Month: December 2020

Isabel B. Slone on how she’s meandering her way through quarantine style.

In the seven years I’ve lived in Toronto, I’ve managed to stuff 74 pairs of shoes into my tiny shoebox apartment. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, I’ve only worn two: comfy grey Allbirds sneakers and a scuffed pair of No. 6 clogs that I kick on and off every time I need to pop downstairs and take out the trash.

As the world settled into varying stages of mandatory quarantine, everything in my carefully curated wardrobe – including my beloved collection of Victorian witch boots – began to feel all wrong. My closetful of monastic, architectural black dresses suddenly felt stifling and constrictive instead of stately and majestic, so they remained untouched while I rotated through three pairs of Lululemon leggings, laundering them only when they had accumulated enough cat hair to be considered repulsive. Despite skimming through a number of well-intentioned articles offering advice on “how to stay sane during quarantine” that suggested “getting dressed up” might add a shred of normalcy, and perhaps dignity, to one’s routine, I simply couldn’t see the point.

For as long as I can remember, fashion has been the organizing principle of my life.

In quarantine, there was nothing to get dressed up for. What good are all these shoes, I thought, if my social life is confined to Houseparty dates with my friends, our heads squished into little squares on my phone and the rest of us unseen? With nowhere to go and no one to share clothing with, it felt like a waste of time. The perennial question of what to wear – once a leading source of creativity and joy – all of a sudden held no thrall whatsoever.

For as long as I can remember, fashion has been the organizing principle of my life. Some kids are drawn to insects, baseball cards, dinosaurs or Disney movies, but my thing has always been clothes. During my childhood, I anticipated back-to-school shopping at Zellers with a feverish intensity. And once I started earning money at an after-school job, I spent hours performing complex search and rescue missions for vintage Ferragamo pumps and men’s Lacoste cardigans at the local thrift store. To this day, I’d rather spend money on clothing I can cherish than on intangible, ephemeral things like plane tickets or fancy meals. My wardrobe is a mirror in which I can gaze and see myself reflected exactly as I want to look. My closet is, in essence, a collection. Individually, each item is of relatively little value – a testament to my well-honed thrifting skills – but collectively my wardrobe is my life’s work. Numerous theories attempt to explain why people are drawn to collecting.

For me, clothing is a way to ensure control amid the cacophony

In his 1931 essay “Unpacking My Library,” scholar Walter Benjamin writes, “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.” He suggests that collectors are driven by the “thrill of acquisition” and that each new possession represents a means of imposing order on the chaos of the world. Psychoanalyst and art historian Werner Muensterberger, whose 1994 book Collecting: An Unruly Passion is considered the authoritative text on the subject, suggests that the impulse to collect begins when infants are first separated from their caregivers and glom on to objects such as teddy bears or blankets to placate their loneliness. Some adults, writes Muensterberger, never grow out of this habit. They continue to use objects as a way to quell the anxiety of operating in an uncertain world.

I can relate. For me, clothing is a way to ensure control amid the cacophony. Much like Muensterberger suggests, I’m an anxious person for whom uncertainty is in itself a form of suffering. But in the shelter of my closet, I’ve managed to create a miniature universe in which everything makes sense. Curating my closet allows me to exert control even when agency is otherwise hard to come by. It may sound neurotic, but it’s what works for me.

When COVID-19 struck like an errant lightning bolt, clothing no longer offered me the sense of security it had been providing for so long. There was no use pretending anything was normal, so I gave up the act. I abruptly relinquished my desire to dress like myself, denouncing structured garments in favour of soft, yielding clothes that grew and shrank with the contours of my body – almost more living thing than object.
Even pre-pandemic, my work-from-home outfits skewed more The Big Lebowski than Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But most days I had reason to change out of the frowzy duds and style myself into a creative character – like “Morticia Addams meets Texas oil heiress” or “art collector with an extensive collection of Black Flag vinyl.” Now, when I leave the house, my style is more akin to Homer Simpson in a flowy floral muumuu.

Now, when I leave the house, my style is more akin to Homer Simpson in a flowy floral muumuu.

After months of social distancing, I no longer wake up feeling like the natural order of life is in free fall. This is just the way things are. I remain resistant to anything clingy or too close to the body (a few attempted dalliances with rigid jeans have lasted less than an hour), but I’m slowly starting to find my old reflection again.

As I write this, I’m wearing a black-and-white-striped turtleneck underneath black overalls – a utilitarian look I favoured in the Before Times. I have yet to return to my beloved dramatic sleeves or Victorian witch boots, but my leggings are folded in a drawer, no longer an everyday item. For now, my style is precarious. But in my daydreams of dressing up again, I find resilience.

Urooba Jamal gave up the hijab, as well as her faith, and gained more than just the freedom to play with her hair.

The year I started wearing the hijab – the head scarf some Muslim women wear — was also the year I got braces and glasses. It was the mid-2000s, I was about to enter high school and it was the heyday of melodramatic teenage insecurities, fuelled by cinema classics such as Mean Girls and High School Musical. Unbeknownst to me at 13, I had teetered dramatically away from conventional beauty standards in a time when they were far more nar­rowly defined than they are today.

Soon, however, the hijab would seamlessly fit into my fashion and beauty regimen. In a quest to stand out in the suburbs of Western Canada, in a city where many people were South Asian like me, I found hijabs to match my clothes: in neon hues, bedazzled with sequins and in prints from cheetah to floral. My makeup matched these colours, and I swapped a hair routine for a hijab routine. (Yes, there were bad hijab days.)

About a decade later, at age 22 and in my last semester of university, I decided to stop wearing the physical marker of faith. As if I were a teenager again, I found myself learning things anew, from how to style my hair to how tied my perception of beauty was to the male gaze.

As a hijabi, I fantasized about all of the different hairstyles I wanted to try: wearing French braids, donning extensions and even dyeing my whole head purple. Ironically, the most avant-garde hair decision I’ve made to date is to let a friend bleach the ends of it in their bathtub one summer. Most days I simply wash my hair, haphazardly rub in some curl cream and hold out till I’m confronted with a frizzy pouf.

Despite these fantasies, I found it easy to embrace modest beauty and fashion trends, part of a growing but still novel industry in the mid- to late 2000s. I even started my own fashion blog in high school to document my outfits, which helped me connect with hijabi bloggers from Indonesia to Italy. One day while I was strolling the beach in Vancouver with some other friends who were also wearing hijabs, a woman came up to us. “You all look beautiful in that!” she exclaimed, pointing to our heads. “Just stunning!”

While I was basking in the glow of her compliment, one of my friends turned to our group and said worriedly: “See, this is why we shouldn’t even get our eyebrows done! The point of the hijab isn’t to attract attention to our beauty.” I nodded along with the others, confused. I knew that the hijab was worn as an expression of modesty, but what’s the harm in looking good? And what did plucking our eyebrows have to do with anything?

It was then that I began to understand why some people had left comments on my blog that were varia­tions of “Hijab is not a fashion statement!” These were among the first few questions I would have about the hijab and then later about women in Islam and eventually Islam itself – or at least the mainstream Sunni interpretation of it.

As my belief in the religion waned, the hijab began to lose meaning for me. My daily ritual of wrapping fabric around my head began to feel cumbersome – even irritating. I knew I couldn’t continue wearing it. I also knew that there would be repercussions and that I’d never look back.

The first day I stepped out of the house without a hijab, almost six years ago, the winter wind nipped my ears and blew my bangs in my face. I felt like everyone was staring, but of course they weren’t. I had matched my eyeshadow to my blue dress and wore dangly ear­ rings that, for the first time, weren’t peeking out from behind a scarf.

“Unveiling” – from colonial Algeria to present-day Iran – has long been seen as a liberating act to many in the West. Now that I’ve stepped from one world to the next, I’ve taken on new burdens. Becoming agnostic opened up a new world of dating and sex, and I soon became fixated on presenting myself so men would find me attractive.

As I try now, in my late 20s, to feel beautiful without validation from men, while at the same time shedding binary ideas from my Muslim upbringing about modesty and hypersexualization, my style and beauty looks are a combination of my entire past. Sometimes I wear short dresses with plunging necklines; other times I opt for shirts with a looser fit. Sometimes I do a full face of makeup; other times I’ll go bare. One thing hasn’t changed, however: how many different colours you’ll see me sporting at once.

After a year spent surrounded by the same four walls, the latest short film from Yves Saint Laurent is a welcome taste of a different world. On December 30, YSL unveiled Summer of ’21, a short from Argentine filmmaker Gaspar Noé and guided by brand creative director Anthony Vaccarello. It takes place in a grand estate featuring everything your 2020 was missing—high-fashion, gilded scenery, and glamorous Oscar nominee Charlotte Rampling.

Summer of ’21 features looks from Saint Laurent’s Summer21 collection, which premiered on December 15 in the desert of North Africa. The collaboration between Vaccarello and Noé follows the director’s 2019 Cannes Film Festival release Lux Aeterna. Its “red, hazy, velvety light” evokes the genre of Italian mystery thrillers known as giallo, according to a press release. Set to Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” performed by SebastiAn, the film leans into the mystifying uncertainty everyone’s been feeling as of late.

“A familiar and timeless feeling. Dreaminess and tension, decadence and danger. The unsettling strangeness of those girls gravitating around Charlotte Rampling, the mysterious and haunted priestess,” the press release promises.

Throughout the film, several models wander through a mysterious mansion, including Anok Yai, Antonia Przedpelski, Assa Baradji, Aylah Mae Peterson, Charlotte Rampling, Clara Deshayes, Grace Hartzel, Kim Schell, Mica Arganaraz, Miriam Sanchez, Sora Choi and Stefania Cristian. They gather in a theater-like setting, fixated in front of a stage that reveals none other than Rampling, star of films such as 45 Years and The Wings of the Dove.

“I wanted to focus on the essence of things,” Vaccarello said in the press release for Saint Laurent’s Summer21 collection. “I think it’s a sign of the times, but I didn’t want anything bleak or heavy.” Similarly, YSL’s short film ends with Rampling raising her arms in a moment of expression that feels like hope for the year ahead—whatever it may look like.

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Odessa Paloma Parker reveals a selection of labels that give “luxury” a more intentional meaning.

As consumers move away from purchasing mass-made goods – because of their toll on the earth and its inhabitants – brands that showcase handcrafted artisanal techniques are poised to win admiration the world over. From intricately beaded works of art to elevated wardrobe basics, there’s no scarcity of wonders offering the irreplaceable value of the deeply unique.

AAKS

Akosua Afriyie-Kumi launched her line of vibrant hand-woven accessories after moving from Ghana to the United Kingdom and studying fashion design. “It was difficult to find a job after,” she says. The industry was saturated with hopefuls, and fast fashion still dominated. “I always wanted to start my own brand, but I didn’t know which direction to go in,” says Afriyie-Kumi. “I remembered that when I was a child in Ghana, we had lots of baskets. You would see a lot of weavers selling their handicrafts on the roadside. I started thinking ‘Why hasn’t anybody done something new with this?’ That was my light-bulb moment – to focus on this craftsmanship and these ideas and turn them into something someone in London or New York or Spain would appreciate.”

With some motherly nudging – “My mom would visit me in London and say ‘Why don’t you come back to Ghana?’” – Afriyie-Kumi began to formulate the idea for AAKS. “I started looking for weavers in the South,” she recalls of her return to her native roots.

“Through research, I realized that most basket weavers are based in the North.” After making the 10-hour trek, Afriyie-Kumi was able to connect with talented makers, and her team has grown from three to 30 as AAKS has caught the attention of an international audience. Mere months after the label’s launch, multi-brand retailer Anthropologie reached out to Afriyie-Kumi to carry her wares, and now AAKS can be found in various stores worldwide. A collaborative tote with the hip ready-to-wear label Rag & Bone launched in August.

It’s all a heady departure from AAKS’s humble beginnings. “I spent about two years under a tree, working with the weavers and developing my samples,” says Afriyie- Kumi. “Of course, it sounds so easy talking about it now, but it was so hard to begin. There was a language barrier, and trying to get my ideas into 3-D with the weavers was difficult. I was trying to do something a bit different.”

Weaving in Ghana goes back thousands of years. “I’m still doing research into how it all began and why it’s done,” she says. “When I speak to my weavers, they tell me it’s something they’ve been doing since they were young. Your dad is a weaver, your mom is a weaver, so you weave as a little kid. All the kids in the community can weave, but with training, they can weave something of a higher standard.”

Afriyie-Kumi has achieved such prowess in developing this kind of infrastructure that she was tapped to participate in the launch of a training program started by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and has since become a partner in the initiative. “They saw my work and thought ‘Perfect,’” she says. “I was working with weavers already so I could help them set up this new program.” The result was AAKS’s Weaving for Change line of home decor items.

Afriyie-Kumi acknowledges that her collaborative approach is time-consuming—even parallel to that of creating an haute couture gown. “In general, it takes about a week to make one product,” she says. “First, we have to source the fibres and transport them to the weavers – it takes three days or more before they even get the raw materials. They twist them, dye them and dry them. Then they begin to weave.”

Products are sent to AAKS’s studio for finishing before they are dispatched to a growing legion of fans. “Before I moved back to Ghana, there was a lot of talk about fast fashion,” says Afriyie-Kumi about what differentiates her designs – ones that have resonated even more greatly, she notes, since the Black Lives Matter movement felt a groundswell this summer. “I always remember that I never wanted to go into that market. I wanted to do something that was handmade. This is where my story began.”

Julia Heuer

Trained as a textile designer, Julia Heuer first learned about the Japanese dyeing technique of Arashi Shibori when she was an exchange student in Copenhagen. She was drawn to its simplicity and nearly instant gratification. “It’s exactly how I like to work,” says the Germany-based creative. “It offers very quick results, but it’s handmade.” It also affords Heuer and her team the ability to work in a satisfyingly-scaled-back way. “You just need a tube for wrapping the fabric and you can dye it in hot water,” she describes. No expensive industrial-sized equipment is needed.

Heuer’s adoption of Arashi Shibori (which was developed by Kanezo Suzuki as a way to create an all-over pattern on fabrics and is an innovation of the ancient Shibori method used as far back as the 8th century) means that she’s free from having a strong reliance on suppliers – and that’s certainly helpful given the global limitations on manufacturing and shipping presented by COVID-19 this year. “when you’re a textile designer, you usually depend on other companies to produce materials,” she explains. “with this technique, i can do it in my studio – I’m able to do it with my own two hands.”

The designer’s fall collection, titled Funny Animals, draws inspiration from the array of natural prints found on all manner of creatures. Heuer’s offbeat pieces combine digital prints and hand-painted fabrics, and there’s a moment of truth when you see how these effects are realized after the fabric has been given the Shibori treatment. “You have to see if the print works after pleating,” she says of the union between the hand-hewn plissé material and its artistic treatments. “When they work together, they create something new and give the resulting product a certain dynamic that makes it feel immediately right.” Sounds like the ideal kind of fast fashion.

Blu HummingBird Beadwork

“Beading is medicine,” says Brit Ellis, founder of accessory line Blu Hummingbird Beadwork. “It teaches and connects us.” Ellis started her practice after joining a beading circle facilitated by George Brown College in Toronto while she was a student there. “I grew up displaced from community,” says Ellis, who had virtually no ties to her Indigenous background while growing up. “When I was in college, I attended beading circles at the Friendship Centre. I felt a real connection with beading almost immediately.”

Ellis started her brand in 2014, and her creations incorporate both contemporary motifs (cartoon characters, the Toronto Raptors logo) and ones linked to her ancestry – her Moon Medallion pieces are particularly popular. “I’ve always felt really connected to the moon,” she says about why she began crafting the labour-intensive pieces, which can take up to 30 hours to complete. “And I wanted to do beadwork with moon imagery since I started.” Ellis’s attachment to lunar activity and its symbolic link to life cycles has a deeply personal resonance. “I struggled with infertility for about six years; I got very sick and had emergency surgery to remove one of my ovaries,” she explains. “It was a very confusing time. The teachings around Grandmother Moon really helped me feel grounded and connected. They helped me feel hopeful. The cycle and the renewal – it’s all very powerful to me.”

Ellis has explored other deeply intimate motifs in her beading, from human hearts to vulvas. “I’ve beaded a number of them,” she says, adding that many Indigenous community members have “received negative feedback when talking about sexuality and our bodies.” She says she feels fortunate that that has not been her experience. “When I was speaking with my elders about the vulva pieces, I got very positive feedback.”
Bridging generational traditions and practices with contemporary concepts is something Ellis finds deeply gratifying about her beading.

“My Indigeneity is tied to the past, present and future,” she says. “It’s all intertwined. So I memorialize the things that are of interest to me – like my appreciation for the art of drag – in a modern respect. Those things are just as valid an influence. They are a way for me to fully encompass and express – in a full-circle kind of way – my entire self as a Haudenosaunee woman.”

Larkspur & Hawk

“My love of foiling came from my love of antique jewellery,” says New York-based curator turned jewellery entrepreneur Emily Satloff, who founded her line of fine baubles in 2008. Satloff collects what she describes as more “esoteric” jewellery from as far back as 250 years ago, and she has become familiar with the technique of foiling, which involves “lining a closed setting with brightly hued, gold or silver metallic foils.” She was so bewitched by the effects – describing the interplay of light and colour as a “halo”—that she eventually decided she wanted to find a way to interpret the under- recognized technique in an updated way.

Satloff began to educate those who were curious about her antique foiled jewellery. “The more I heard myself talking about it, the more I had a burning private desire to design a bit of it for myself,” she says. But the revitalization of an antiquated technique requires plenty of research, and that wasn’t easy to do with this near-obsolete craft. “There’s no guidebook or recipe for foiling,” she says. “But I had been working with antique jewellery for so long and had seen it in all stages of disrepair, so I basically had a sense of the ways in which people were foiling 200 years ago.”

Satloff says that after she gained a sense of the basics behind the technique, she “played around with faceted gemstones and candy wrappers to see the effects” until she got the cut she was really looking for and then searched for a jeweller who was patient enough to work with her. She describes the foiling technique as “extremely laborious” and notes that because Larkspur & Hawk is a pioneering brand in terms of modernizing the practice, she – once a student – has essentially become a teacher. “Even today, when I start with a new workshop, I train the artisans on how to do things our way,” she says. “It’s not something they’re versed in…. One of the good things about working with an outdated art form is that we don’t have a lot of competition. But with the benefit of leading the way in modern foiling comes the disadvantage of it not featuring a mainstream technique that people immediately know about.”

This lack of awareness means there’s a steep learning curve for Satloff when it comes to customer education. “There is a misunderstanding of whether it’s fine or fashion jewellery, and it’s all fine,” she notes. “We use fine materials, and the pieces are handmade.” Satloff also wants to make it clear that she’s not replicating pieces from days gone by. “I never want to appear to be doing reproductions,” she adds. “If our work is mistaken for a Georgian piece of jewellery, I’ve done my job poorly.”

Osei-Duro

Founded by Maryanne Mathias and Molly Keogh in 2011, this line of contemporary essentials was inspired by Mathias’s travels to various regions of Africa and India – locales she visited while on hiatus from her former fashion label, Hastings and Main. “After getting frustrated with the design industry and wanting a break, i ended up travelling around the world and designing capsule collections in textile-rich countries,” she says. Upon returning to Canada, Mathias recruited Keogh to join her in launching Osei-Duro.

The brand primarily offers hand-printed batik clothing – pieces that are made by local artisans in Accra. (Mathias is based in her native Vancouver, and Keogh resides in Ghana.) Batik is an ancient wax dyeing technique that cultures across Africa, India and Asia have been employing for centuries as a means of creating artful garments and accessories.

“It takes a while for any designer or artist to find their voice,” notes Mathias. “We have experimented with so many different techniques over the years – natural indigo, plain dye, hand-weaving, factory-dyed fabrics, knits and more – and through feedback and experience, we found that batik was the aesthetic that shone through.”

To better educate customers about the labour involved in making an Osei-Duro garment and to give a face to the makers honouring their local artisan culture, the company boasts a stories pillar on its website. “Our brand is so process-driven; it’s one of the most exciting elements about it,” says Mathias. “The story behind the clothes can almost tell itself.”

While the sweatsuit – and tracksuits, sweatpants, sweatshirts, et al. – was admittedly not something we predicted would be the It item of 2020, it’s undeniable that was the case. If you had the ability to work from home, where Zoom meetings only required you to look presentable from the waist up, jeans and skirts were immediately swapped for sweatpants.

Athleisure has been a trend for years now, but it wasn’t leggings we were drawn to during lockdowns, particularly in the winter months. As Anne Donahue wrote in a 2006 essay defending sweatpants, yoga pants may be comfortable, but they offer neither coziness nor warmth – something we all desperately needed.

“I don’t see sloppiness or the abandonment of one’s stylistic brand – instead, I see liberation,” wrote Donahue of choosing to wear sweatsuits. “Liberation of fitted pieces that we all need a break from, and liberation from the self-imposed fashion police who condemn simultaneously looking and feeling comfortable.”

Looking to 2021, we’re not done with the desire for comfort just yet. Designers like Thakoon, Prada, Tibi and Balenciaga showed sweatshirts and sweatpants on the spring runways. If you’re in need of a fresh pair of sweatpants or a matching sweatsuit set, click through the slideshow below featuring options some of our favourite Canadian brands like Kotn, Knix, Brunette the Label, Sidia, Tkees and more (at all price points!).

[cozy package tagline]

A lifetime ago, otherwise known as October of last year, my best friend and I decided to treat ourselves with a night out at Olmsted, a Brooklyn restaurant that’d been on our bucket list for months. It was a bit on the expensive side for a casual Thursday meal, so we decided to tackle the menu with our living-on-a-media-salary-budget strategy: bypass the main entrees in favor of appetizers and dessert. Turns out, the most expensive thing Olmsted convinced me to buy didn’t even show up at our table.

OK, yes, it was a candle. (The headline gave me away!) Before we left, my friend and I both made trips to the bathroom and returned raving about the warm woodsy scent that turned the restaurant’s powder room into a full-on sensory experience. We made it out the door before doubling back to ask the hostess what was on display. Thus began our obsession with the Apotheke charcoal candle. Here’s why I love it:

It’s the coziest.

If you plan to spend most of your pandemic winter nights horizontal on the couch, might I suggest you do it with this burning on your coffee table? The candle’s aesthetic—a chic matte black tumbler with all-black wax—is a mood in itself, and the scent—cedarwood and sandalwood with notes of smokey amber—will transport you to a cabin in the Catskills with a roaring fireplace and a collection of sweaters nearby. (I predict this will be an especially helpful tool as we try not to yearn for the glory days of socially-distanced summer outings.) If I had a dollar for every time someone in our apartment has yelled, “It smells so good in here,” while this candle was burning, I’d go ahead and buy the three-wick version.

It’s easy to reuse.

Hear me out: In my efforts to reuse the items I buy instead of tossing them out, I try to salvage as many candles as possible. This means when I’ve burned a candle down to its dredges, I’ll pop it in the freezer for a day and then use a knife to scrape out any remaining wax, leaving me with a new, usable container. I can speak from experience that the Apotheke candles respond to the freezer method extremely well, plus the container’s packaging is simple yet beautiful, making it perfect for reuse purposes. And while maybe that’s not traditionally “cozy,” a little DIY does make me feel fuzzy inside.

It’s got a good backstory.

According to Apotheke’s website, the company all started in founder Chrissy Fichtl’s kitchen. She created Apotheke in 2011, and her husband Sebastian Picasso became the company’s production lead in 2012. The two started out selling at farmers’ markets and then brought their soaps and candles to flea markets in Brooklyn; they still pour their candles and bar soaps in the borough. They’ve also given back to the community through their work with NYC’s Bowery Mission.

As for the product, the charcoal candle is described as vegan, non-toxic, cruelty-free, and made with a soy wax blend. And while $38 is an admittedly high price to pay for a candle, this occasional indulgence has made the perpetual indoors feel just a little more novel.

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The pursuit of covetable pieces keeps fashion enthusiast Marlowe Granados connected to a pre-COVID-19 way of life.

Before quarantine, my enjoyment of going out was heightened by the promise in anticipation. If there was a party I planned to attend, the way I prepared for it always started with choosing an outfit. Placing myself in a considered look featuring an array of playful colours and outlandish silhouettes – vintage Pucci or Moschino, perhaps – helped me understand how I could move through a room and be myself, no matter what came my way, with ease.

As I got older, this process often became an exercise to quell social anxiety, and eventually, with practice, I could overcome any obvious nerves. Only in the isolation of COVID-19 did I realize that this ritual was integral to my love of clothes. The journey started with the thrill of coming across certain pieces, imagining all the possibilities of wearing them and then finally living in them. For me, that was the joy of fashion.

When there was suddenly nowhere to go, my relationship with clothing had to adapt to new circumstances. Though I have considered myself a collector for many years, my obsession reached a fever pitch during isolation.

My experience with resale websites goes back to my early days of thrifting; it is an expertise that includes knowledge about textiles and fashion history and understanding the difference between how much something is worth and what you’re willing to pay for it.

When there was suddenly nowhere to go, my relationship with clothing had to adapt to new circumstances

As time passes, sourcing items that meet certain standards of quality craftsmanship becomes more and more difficult – those with a discerning eye notice that some luxury houses are not manufacturing their clothes like they used to.

In the unsettled moments before bed, I opened the apps: Poshmark, eBay, The RealReal and Depop. With the possibility of physically going to stores largely out of the question, these platforms were my only outlet. The search, often like dating, was held up by the hope that something might come along that I wouldn’t want to miss. I scoured for hours, with a vague idea of what I wanted and the certainty that it must exist somewhere.

A few weeks into quarantine, I stumbled across a dress from the infamous Jean Paul Gaultier Fall 1995 Cyber collection, which is easily recognized by optical illusion-style dots that echo the curves of a woman’s body. Thanks to luxury vintage sellers like Pechuga Vintage, pieces from the collection have resurfaced; Gaultier’s dots have recently been seen on the likes of Kim Kardashian and Cardi B. I purchased the dress for $30, and the rush of serotonin that resulted from the thrill was the only vice I had left.

What started as a way to fill hours while isolating at home suddenly became filled with purpose.

My knack for describing garments has been honed by the eBay search bar, and my various watchlists are filled with items that are attainable, fantastical and, of course, so novel that one can only find pleasure knowing they exist. I’ll look for Bakelite handbags that resemble giant rounds of butterscotch or for archival pieces like the original Paco Rabanne disc bag from the ’60s (now re-released). I can scroll through countless pages to find specific pieces from collections that hold historical and cultural significance to me – my very own Criterion Collection of clothes. A $6,000 museum-quality set – consisting of a corset, a bustle skirt and a balloon-sleeved top – from Vivienne Westwood’s Spring 1996 show has been sitting at the top of my eBay list for over a year. Westwood’s designs that season mimicked the rococo style, with Watteau gowns and corsetry interpreted with her signature playful twist.

What started as a way to fill hours while isolating at home suddenly became filled with purpose. I bought floor-length dresses, bustiers and large ornate hats. As I showed my wares to friends over FaceTime, they would say “But where are you going?” It did not matter. I was preserving remnants of my former life through my wardrobe – a life that may no longer be possible in a post-COVID-19 world. I snapped up pieces from specific collections, always with the presumption that I could sell them if I wanted to; but the bliss I derive from having them in my closet is almost better.

As I showed my wares to friends over FaceTime, they would say “But where are you going?” It did not matter.

It’s not that I may one day have a place to wear them – it’s their association with the past that feels like a fantasy. What used to be an object filled with possibility is now a relic from an era long gone.

Away from other people, this obsession feels intimate and personal. Whether I am curating a digital museum or dreaming through my closet, I can surround myself with objects I find beautiful, and this gives me comfort in times of uncertainty.

When it’s possible, I will wear these clothes into the future to commemorate the beauty of the past.

This Canadian rock band’s glorious manes aren’t the only things turning heads. Their socially conscious lyrics shine a spotlight on First Nations.

Buoyant, shoulder-grazing tresses are a prominent feature of Crown Lands, the genre- bending psych-blues rock band comprising Cody Bowles and Kevin Comeau. “They’ve definitely become part of our identity, for sure,” comments Comeau. “Our hair is important to the band and what it represents.”

The pair, who hail from Oshawa, Ont., began their joint hair journeys six years ago, back when Bowles (vocals, drums) and Comeau (guitar, bass, keys) first met and quickly bonded over their shared obsession with Canadian progressive rock band Rush. Their look developed out of necessity rather than an active decision, shares Comeau. “It was more about the fact that I had spent all of my money on guitars, so I didn’t have any left for haircuts.”

Their lengthy locks have become a trademark that creates an impact onstage and are as unforgettable as their “heavy, loud” music. “It’s a presence thing,” expresses Bowles, who identifies with the non-binary pronouns they/them and isn’t shy to enhance their cascading curls with wild outfits, body glitter and makeup. “When people see us, they’re like, ‘Wow, sick!’ They know they’re in for something interesting.”

Headbanging and hair whipping while shredding his guitar is paramount to Comeau’s showmanship. “It’s my only way of dancing because I’m standing and playing keyboards with my feet, so I can’t move around,” he explains. “Before touring ended this year, I’d almost built up some choreography: I had movements for each song.” And that feeling of hitting the stage to perform for a crowd? According to the duo, it’s like a time-escaping, transcendental moment that changes you, inside and out. “When the sound waves hit your body, you become bigger,” expresses Comeau, mentioning music and religion in the same breath. “It’s the same reason why people go to church or join sports teams – it’s to serve something that’s bigger than yourself. And I think that’s a huge part of human nature and societies. We want to be part of something bigger than ourselves. That’s what Crown Lands represents for Cody and me. It is so much more than the sum of its parts.”

A greater mission is written into the band’s name. It’s a direct nod to territorial areas once belonging to the British Crown that were passed on to the federal or provincial governments – lands that Indigenous peoples traditionally occupied. It’s a blunt and powerful alias that compels the duo to create music that educates people about Indigenous injustices and Canada’s troublesome history. “It’s our duty to speak up about things that really matter,” states Bowles, who is half Mi’kmaq (an Indigenous tribe from the Atlantic region of Canada). And in the wake of a global chorus calling for a reckoning with anti-Black racism, policing and inequality, Crown Lands’s passion to raise marginalized groups is burning stronger than ever. “There’s a spiritual revolution happening, and we have a duty to be the soundtrack to it,” says Comeau. “As a straight, white-presenting male, I have a huge responsibility to be a good ally.”

Their 2017 song “Mountain” paints a picture of colonization and the damaging government-sponsored residential school system (an attempt to eradicate Indigenous youth of their cultural language and practices that caused long-term intergenerational problems among Indigenous communities). Then there’s “End of the Road,” which was released this year and shines a spotlight on the notorious Highway of Tears, a remote stretch of road in British Columbia known for the dozens of women and girls – mostly Indigenous – who have vanished or turned up dead in the area. To this day, most of these cases are still unsolved.

As much as this rock band creates music in the hope of sparking change, it has also become a potent outlet for Bowles’s mental health. “Music has helped me through so many hard times in my life,” they share. “It has helped me through major depression.”

Comeau, on the other hand, is quick to flip the script. “Listening to music helps a lot with mental health, but creating it can sometimes be super straining,” he says. Especially when you have to “tear your soul apart to write a good record” and hit the road for a whirlwind tour that pulls you away from loved ones for lengths of time – realities that are often not spoken about in the music industry. Comeau adds that he reached his lowest point this past February while recording Crown Lands’s latest creation, Wayward Flyers, a five-track acoustic EP. How did he cope? With weekly therapy. “It’s never the wrong time to get therapy,” he states. “Finding someone you can talk to? There’s no shame in that whatsoever. It’s been the best investment in my life – other than my guitars.”

Below, the duo unpack what their hair (and beard) routines consist of.