While any client of hers will tell you image consultant Tess St. Pierre, based just outside of Lakefield, is good at what she does, style is so much more than a job or even a passion for her.
“It became a lifeline for me when I was going through something that was stripping away my physical identity in every other sense,” says St. Pierre.
St. Pierre was born in 1998 in Red Deer, Alberta with bilateral retinoblastoma — a rare childhood cancer that affects both eyes. The condition was diagnosed when she was just three and a half months old, after it was discovered that, in all the photos taken of her, her pupils were white instead of the red reflex that is the sign of a healthy eye.
Although she underwent chemotherapy at SickKids Hospital at five months old, the treatment ruptured the tumour in her right eye, which was then surgically removed to prevent the cancer from spreading through her optic nerve into her brain. After seven months of remission, the cancer returned to her remaining eye, and she once again underwent chemotherapy.
After spending her toddler years repeatedly flying back and forth to Toronto, her family relocated to Kawartha Lakes to be closer to the hospital when she was five or six years old.
“When you have cancer, you don’t go through treatment and then you’re done — you’re followed for life,” St. Pierre says. “I grew very accustomed to a medical way of living.”
St. Pierre’s dedication to fashion helped her through her challenging childhood. She recalls one of her earliest fashionista moments was dressing as Watts, a main character in the 1987 film Some Kind of Wonderful.
“I was always, always highly creative, highly experimental with style to the point where it wasn’t necessarily good,” St. Pierre jokes. “I was just having fun and expressing myself through clothing always.”
Children who survive retinoblastoma are at increased risk of later developing osteosarcoma, a related type of bone cancer, and that’s exactly what happened when St. Pierre was 13 years old. As a competitive swimmer with Olympic aspirations, her dreams were cut short when she was diagnosed in April 2012, and had her left leg amputated below the knee three months later.
She underwent seven months of intense, high-dose chemotherapy during which should have been an exciting, monumental time in any young girl’s life.
“It’s that summer when everyone is in grade eight transitioning to high school at a peak point age and discovering their identity, and I’m isolated, dying, with nobody really talking to me,” she recalls.
Despite her second fight against cancer, St. Pierre was still having fun with style.
“I would still rock up to the hospital with all my colourful earrings and accessories and clothes that made me feel alive,” she says. “It made other people happy too, but it made me feel like myself when I was going through something that was undoing me completely.”
When back in remission, St. Pierre says she “skipped straight to adulthood” as she spent her teen years as a spokesperson for the SickKids Foundation and Terry Fox Foundation, and even became an official poster girl for the latter in 2016.
Her photo and story were printed on Terry Fox Foundation posters displayed in thousands of schools across the country, and she even wrote a guest column for the Toronto Sun. She also did regular presentations several times in a day, which changed the way she saw fashion.
“I think a lot of my style in those years, in a sense, was masking because you can do so much with a garment,” St. Pierre says. “You can tell people exactly who you are, or you can blend right in and just be a style chameleon.”
“Not to say that I wasn’t myself, because I’ve always had my unique style, but I think a lot of it was just dressing to impress so people couldn’t really see through to the very core of me — because it was a very vulnerable, somewhat traumatizing experience to share day after day the same presentation.”
While it had always been a dream of hers to become an image consultant, she only began to see it as a viable career when she started an Instagram account in 2020 to sell the old clothes that were sitting in her closet.
Today, as The Style Servant, St. Pierre works with clients to help them discover their own style and all that can be expressed through clothing. From services in body assessment to wardrobe analysis or restoration, personal shopping, and style coaching, St. Pierre will help clients present themselves through her belief that an “understanding of a personal image elevates access to new opportunities.”
“If we don’t know who we are, we don’t know what we want. If we get an opportunity to go and step into that role and we’re not assured in what we even look like to other people, there’s no way that we can be operating at our most prime or at our most expert. It’s rising to the responsibility of dressing well to present yourself as the expert you are for the sake of serving others well.”
St. Pierre notes that it’s a misconception that clothes are rooted in materialism. When applicable for the client, she often takes them on personal shopping excursions to thrift stores, believing that people often “get so clouded by overconsumption.”
“We want to be putting wealth back into our business and back into people,” she says. “There’s better ways we can be spending our money, but that’s not to say that you shouldn’t invest in good pieces as well.”
The root of it all, and something she aims to break down with her clients, is knowing the difference between what styles a person likes for themself versus the styles they simply appreciate when worn by someone else. As a certified and educated image consultant, this is something St. Pierre regularly shares through her Substack blog, Very Good Style.
“Your style and what you wear comes from everything that you like and dislike in general,” St. Pierre says. “It can be colours, it can be food, it can be a person’s behaviours or things they like to do on the weekend versus things they hate. Everything that we do in life gets filtered but not everybody can do that organically, and that’s where I come in to help.”
As of today, she is 13 years in remission — half of her life. Though she is making an identity shift from Tessa Smith — who was easily searchable as a cancer survivor — to the now-married Tess St. Pierre, The Style Servant, her relationship to style has been there through it all.
“There was a time I was full face of makeup, full outfits, and then it was stripped back and refined and now I’m just seeing the balance. It’s about what we feel when we put clothes on, and that’s everything from colour to cut to pattern.”
“There’s so much psychology behind style that I really care about,” she adds, noting, with a laugh, “I’ve been in fashion since a fetus.”
