Comrags’ Final Bow

In 1983, the Toronto fashion scene was pulsating with vibrant, splashy energy, money and promise. Queen Street West was a counterculture hub, filled with vintage stores and underground venues. Fashion File and Fashion Television ruled the airwaves, department stores like Simpsons carried mostly Canadian designers, and cigarette companies were practically giving away money, offering $30,000 grants to young designers like they were $5 bills.

This flush environment spawned an array of internationally successful brands—think Canada Goose, Roots and Club Monaco—as well as a cohort of once locally beloved names like Alfred Sung and Vivian Shyu. The scene also birthed Comrags, whose bookish, peculiar designs became the unofficial uniform of the city’s creative class.

For the past 42 years, the brand has weathered several sea changes in the fashion industry and managed to build a quietly thriving business against all odds. Here, designers Joyce Gunhouse and Judy Cornish look back at their storied career and share why they’re ready to wind down.

Judy: Joyce and I met in 1980, while we were enrolled in the fashion design program at Toronto Metropolitan University. I think we were the only two people in our program who had to work while we were in school because we were paying our own way. In the last year of the program, there were a lot of group assignments. We ended up working on a lot of projects together because our schedules were the same. I worked at a bar called Larry’s Hideaway, and Joyce worked at the Rosedale Diner. We both had to be out of school by 5 p.m., so we were mercenary in our approach to assignments. If something was worth five per cent of our grade, we’d work on it for half an hour.

Joyce: We had a similar sense of style too. We wore a lot of vintage clothing—it was just called secondhand back then—and were always dressing up to go out at night. I would go to Voodoo, Nuts and Bolts, and Twilight. There was a bar at Queen and Claremont called the Squeeze Club that had a Plexiglas wall filled with hundreds of vintage rubber and plastic squeeze toys. We played lots of pool and snooker there, as well as at Danny’s, which was a hole-in-the-wall pool hall beside the Cameron.

Judy: We started out making stuff that we wanted to wear—a lot of clothes in paisley prints or made from corduroy. We were conscious of keeping costs down. Nobody in our social circle had any money, so we were trying to make clothing our friends could afford to buy—a dress cost around $100.

Our first-ever runway show was a few months before graduation, at the bar I worked at, Larry’s Hideaway, which a promoter once called “the biggest shithole in the city.” It was right at the beginning of MTV, so the bar had video nights, where they would show new music videos that had just come out. That night, they were debuting “Girls on Film” by Duran Duran and “China Girl” by David Bowie. The owner wanted to make video night more exciting, so they asked me and Joyce to put on a fashion show.

We recruited all our friends from school to help. Patrick Cox, who became a shoe designer for Elton John and Madonna, modelled for us. Paul Harnden, another highly sought-after designer, did hair. A bunch of our classmates modelled for us, including Gayle Bunn, who also knit the sweaters. Jimmy Moorhouse, who is still our stylist today, styled the show. Afterward, a boutique called Metropolis on McCaul Street approached us, and we started selling our clothing there. Everything was done on consignment. We realized that, if we could sell two of something, we could make four, then if we sold four, we could make eight—and everything just snowballed from there.

Joyce: It was a really interesting time because Fashion Television and Fashion File, both huge international TV shows, were being made out of Toronto. When we had a fashion show, there would be cameras there, and they’d be broadcast all over the world, on the same episodes as designers like Vivienne Westwood. We got so much press at the beginning that we didn’t really have time to think, Do we actually want to do this?

Judy: I think we were on one of the very first episodes of Fashion Television with Jeanne Beker. They had a clip of us riding our motorcycles, which they used in one of their “CityTV…everywhere” commercials. The fashion district was really alive then. If you went out to run an errand, like buy a zipper, you’d never make it back to work because you would run into five people you knew doing the same thing, and you’d all end up going to lunch for four hours. Everything was happening on Queen Street. On the stretch from Spadina to University, there were five different stores selling our clothes.

Joyce: In fashion, you don’t always know if you’re going to make it to the next season, because you’re speculating the whole time. You might end up making something nobody wants to buy, and that could be the end.

Judy: But we weren’t stressed out about it. We knew it might end tomorrow, but we thought, Who cares? Let’s just do it today and have fun. Making clothes was just something we did for fun. When we started out, we were both still waitressing, but about a year and a half in, things were going well enough that we could quit our jobs. That was a huge deal. Still, we had no idea how to run a business.

After we quit our jobs, we agreed to pay ourselves $50 a month plus whatever our rent was—it was always changing because sometimes we’d be on our own and other times we’d be living with boyfriends. Everything else we’d reinvest back into the business. We were good at living cheap. We worked out of some really crappy studios in those early years. One had water leaking out of the walls. In another, on Adelaide, Joyce and I were staying late sewing buttons, and we had to keep our feet up off the floor because there were so many mice running around.

Joyce: Our studio rent was $50 a month. It was a shared space, and most of the tables had been scavenged from the garbage. I remember one of the tables was actually a door. We cut fabric on the ground.

Judy: The city was cheaper to live in back in the 1980s and ’90s. To do a runway show, we’d see a sign on an empty building and call up the realtor to ask if we could use the space for free. Sometimes it would have no power, so we’d bring a generator. They let us have the space because we’d invite magazine people to the show.

We used to go to Ottawa Street in Hamilton to buy fabric. It was just a whole long street filled with fabric stores, kind of like a textile Mecca. I’m originally from Burlington, so it was close by. We’d go there, design collections on the spot and buy carloads of fabric. We used lumberjack plaid a lot, which felt like real Canadiana.

Joyce: We’ve always done what we want, but at the same time, we weren’t going to make clothing you couldn’t move in. Our stuff was always practical but a little bit different. We weren’t doing shoulder pads. We weren’t making pirate shirts. There was this really exaggerated costume thing happening at the time—think Comme des Garçons—but we weren’t doing those huge proportions.

Judy: We were influenced by all that stuff, but you had to be able to lift your arm over your head. There’s a quote from the late fashion journalist David Livingstone that we’ve always loved, “Comrags is never in style but never out of style.” We would see what was happening and find out how to make it our own. Everything we made was just odd enough.

We were carried in the department store Simpsons, which had this extraordinarily huge budget to buy Canadian designers. Matinée Cigarettes was giving away money to young designers—everyone around us was getting $30,000 grants. We never applied because we were staunch anti-smokers, until one year we realized we were crazy not to. We applied to buy a bunch of machinery, and they gave us $40,000. We were so excited, except that year Matinée put some conditions on the money, which meant we had to put its logo in all of our press materials. We took so much heat for that. But we’re still sewing on those machines.

Over the years, we cultivated a lot of very dedicated customers. A lot of them work in creative fields, like writing or film production. But we also have doctors and lawyers—people looking to express themselves within the conservative confines of their jobs. They’re all women who have a strong sense of themselves and know what they like.

Comrags is almost like this secret society. One of our customers was giving a guest lecture at a university, and when she opened the floor to questions, the first one she got was, “Where did you get your jacket?” Another time, we got a phone call from someone in Australia wanting to buy a specific jacket because she’d met someone at a conference wearing one.

Joyce: Most people who show up to an event don’t want to see someone in the same dress they’re wearing. Our clothes don’t have that stigma. If two women wearing Comrags see each other in the same dress, they’re high-fiving. Our customers are very secure. They’re not buying our clothes because they think they’ll make them a better person; they’re buying them because they fit in with who they think they are.

Judy: Right from the beginning, it was important to us to make our clothes in Toronto. Honestly, it was partly a lazy decision on our part. Everything the big companies made was coming in from Asia, and the idea of having to do all that research on factories was very daunting.

Joyce: Plus we were control freaks. We wanted to know that every garment was exactly the way we wanted it to be. When you’re working with factories overseas, you have much less control over the finished product. Even now, we’ll get to the point where we’re ironing something and then think we should have done it another way. Then we’ll rip everything out and start again. Our head sewer, Loan, a refugee from Cambodia, has been with us since the very beginning. She had her own factory on Spadina, which she closed in 1990 to come work for us full time. We always kept our team very small, just a sample maker plus Loan and one or two other sewists at a time.

Judy: We wholesaled to a lot of stores around the city, but I remember one in particular, in Yorkville, that shut down abruptly because they’d been locked out by their landlord. When you wholesale, the store owns your clothing, and if they don’t pay you, too bad. But the owner of that store broke in after-hours to steal all our clothing back and return it to us.

Judy: By 1997, we realized we weren’t having fun anymore. We’d go to sales meetings and agents would ask us exactly how long a skirt was. We’d be like, “I don’t know, above the knee?” That kind of stuff drove us crazy. We were wholesaling our clothing all over the US, Canada and Asia, and all we did was go to meetings. It was awful. We weren’t making stuff anymore. Instead it was our job to hire people to make stuff for us. We decided to wind down the wholesale business and open our own store instead. We took heat from a lot of people who thought it was a terrible business idea—they assumed we must be failing. No, we were doing exactly what we wanted to do.

Joyce: At the time, we had a third business partner who handled all the money. We had a lot of disagreements, and finally we said, “Let’s get rid of him and not talk to anyone else.” It was over ten years into the business when we realized that we actually do have enough business savvy to run things on our own. As soon as we shifted our business model and opened the Queen West store in 1997, we became more profitable. It was way easier to see how we were doing and what actually sold.

Judy: No matter how much colour you have in the store, eight out of ten things you sell are always going to be black.

Joyce: Kirk Pickersgill from Greta Constantine did a co-op with us when he was in his last year of high school. Sometimes he would bring his friends to work, and there would be a lot of squealing, gossip and dress-up.

Judy: The store was doing well on Queen West, but by 2011, rents in the area were exploding. Our landlord wanted to raise our rent—I can’t recall how much, but it was enough for us to start looking elsewhere. The studio where we made everything was on King Street, just east of Bathurst, and the real estate in that area was blowing up as well. We started to think about trying to buy something, but every time we went out to look, we realized we couldn’t afford anything. We inquired about potentially buying the building on Queen Street our store was located in, but the price was about four times what we could afford.

That winter, I was driving to the store when I had to take a detour up Dundas because of a fallen tree. I noticed a building with a red For Sale sign on it and called the number. The landlord was selling it for under $1 million. It was a really scary bar, so I decided to have a drink there with my architect friend. We casually asked the bartender if we could take a look downstairs, and they said yes. My friend told me that it was an unbelievable amount of square footage for the price. The guy who owned the building waited for us for an entire year while we got together the money to buy the building. All these weird things came together for it to happen. We were able to move our production studio to the top floor and have our store on the main floor, and we painted a tiny little corner of the basement white so we could shoot photos for the website. It was really the dream arrangement.

Joyce: The store is a real family affair. My husband, Rocco Matteo, who trained as an architect but works in film production, designed everything. His crew was able to work very fast and very cheap. They created the hardwood floor using ends that were lying around. My sister Susan manages the studio, and my twin sister, Judy, manages the store. Having those people who are dedicated and really want the best for you is an important part of what we do.

Judy: Comrags is still doing well as a business, but the world around us is very different than when we started out. Most of the textile agents and suppliers we worked with have retired, and a lot of our friends have long left the industry. We always joke about being the last ones standing. The fashion industry has also come full circle: fast fashion changed the world, and now there’s renewed interest in small-production, locally made, community-minded companies like ours. There’s Warren Steven Scott, who used to work in our store. And Alexis Venerus, who also worked in our store, is running a small but growing production studio called Sew Rite Studio. Wanze Song’s approach to business and design reminds us very much of ourselves in the beginning.

In 2021, our head sewer, Loan, who had been with us since the beginning, passed away, which made me realize that our time is finite. Loan was quite young. It’s sobering. There are so many things I want to do, but we don’t always have as long as we think. In January of 2025, we came to the decision to close the business. We were conscious of wanting to stop doing things while they were still good.

We’re not quietly sneaking off. We wanted to be able to wind down while still celebrating what we’ve accomplished. I’ve got a granddaughter, Joyce’s daughter is expecting, and our store manager has a new grandbaby on the way. We’re just curious about other ways to spend our time.

Announcing in advance that fall 2025 would be our final collection has given us the chance to say goodbye to our incredibly loyal customers.

Joyce: The storefront’s last day is December 31, if we have enough stock to last until then. Then we’ll have to figure out what to do with the building.

Judy: We’re not going to sell; we’re going to hang on to it for now and see what happens. We’ll try to rent it out, but we kind of hope no one takes the basement so we can set up a little studio. It’s weird. Someone said to me, “In nine or 10 weeks you’re going to be unemployed.” I was like, “Yeah, but that’s not for a while.” I’m not really thinking about it.

Joyce: I got an email from a friend asking if I wanted to go curling. I replied, “Sorry, guys, I’m not committing to anything in the new year.” For the first time ever, I am really trying not to have any responsibilities.

Judy: I have a list as long as my arm of things I want to make for people. I just bought a bunch of old clocks with the idea of removing the clock parts and using the wooden cabinets as vitrines for three-dimensional collages. I’m also trying to scavenge some really distressed fabric, something like an old piece of garbage tarp that a person wouldn’t even want to put in a garage sale. I want that tarp. I want to work with things that already exist and reshape them.

A lot of our customers aren’t convinced that we’re actually closing. They think that we’re going to turn up in six months with another drop. I don’t know. Maybe we will. Maybe we’ll never make a garment again. We’re makers. That’s what we do. But, right now, we just need time to not do anything.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.