Sorry I'm Late

Fast and loose, people! This one has a lot of swear words, sorry.

I am opening a store in September. It’s a whole thing. The bottom floor is vintage and opening designer womenswear and the top floor is an event space/photo studio. I am excited and I am extremely overwhelmed. It is also partly why I’m so bad at this newsletter thing right now. The (future) store is currently just me, and a merry band of my talented friends who are consulting with me to help bring it to life. If you want to send me your resumés, please do so. You can DM me. It doesn’t totally matter what your skill set is, surprise me!

Here is the reason I wanted to open a store: because we need good brick and mortar stores. We need physical stores that act as community hubs and a place to connect and discover and get inspired and all that flowery stuff etc etc. The pendulum swings eternal and I think we’re about to swing back to what I consider the golden age. Remember Jeffrey in NY? Barneys? Opening Ceremony? Colette in Paris? Dover Street in London? These are (and were— RIP most of them) landmarks. Places you send your out of town friends. These stores all had a big assortment (nothing worse than a sparse store) and a lot of personality. Barney’s was obviously a department store, but the most directional and with a point of view we don’t see department stores take anymore. Julie Gilhart bought (basically) the entire Proenza Schouler collection off the runway at the Parsons graduation show and that’s fucking awesome!!! Nobody does that anymore!! What a time to be alive!! Designers and buyers were partners and it was fun! I JUST missed all that when I started my own line so I slogged through hell for 10 years before coming out this side of it. Anyway I love a boutique department store and they don’t really exist anymore and I want to bring them back. Lofty goal, I know. But I believe! Watch this space! (Sorry).

I think Toronto has some of the best independent retailers and it’s because of the aforementioned traits: personality and a point of view. We just could do with some more! For example — 100% Silk. Great store, very strong point of view, Leigh is the cool art mom we all (I think?) aspire to be and I trust her opinion on the high-touch, very handmade, quality pieces that populate the store.

VSP is cool and accessible. Britt is the woman behind (and in) the store who always looks chic and put together but also like she approaches fashion from an intellectual lens which I love. Its consignment but it doesn’t feel consignment-y, you know? It’s very high-end. The ecosystem they’ve built around them is flourishing and filled with kind, chic people which feels very Canadian.

Soop Soop is super weird and very Vaquera-Heavy but they KNOW what their customer wants and they do not want to be everything to everyone and it works. A very strong point of view that does not appeal to all but is not unwelcoming in the least.

Milli is perfection. On Avenue road at Roxborough (a weird location but that makes me like it even more), It stands alone in a lot of ways. It’s not ‘cool’, the website is not very functional, and you have to go to the store to get any real sense of the designers they carry. There are videos on their instagram of the fashion director (Pam!) giving tips on how to wear the trends and I love them so much. The history of the store is also long and sad but in the end, nice because the unifying thread is the story of their family. It’s the stuff you can’t fake that makes it work.

Narwhal is mostly on my radar because Syd - the owner - is always posting wonderfully informal instagrams that are authentic and sometimes pleasantly chaotic in which she shows new merchandise and how she wears it. It’s breezy, it’s in the moment, and it’s personal.

Toronto does personal well! Forgive me for not giving a single fuck about the demise of Nordstrom. Even if they carried all the brands I love I would still consider it an errand to shop there. I have tried to avoid negative comments because they live forever on the web and in my heart but I don’t feel bad about slamming a massive department store. They’re all boring and awful and honestly, that’s what e-comm is for! We don’t need to walk into the physical equivalent of fashion amazon. Make it worth it or go away!

Speaking of Fashion Amazon

Ssense has a new collaboration that doesn’t make total sense to me but was a pleasant surprise that I’m going to tell you about. On (a very technical swiss sportswear brand ) is collaborating with Ssense on an exclusive shoe called the Cloudflash, and they sent me a pair to try. Now I don’t know if I really need to articulate this, but, I am not a runner. I wore them boxing and I don’t know if this constitutes a positive review but they were so light I felt barefoot. But also springy — like when you’re a kid on the tumbling mats in a gym and you get that lift and bounce seemingly from nowhere. To summarize: 8/10 with the caveat that I didn’t wear them as intended.

I also want to highlight the hiking shoe from On - really top notch shoe that isn’t clunky like the Merrell boots my mom used to take me to buy before I went off to camp in my youth. I took them to Iceland last year and I still tumbled frequently in the wild but that has a lot to do with general coordination and athletic ability and not a lot to do with footwear.

QUICK HITS //

This Saie foundation is my favourite of the clean beauty serum foundations. Use a tiny bit - it needs a light touch. I layer it over the dewy highlighter and then I use a fluffy brush to blend it all in and the effect is more nice skin than makeup. Great.

Do you listen to Huberman lab? I love it because it should be totally over my head but it’s not. And the information is actionable and helpful and not delivered under the banner of vague “wellness” information that we are constantly inundated with. This episode below was particularly interesting:

Someone asked me about cool socks and I’ve mentioned them before but I love Comme Si. I don’t know what makes a sock cool or not but these are good quality and feel nice. That’s the best I can do here, sorry.

It snowed in Toronto this week which means it is STILL soup season. I made this one a few days ago when no one was feeling great and I think it healed us.

Sometimes 323 is too weird even for me but sometimes I think it’s perfect. Like, I want to wear this whole situation at once:

And this too but I would want the waistband to be higher and also the shoes are not ideal - I’d go with a slide because I’m wearing this somewhere hot. Yes I wish there were more images so that you could have the same vision for this that I do but alas, here we are:

WHAT I WANT TO WEAR TODAY //

Wardrobe NYC Contour Blazer, Priscavera Mesh Baby Tee, Acne Cargo Pants, Stacey Nishimoto Rose Quartz Collar, Florist Half Moon NY Bag, Bottega Veneta Flash Sandals in Grass

DREAM WITH ME!! //

The Orient Express is a huge bucket list trip for me. I desperately want to wear my black tie finery and drink Martinis in the chic dining car of a train taking me from Paris to Venice.

That’s It! See you when I see you!