Clothes Quarters

Toronto has never lacked fashion talent. Homegrown designers behind labels like Greta Constantine, Horses Atelier, Spencer Badu and Comrags (which shuttered in December after 42 years) built thriving independent brands, earning loyal followings, celebrity endorsements and glittering press coverage along the way.

Now, a new class of Toronto designers is rising. Wanze, Henry’s, Body of Work and Literary Sport are all garnering international press for their deceptively simple designs, which include loose-fitting athleisure, reimagined workwear staples and deconstructed basics. They’re more liable to design super-soft T-shirts than the avant-garde collections you expect to see on Paris runways. In fact, some call themselves garment makers rather than capital-F fashion designers. In other words, they make wearable clothes for real life—and people all over the world are buying them.

Body of Work

Est. 2020

Who: Brittney MacKinnon and Dwayne Vatcher, co-founders and designers Where to find it: Grays and Lost and Found in Toronto; bodyofwork-studio.com

1 No one is a bigger fan of American Apparel than Dwayne Vatcher. He worked at the Yonge-Dundas location while he was at university and credits the early aughts hipster brand with creating the blueprint for his eventual foray into design. “The clothes were just simple T-shirts, but they had something beyond,” he recalls.

Vatcher rose through the ranks in marketing and product roles at Canada Goose, Wings and Horns, OVO, and Reigning Champ before launching Body of Work with Brittney MacKinnon, his partner in business and life. The brand started out with a small capsule of 100 per cent cotton, made-in-Canada sportswear, a novel proposition in an athleisure market saturated with sweat-wicking, planet-polluting polyester. “I just feel better running in a cotton T-shirt,” Vatcher says.

All their fabrics are from local family-owned mills, and everything is made in Toronto. Unlike Lululemon’s skin-tight silhouettes, Body of Work’s activewear is loose and generous. (The New York Times namechecked the brand as a harbinger of shifting tides in athleisure.) Vatcher and MacKinnon have been growing their company, which is self-funded, at a slow and steady pace. They still work out of their apartment but just opened their first stand-alone store in a century-old Summerhill building.

Literary Sport

Est. 2024

Who: Founders Deirdre Matthews and M. Bechara and co–creative directors Jackie McKeown and Fran Miller Where to find it: No Toronto stores yet, but online at literarysport.com

2 When Deirdre Matthews and her business partner, M. Bechara, were looking for creative directors to head up their nascent running brand, Literary Sport, they knew exactly whom to call. Jackie McKeown was an in-demand stylist in Toronto, conceptualizing campaigns for Roots and Skate Canada. Her partner, Fran Miller, founded the botanical skin care line F. Miller in 2014, and together they run a creative consulting company called Garden Grouppe. The couple are renowned for their highly refined tastes: their airy west-end bungalow got its own feature in Architectural Digest.

McKeown is also an avid runner, and Literary Sport makes activewear that appeals to the style-conscious. Fashion writer Lauren Sherman aptly compared their aesthetic to that of the Row, the ultra-minimalist brand run by the Olsen twins. The line is known for its simple, tasteful cuts and signature performance fabrics, like Japanese cotton and merino wool blends. Compression running tights feature useful pockets; a half-zip with an adjustable hem works as a water-resistant anorak in the rain or as a smart layer for your coffee date. The brand’s models wear rolled-up sweatpants with kitten heels or running shorts with loafers.

Production is still on a small scale, but demand has spiked in the past year, particularly after an appearance on the high-profile menswear podcast Throwing Fits and a shout-out in the Wall Street Journal. (The writer went for a run in one of the brand’s merino-blend cardigans and concluded that it stacked up surprisingly well against more typical activewear.) New York fashion Substacker Becky ­Malinsky has also extolled the virtues of Literary Sport’s cotton tanks and nylon jackets. The high performance is not a coincidence: “The pieces that get added into the collection first are always the ones I want to have in my running wardrobe,” says McKeown.

Related: Beloved Toronto clothing brand Horses Atelier is shutting down

Wanze

Est. 2022

Who: Wanze Song, founder and designer Where to find it: Grays and Lost and Found in Toronto; wanzesong.com

3 In 2019, Wanze Song was working for designer Xiao Li in Shanghai and had flown home to visit her parents in Scarborough. When the pandemic hit, lockdowns extended her trip indefinitely. To stave off quarantine boredom, Song—a TMU-trained fashion designer who once worked as a pattern maker in London for conceptual designer Kiko Kostadinov—­started playing around with her sewing machine from high school, using fabric scraps to experiment with different shapes. In between, Song helped her mom make dumplings. “She would force me to sit there for like two hours and just fold them with her,” Song says. But inspiration struck. She noticed that the generous pouch and its delicate, frilly folds would translate well into a handbag, so she made a prototype and posted a picture on Instagram. Instantly, Song was flooded with requests to make more. The “dumpling bag” was a hit.

In 2022, she launched Wanze, her eponymous brand for men and women. Using deadstock fabrics from Italy and Japan, she designs a relaxed wardrobe rooted in classic tailoring but with a deconstructed twist. Song creates and samples every piece in her Toronto studio, which she uses as her showroom each season. Standouts for spring 2026 include a track jacket in a Japanese washed nylon and a gathered plaid skirt made from mossy-coloured organic cotton.

As for the high school sewing machine Song used to create her first dumpling bag, she still has it—only now, the interns practise on it.

Henry’s

Est. 2017

Who: Keith Henry, founder and designer Where to find it: Lost and Found in Toronto; wearhenrys.com

4 After failing to find jeans that fit his frame generously enough, Keith Henry started making his own. He learned to sew from his mom and eventually began tailoring all his clothes. One day, while out vintage shopping, Henry experienced a hallelujah moment familiar to anyone who loves clothes: he found the perfect pair of pants. “They’re wide, they’re cropped and they fit my legs perfectly. I was like, I would just love to recreate this,” he says. For several years, he made his own clothes, experimenting with silhouettes he found in vintage clothing: “I’d see a shirt and think it would be cool if it was two inches longer and a bit wider in the armpits.” Then, in 2017, he launched his eponymous line, sewing small runs of simple workwear staples.

His jeans, denim jackets and Oxford shirts have earned such discerning fans as Jonah Weiner, co-founder of the style Substack Blackbird Spyplane, who writes rhapsodically about Henry’s use of olive Japanese moleskin in the Swoop jacket or the perfect cut of his raw denim jeans. “I think it takes someone who’s got a genuine interest in clothing, not necessarily fashion people, to understand my clothes,” Henry says.

As covetable as they are, Henry’s creations can be hard to get. He makes everything by hand in small batches in his west-end studio, then releases it in drops—essentially whenever he feels like it—that sell out almost instantly. Recently, he’s tapped custom denim maker Ben Viapiana to help with detail work, like sewing buttonholes, and Alexis Venerus of Sew-Rite Studio, a small clothing manufacturer, to help with shirting. The extra set of production hands frees up Henry’s time to develop new products and experiment in the studio rather than, as he says, “crush out, like, 20 pairs of pants in a week or something.”