A fine vintage
Toronto mainstay Comrags releases a collection of its own vintage pieces
There is a timeless quality to Comrags clothing.
The Toronto label designed by Joyce Gunhouse and Judy Cornish will celebrate its 40th anniversary this summer, and ahead of it, they’re launching Comrags: ENCORE, a curated collection of their own vintage designs. The pieces are pulled from the personal archives of Gunhouse and Cornish, as well as from longtime customers’ closets in return for a gift certificate.
Customers will be able to shop the best of the label’s past alongside the current collection at their Dundas Street West boutique as of Sunday, with hundreds of pieces ranging from $30 to $150.
“I’ve always been a second-hand and vintage shopper, a scavenger at heart,” says Cornish. “I’m attracted to the randomness of what can be found, and to clothing that is imperfect, especially from wear: fading, holes, bits mended.” These things give character to the piece, and suggest a life well lived.
Cornish’s favourite description of the brand was by the late Canadian fashion critic David Livingstone, who said Comrags is “never in fashion, never out of fashion.”
The designers’ inspirations include housedresses sold at Portuguese and Italian shops in the west end, slip skirts from the 1930s and ’40s, uniforms and coveralls and “people we see on the street,” Gunhouse says. “The haystack skirt was inspired by a woman we saw on her bicycle with her skirt all bunched and twisted up front.” They seek out fabrics and textures to achieve what Cornish calls “rumpled dishevelment, or cultivated messiness.” Bias cut construction makes the clothes feel “liveable.”
The motto has always been “buy less, buy better,” a philosophy now embraced by millennials and gen Z. “We always wanted our clothes to last, to be timeless and to be made locally,” says Gunhouse. Their atelier is still above the shop today. “Judy drapes, I draft,” Gunhouse says of their different design approaches. They each make their own items for a collection first. “Often our ideas are in sync with one another, at other times we are far apart,” says Cornish. “Then we ‘build the bridge,’ working more collaboratively to design the remainder of the collection together.”
The designers met as students at what was then called Ryerson University; they graduated in1983. Cornish worked at the bar and music venue Larry’s Hideaway and one night, to round out an evening of Duran Duran music videos, she was asked to put on a little fashion show. She joined forces with Gunhouse and the name Comrags came a few months later. “We had the same sensibility. We admired English and Japanese designers at school,” says Gunhouse. “Out of school, everyone was punk, new wave, wearing vintage.” But it was their shared work ethic and the way they nurture their separate family lives alongside the brand that has kept the label and the friends together for so many years.
On the business side, Gunhouse and Cornish made an early decision to only work with stores that paid them. It sounds obvious but a lot of labels were burned with the splintering of the local fashion industry — a vibrant force of independent designers in the 1990s — in the early 2000s as retail began to falter. Comrags scaled their business down to focus on their own boutique, which had opened circa 1995.
There were some electrifying moments on the Canadian runways of the 1980s and ’90s, with a bootstrapped approach to showing clothes in unlikely locations. Take the Salt Show. “We’d done a group of heavy black wool pieces to end a show, long, dragging on the floor. The night before the show, we filled big tubs of water with large quantities of road salt, then let the bottom quarter of each garment soak overnight in the salt water,” recalls Cornish. The clothes were stained and crusted in salt. As the models walked, chunks fell onto the runway. “The audience was unsure of what we’d done,” she says, and whether they meant for it to happen. They had, and the critics raved.
Another presentation, which they call the Bed Show, took place in a church basement on Bellwoods Avenue. They sat guests on vintage army cots; the concept was deconstructing the bed. “The final looks of the show were made of netting, feathers, pillow ticking and quilted stripes,” says Cornish.
A lot has changed in fashion since then, but much about Comrags has endured. Take the bias slip from 1983, which has appeared consistently over 40 years. “Slips are easy to wear, easy to layer, both over and under,” says Cornish. “Often we do them in atypical fabrics like wools, heavy linens — rarely are ours lacy or intentionally sexy.”
More staples include the pleated Georgia skirt (2014), and the Odessa jacket (2012), both made of a featherweight plain weave polyester the designers call “crush.”
“Crush takes topstitching beautifully, gently puckering along any stitched seam,” says Cornish. “The Odessa jacket was one of our early pieces using a heavy acetate lining. Once finished, it was handwashed and tightly twisted and wrung, which gives so much texture and life to the piece.” It’s a life that shows no signs of ending anytime soon.