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Toronto, Canada’s largest city, is busting out with style, fashion, cuisine, art and this year’s International Retail Design Conference.
It’s been said that if Montreal is the Paris of North America, Toronto is our London.
Like London, Toronto is a commercial and financial hub with a polite, businesslike surface. And, like London, Toronto has an artsy, creative, fashionable sensibility bubbling just below its stiff upper lip.
The city’s high-fashion taste is best expressed on Bloor Street, at the northern end of Toronto’s downtown core. Sometimes called the “mink mile,” Bloor is home to international brands such as Gucci, Prada, Burberry and Hermes. But it’s also home to a great many local retailers, like Holt Renfrew, Canada’s highest-end fashion retailer; lifestyle brand Roots; and Harry Rosen, the elegant menswear store.
Also on Bloor is one of several locations of The Bay, the department store arm of Hudson’s Bay Co., the trading company started by England’s King Charles II in 1670 to organize commerce in the new world. Its flagship store, several blocks away on Queen and Yonge streets, has undergone significant upgrading, such as The Room, the fine ladies’ department on the third floor recently renovated by Toronto retail architecture and design firm Yabu Pushelberg.
But neither Toronto’s retail nor its culture is defined by large chains, either national or international. It has a long entrepreneurial tradition, perhaps currently best exemplified by Joe Mimran, the Toronto fashion visionary who started the Club Monaco chain in 1985 (and sold it to Ralph Lauren in 1999). Mimran has a brand of apparel, cosmetics, intimates and accessories called Joe Fresh, which is sold in Loblaw supermarkets and now has its first freestanding store on Queen’s Quay, along the lakefront. And his wife, Kimberly Newport-Mimran, produces a line of high-end women’s apparel called Pink Tartan, selling in Holt Renfrew and The Bay department stores as well as its own store on Bloor.
While the Bloor Street corridor between Yonge Street and Avenue Road is tony and chic, a much trendier neighborhood called Yorkville sits tucked in just to the north. Once the hippie enclave of Toronto, the neighborhood still has an edgy, provocative feel. And there are lots of other neighborhoods that also define Toronto, smaller and emerging pockets full of tree-lined streets that are also lined with little shops, cafés and restaurants. “To understand Toronto is to understand that its essence is multiculturalism,” says Tara O’Neil, chief creative officer at Toronto’s Perennial Inc. design firm. “It’s a very open, liberal city with an entrepreneurial spirit.”
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