Reasons to Love Toronto: No. 26, because we love to snoop
Sylvia Mantella’s closet blushes with pink gowns, pink heels and pink clutches. She likes red kimonos and black knee-high boots, too, but pink is the colour that best flatters her big blond mane and frosty blue eyes. Mantella, whose couture addiction is funded by her husband’s family-owned development company, treks to New York and Paris shows and runs her own charity fashion events in Toronto with fellow designer devotee Suzanne Rogers.
A closet that’s worth more than the average house is undeniably a luxury reserved for the one per cent, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t enjoy sneaking a peek, which is what Toronto-based childhood friends Erin Kleinberg and Stephanie Mark were counting on when they launched the blog The Coveteur last year. The pair are fashion world bona fides—Kleinberg runs her own small fashion label and Mark works as a stylist—which helped them coax their cameras into the homes of subjects like Mantella, Rogers (the kind of person who buys two Jil Sander runway 2011 skirts as closet dressing), Jeanne Beker (who owns custom-made cowgirl boots), Nicky Hilton (who’s obsessed with monogramming) and Khloé Kardashian (who, no surprise, has a weakness for leopard print). On the blog, they take us on a tour of each person’s fashion collection, every item photographed like a precious art object. In a year, they’ve featured more than 100 of the rich and stylish, and have spun their success into consulting gigs for Chanel and Bulgari and editorial work for Vogue. Their blog has become the ultimate stamp of fashion world cred—people beg to be Coveteured.
(Image: Courtesy of The Coveteur/Kathi Z.)
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Courtney Shea is a freelance journalist in Toronto. She started her career as an intern at Toronto Life and continues to contribute frequently to the publication, including her 2022 National Magazine Award–winning feature, “The Death Cheaters,” her regular Q&As and her recent investigation into whether Taylor Swift hung out at a Toronto dive bar (she did not). Courtney was a producer and writer on the 2022 documentary The Talented Mr. Rosenberg, based on her 2014 Toronto Life magazine feature “The Yorkville Swindler.”
