of the ‘winged’ back of her dress. Not going to lie, this took some time. She did not wake up like this. Next up was filling alllllllllll the water vessel secured onto our framework and we went to town filling them with burgundy toned foliage, roses, carnations, orchids, celosia in tones of burgundy, red and fuchsia.

It was such a privilege getting to assist on this project. Our Beyonce got runner up for Most Creative, and I am SO proud of Travis and her team for bringing their vision to life! It was such an exciting and challenging project and we would love to do it again next time Fleur de Villes makes its way to Calgary!