Vancouver gets a cosplay cafe

“If little Asian girls in costumes float your boat, then it’s awesome.”

Let’s say you’ve gone back in time

This tee by Dinosaur Comics’ Ryan North could be handy if you ever get sucked into a time vortex and deposited in the past. (Zoom here.) Hell, if you play your cards right, you could even wind up as a god-king. See also How to Kill a Zombie by Split Reason.

The Personal Trainer T-shirt

Love it. Can you get one pre-stained?

Because you can’t have too many T-shirts

Like Threadless? Then you may also like Split Reason, a Vancouver-based T-shirt and gear company. I’ve been buying so much stuff from them lately I may need an intervention. (I’m wearing this tee in my latest comic.)

“Her mind went to the gun in her purse”

Over at the delightful Capacious Hold-All blog, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer considers the role of the purse in her novel Perfecting. It’s a post with secret compartments!

p. 11 “She been walking so long, hadn’t talked to another soul in days. She carried that big, floppy leather purse.”

The purse in my novel Perfecting was imagined out of the hold of childhood memory. I was born in 1965 and, although the story’s inception had many roots, one was a deliberate need to investigate the time of my beginning consciousness, so the era of peaceniks, Vietnam, Cold War politics, and hand-tooled leather purses. I wanted the book to span, temporally, 1972 to 2004; politically, the end of Cold War; geographically, Canada/USA; thematically, perspectives of family and religion. It is a lot to ask of a novel, I suppose, but I get bored easily, and the project, once I started, did become necessarily more complicated.

“What does a vampire reporter wear?”

Fashion magazine interviews Derek McCormack.

There are definitely some similarities between The Show That Smells and your previous book, The Haunted Hillbilly, like vampires, costuming and country stars. What is your fascination with those elements?

“Well, I have a limited range of fascinations, and they last a long time, and I’m really, really obsessive about them. So, in fact, I always think of my books this way: I have a collection of disparate fascinations, and I try to find a structure that contains them all. Which is why the books end up being so ridiculous and absurd. But it’s the best I can do, to link these disparate things, like Schiaparelli and Jimmie Rodgers. My love of fashion goes back to when I was a kid. I remember the first Vogue I bought, and at my high school graduation I wore Gaultier, which I had to save up a long time to buy.”

The William Gibson Collection

Boing Boing reports writer William Gibson is following the hip-hop model and putting his name on some lines of merch.

If camouflage is red, is it still camouflage?

One of my co-workers at The Province had the lucky assignment of modelling some of the new Olympic clothing line in downtown Vancouver yesterday. My eyes are still burning.

For one surreal moment, walking across Robson Street, I felt like an extra in a Jackie Chan flick.

After all, how often does anyone get a chance to make a fashion statement that bellows, “look at me!”

Heads swivelled round, fingers pointed, people snickered behind their hands.This was a chance to put some of the new Canadian Olympic team outfits to a Province taste test, a trial by fire.

And, not surprisingly, everyone had an opinion on the gear that went on sale at The Bay yesterday.

Some loved it, others hated it. No one was undecided.

“It’s really ugly,” said Debby Andrews, a Nanaimo retiree. “Let’s face it, if you were an athlete, would you not be devastated having to walk round like this?”

“There is now a reason to buy Canadian designers”

The Globe previews Toronto Fashion Week, and it seems Canadian designers are the in thing this year.

Here, some of our best show that they can create their own signature looks while nodding to international trends. The focus, just as in Paris and New York, is on luxury fabrics and workmanship. “The Canadian designer specializes in special pieces,” Kay says.

For a sample of the special pieces, click here.

“A suit should do something for you”

Torontoist profiles master tailor Salgado.

Having spent nearly fifty years making the highest quality suits, shirts, and shoes, Salgado is someone who knows. The House of Salgado, based in the TD Centre, is one of the city’s few remaining bespoke gentlemen’s shops—meaning everything is made to order for each client from the finest materials. The austere shop is unlike your average men’s shop. A grand wooden desk at the centre of a small room is surrounded by shelf-lined walls displaying fabric of every type and colour. The only finished suit in the store is for display purposes only. It’s not a place for browsing racks of finished suits, but for designing the ideal suit of your imagination.

With every aspect of the suit’s design customizable—from the fabric and cut, to the style of pocket, lapel width, and button detailing—the bespoke suit gives free reign to all your personal idiosyncrasies. The suit can follow the latest designer fashions from the ready-to-wear world—a sign of a good tailor is that he keeps abreast of and can advise on the latest trends—or the suit can follow a more classic design. As Salgado advises, “I wanna give you what you want, not what’s in style.”

Such freedom can also be daunting if you don’t know exactly what you want. Luckily, at the first appointment, Salgado is there to coach customers through the process. What is their occupation? What type of personality do they have? What can the clothes they’re wearing reveal about their tastes? He will assess whether the customer’s style is more self-conscious conservatism or youthful adventurousness. “And, then I would cater them towards the things that would be better for them.” Unlike the sometimes pushy salesmen who pressure for the purchase of a more expensive suit or the latest trend, the tailor’s role is to discover what will be most complementary to each individual client.

This almost makes me want to wear a suit. Almost.