Beloved Toronto clothing brand Horses Atelier is shutting down

For 14 years, Horses Atelier was the wardrobe du jour for a certain segment of the city’s creative class (specifically, extremely hip women over 30 with healthy bank accounts). The brand’s instantly recognizable field suits, oversized coats and prim collared blouses dotted the streets of Toronto, often draped over cultural heavyweights like Leslie Feist, Sarah Polley and Margaret Atwood.

But, this Wednesday, founders Claudia Dey and Heidi Sopinka—both of whom are acclaimed novelists in addition to their design credentials—announced via Instagram that the brand would shut down imminently. “Our entire and final collection is now online. Quantities are very limited and not expected to last. If you’ve had your eye on something, now is the time,” they wrote. According to Sopinka, nearly all remaining stock sold in less than 24 hours—something the pair thought would take a month.

“We started as under-slept mothers with no business degree or formal training in fashion,” says Dey. “After about five years working with wholesalers and boutiques, we decided to sell directly to customers because we have a pernicious habit of going against good advice, and somehow we were both able to write novels while running the design house.”

Related: Toronto’s Best Dressed—Claudia Dey and Heidi Sopinka

Horses built its reputation on sourcing high-quality fabrics and paying Toronto garment workers fair wages. Its clothes were always expensive to make, but Dey says that, after Covid, costs ballooned by over 100 per cent. “Horses has been priced out of conscious production in downtown Toronto,” read a press release that circulated earlier this week. “The design studio has been flooded, vandalized, burgled, defrauded. They’ve had a contractor hide in a closet after the the founders confronted him for taking their money and bumping them from production to sew hoodies for Supreme.”

Dey and Sopinka also cite Meta’s pay-to-play advertising model as a source of the brand’s demise. “For the first decade, word of mouth actually worked. Pre-algorithm, people interacted with what we were making in real time,” says Sopinka. “But eventually we needed to buy into an internet presence to resist being buried, and it became more expensive than our brick-and-mortar.” Throw in a shaky economy that made even the most principled buyers reluctant to shell out for sustainable fashion, and it became impossible for the brand to stay afloat.

Horses isn’t the first long-standing independent fashion retailer to go out of business recently. Comrags took their final bow last December after 42 years, and Ronscevalles’s beloved boutique Frock will wind down operations this spring. “If something radical doesn’t happen soon, Toronto—and the world—will be depleted of goods with any kind of personality,” says Sopinka. “Pushing independent makers out results in a place that feels textureless and algorithmic.”

Related: Claudia Dey’s hat tricks

Despite the current state of the world, the stylish duo still look back on their time spent in fashion fondly. “Fashion can be profound—it can be like casting a spell on your body that can change the way you feel or move or approach a day,” says Sopinka. “So I’m happy that, even though we’re closing, our pieces will live with the loyal clients who continue to wear us so beautifully.”

Fortunately, the pair isn’t at the end of their creative journey. Dey and Sopinka say they plan to turn their attention to writing a television series that features two renegade outliers, reminiscent of Thelma & Louise—and perhaps a bit like the two designers themselves.