Dress down
The amazing way the Internet can fix anything (or at least take you to Gus)
Do you know there is a man in Toronto named Gus who can fix destroyed dresses?
This is probably not the sort of thing you’d know unless somebody spilled vinaigrette on your wedding gown, or if you were a formalwear shop owner with stock damaged by flood water, or if you unwittingly sent your very best dress to what might be the very worst dry cleaner in all Toronto — a place that sees a delicate, sea- hued silk chiffon dream of layered fabric so beautifully transparent, so meticulously cut and draped that it wafts around like a cloud, and labels it “to launder.”
That’s me. A dry cleaner decided to wash my exquisite water-coloured cloud, the best piece of clothing I have ever owned. It came back two sizes smaller, and looked like a stiff, flat- ironed piece of paper, its edges crinkly burnt and its roughed- up fibres greyed to the colour of a day- old avocado. The annihilation was so complete, it almost seemed like willful destruction.
I know a dress is just a dress. Just fabric. But sometimes the most inconsequential things become emotional vectors.
In my bedroom, I stood in a puddle of dry cleaner’s plastic and spent a minute or two crying over my dress. Then, I put it in a garment bag and went to the dry cleaner. I unzipped the bag, and the woman who owned the place stood silently looking at its contents for what felt like an hour. I said something about small claims court. She said nothing. I got exasperated and raised my voice. Still not a word. Then finally she looked me straight in the eye and said: “This has never happened.” “You mean before? Well it’s happened now,” I answered.
“This has never happened,” she repeated.
Where was I? If a green cocktail frock falls in the urban jungle, does anybody hear it?
Leaving the dry cleaners with nothing resolved, I saw three paths ahead of me: I could toss the dress and move on; I could file a legal claim and whip up a lot of bad karma seeking justice over peace; or I could gather up my skirts and see all this as a challenge to fix the probably unfixable.
In the last couple of years, I’ve had some of my most satisfying domestic moments thanks to the Internet hive mind, employing all sorts of tricks I wouldn’t have otherwise known about. From knowledge gleaned from message boards or generalist sites like wikiHow, I have successfully removed Sharpie scribbles from a varnished wood table with toothpaste, I have saved over-salted stews by throwing a raw potato in, and have pulled the smell of oil out of my kitchen linen by using dish liquid in the washing machine instead of laundry soap.
Years ago, all this was the sort of folk wisdom grandparents disseminated, but in the last few decades this breed of knowledge stopped being handed down. Schools s t opped t e aching s hop and home economics, and people stopped fixing their own toasters. I don’t know too many these days who can change their own tires or make a short crust without a YouTube video to tell them how.
But that’s not to scoff at YouTube videos. The last 15 years have seen the reuptake — and sometimes annoying fetishization — of goodold, honest things like the clothespin or the Mason jar or the knitting basket. Behind these artifacts there has been a small, but significant, web- led renaissance in doit- yourself- ism. We have left the age of “leave it to the experts” and entered the age of “everyone can be an expert.”
Still, I could not find a great home solution for my ruined dress online. So I started calling all the “fine dry cleaners” in Toronto, places that had words like “Precious” or “Luxury” in their names. But I had passed the point of trusting dry cleaners. Then, back online, I found a Toronto Star article from 2009:
“Meet the bridal gown wizard.” Armed with a frayed pink toothbrush and fourlitre jugs of a top- secret potion he mixes himself, Gus Polyzois plies his unsung trade in a forest of silk, crepe, satin and chiffon.” Gus actually started out as a presser in a Spadina wedding-gown factory in the 1970s. The dresses had a lot of hand-sewn work at the time and, by the end of the fabrication process, would often be soiled with grease or footprints. “And when they came back from dry cleaning,” Gus says, “they would come back still dirty, or worse.”
So he began trying his hand at saving the gowns, coming up with his own cleaning solutions. He became so well known for it that he branched out and made it a business.
When you walk into Courtesy Gown Preservation on Eglinton West, you feel like you are walking into a world of a thousand stories. Gowns hang from high racks, some so stiff with beading or boning, they look like they contain invisible wearers. Gus shows me a veil covered in footprints, and a giant meringue with a stain down its front, “probably wine.” He shows me how he boxes the dresses for women who want to keep their single-use wedding gowns in pristine condition.
I tell Gus I would never have imagined that artfully boxing wedding dresses was a thing.
He shrugs. “A dress can mean a lot,” he says. Some of the dresses Gus deals with can cost $30,000. “Look, you are here, right?” I show him my dress. “This silk was washed for sure,” he says, immediately. “Leave it with me.”
Two weeks later, I am back at Courtesy Gowns. Gus’s wife Ellie tells me he spent hours getting the air back into my dress.
His work was nothing short of miraculous. The fabric was soft, the edges smooth, and somehow Gus got almost all the lost size back. Even the colour was fresh again.
“How did you do this?” I ask.
Gus just shakes his head. “A guy like me has to have his business secrets,” he says. “But now you can wear your dress again. And now you can be a happy girl.”