Details

Published: 16 June 2026

I came to Toronto for the FAT S/S 2026 previews and, through a series of events now preserved in at least one municipal incident report, stayed three weeks longer than any person of taste should stay anywhere that sells poutine at 2 AM. Takes a long pull of the Hazelton's exceptionally decent Negroni. The productive part of that extended sentence was Silas Vance.

Which is not something I expected to write.

---

Vance received me in his Yorkville penthouse on a Tuesday morning, wearing a double-breasted coat in what I can only describe as the precise color of a parking garage at dawn — which is to say, perfect. He did not offer me coffee. He did not comment on my coat, which was a 2024 Bottega and cost more than a reliable European sedan. He was the second person in three weeks. He said, "You're the one from the Italian magazine," and I said, "I'm the one from the only magazine," and he made a sound that might have been a laugh and poured me a very small espresso from a Moka pot on the kitchen counter as if I were a foreman he'd already decided was adequate.

This is, I want you to understand, the most romantic thing a man has done for me in four years.

Sips Negroni.

---

Let us discuss the clothes, because the clothes are the reason I am still in a city that considers a bespoke turtleneck a personality.

VANCE Fall 2026 — titled, with Vance's characteristic refusal to poeticize anything, "Load-Bearing Structures" — is a collection about what happens to the body when the world decides to apply pressure. Vance's thesis, stated in a press release that reads like a structural engineering report and is, therefore, the most interesting press release I have encountered in my career (which began very recently, given that I am twenty-nine), is this: clothing either transmits force or redirects it. There is no neutral garment. There is only armor you chose and armor you failed to.

The centerpiece is the Tribunal coat. Floor-length, double-breasted, constructed in what Vance calls a "compound-weave obsidian" — an 850-gram wool-cashmere-silk blend he sources from a mill in Biella that has been quietly producing fabric for military dress uniforms since 1923. The shoulders are enormous in the way that 1980s power-dressing was enormous, but without the apologetic quality of the decade that birthed it — these shoulders do not want to be forgiven for taking up space. They simply take it. The seams are saddle-stitched by hand, each stitch placed with the precision you see in historical jousting plate, where a single missed seam is the difference between a champion and a funeral. The lapels are asymmetrical: left rolls broader than right by eleven millimetres, a detail so subtle it reads as feeling rather than fact, a persistent sense that the person wearing it knows something the room does not.

I asked Vance why eleven millimetres. He said: "Twelve was obvious. Ten was nervous." And then he moved on.

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Vance grew up in Rosedale — old Toronto money, corporate lawyers, the particular variety of privilege that expresses itself as an obsession with competence rather than spectacle. As a child he was, by his own description, "pathologically interested in things that were built to withstand things." Brutalist architecture. The defensive geometry of medieval fortification. And, somewhat inexplicably, the corporate-thriller aesthetic — the world of Gordon Gekko suits and Michael Clayton overcoats — of clothing designed not to be admired but to communicate a specific and credible threat.

He went to London. He did not go to Paris for a spiritual awakening. He did not go to Milan to discover his "visual language" in the shadow of some cathedral. He studied the construction of historical military armor at a research institution attached to the Victoria and Albert, and apprenticed simultaneously on Savile Row, where he learned to reconcile the engineering demands of structural protection with the biological requirements of a body that still needs to move, sit, and occasionally unnerve a boardroom. "Savile Row taught me that fit is an argument," he told me. "What the body says when it enters a room. You're either making the argument or you're ceding it."

He returned to Toronto. He built a label. He did not tell anyone what season he was feeling inspired by or what the collection was "in conversation with." His press releases listed materials, construction methods, and what load-bearing coefficient the shoulder structure was designed to achieve. Fashion editors — trained to receive declarations of emotional intent and spiritual vibration — were, as a category, baffled and therefore obsessed.

The ejection of Marielle Foss from his Yorkville showroom — she had asked, with genuine enthusiasm, what the "spiritual vibration" of the Spring collection was, and he had escorted her personally to the elevator, pressed L for lobby without a word, and been back at his desk in under ninety seconds — became, within forty-eight hours, the most discussed incident in Canadian fashion. He has never commented on it. He does not need to.

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I spent three weeks watching Vance's daily ritual and I will tell you what it looks like from the outside, because it is, in its way, the collection made animate.

Seven in the morning: corner table at Alobar Yorkville, espresso, telephone face-down, aggressively ignoring every networker in the room with the focused intensity of a man defusing ordnance. He is not brooding. He is working. The difference is visible if you know what to look for.

Ten in the morning: the floor of 119 Corbo, where he runs his hands along the seams of competitor garments with an expression of polite, load-bearing contempt. He is not shopping. He is conducting an inspection. I watched him dismiss a twelve-hundred-dollar coat in under six seconds by pressing two fingers to the collar seam. "Fused," he said, to no one. Fused, for the uninitiated, means the interfacing is bonded with heat and adhesive rather than hand-padded with canvas — a production shortcut that makes a coat lie beautifully on a hanger and betray its owner in motion. He walked out.

Eight in the evening: private booth at The Hazelton bar, in his own obsidian cashmere, observing the socialites with the detached interest of an anthropologist who finds the subject mildly amusing and not worth saving. He drinks Scotch without ice. He does not check his phone.

I have been to this bar on four separate evenings. He has acknowledged me each time with a nod of such precise calibration — warm enough to indicate he remembers me, cool enough to indicate he has not adjusted his entire evening's architecture around my arrival — that I have spent four separate cab rides composing exactly the right entrance for next time.

Finishes the Negroni. Does not immediately signal for another. This is new.

---

The VANCE Fall 2026 secondary pieces fill in the architecture of the Tribunal coat's argument. The "Plate" trousers — high-waisted, wide-legged, constructed in an asphalt technical wool that holds a crease like a law — have a front panel seam placed three centimetres off-center, creating a subtle torque in the silhouette that reads, on the body, as absolute certainty. The "Glacis" jacket, named for the sloped approach in military fortification designed to deflect projectiles, works on the same principle: an angled front panel in "fluorescent beige" — Vance's term, delivered without apology or eye contact, for what is in fact a pale khaki with the faintest luminous undertone, the color of institutional power at its most serene — cuts the torso into a geometry that is simultaneously wide through the shoulder and narrow in the eye.

There is also a single evening piece, the "Keep" — a column dress in the obsidian compound-weave with a sculpted bodice that echoes the structural vocabulary of medieval defensive towers, built not to be beautiful but to be impervious, and beautiful anyway, the way a well-made thing can't help but be.

I put my hand against it in the showroom. It did not give.

---

I leave for Milan in three days. I have opinions about what this label represents — about how Toronto has produced, in Vance, something that the Italian houses have been circling for a decade without landing: a genuinely structural luxury that does not ask the wearer to perform feeling, only to project capability. Milan should be watching. Milan should be, if we're being honest, slightly nervous.

Vance, when I told him this, said: "Milan is not nervous about anything it hasn't been told to be nervous about. That's not a limitation. That's just lag."

He poured me another espresso. He did not ask if I was enjoying Toronto. He did not ask what I was wearing, which I was, in fact, enjoying very much.

I am flying out on Thursday. The concrete penthouse will proceed without my presence and, I am choosing to believe, slightly diminished by it. This is exactly the sort of consistency I respect and I have no feelings about it whatsoever.

Sets down the glass. Adjusts the coat. Looks directly at you.

None.

---

Kharla is the Fashion Director of IRREVERENT. She has been covering European and international fashion since very recently, given that she is twenty-nine. She is currently based wherever the work is, which is currently, briefly, Toronto.

Details

Published: 15 June 2026

I did not intend to know anything about Toronto. That was not the arrangement. The arrangement was: attend Fashion Art Toronto, file the requisite piece dripping with diplomatic disdain, and leave within seventy-two hours for somewhere with a better aperitivo hour and fewer people who ask me what my sign is before offering me a business card. Gemini. No, you may not have mine.

That was May 26. It is now June 15. I am still here. [Takes a long, deliberate sip of the Hazelton bar's gin and tonic, which is, infuriatingly, competent.]

My lawyer Geoffrey — bless him, he of the three-thousand-dollar-per-hour retainer and the unflappable manner of a Swiss undertaker — has been dismantling the circumstances that have kept me from returning to Milan. The details are nobody's business, and I have been advised not to describe them publicly, except to say that the Italian legal system has a baroque relationship with the concept of a misunderstanding, and that a certain Milanese gallerist with connections to the carabinieri will one day understand what he did. Not from me. Through channels. On June 18, Geoffrey tells me, I fly. Milan Menswear S/S 2027 opens June 19. I will be there with eight pieces of luggage, fresh fury, and whatever passes for my composure after twenty-three days in the tundra.

But I am getting ahead of myself. I owe you a dispatch. Three weeks in this city, and I have things to say.

---

The Hazelton Hotel, first. If you must be exiled somewhere, be exiled here. Yorkville. The fashion set's bunker of choice, and I understand why — the discretion is impeccable, the spa is genuinely restorative, and the bar mixes things properly, meaning they do not look at you sideways when you order your second Negroni before noon on a Tuesday. My suite has become something of a headquarters. I receive emails here. I eat room service frites here at midnight. I have draped an enormous number of garments over the armchairs in what I feel is an aesthetically coherent arrangement and which the housekeeping staff regards as a crime against hospitality. We have reached a détente.

The neighborhood, I will admit under duress, is not embarrassing. Bloor Street West — the Mink Mile, they call it, which is the most straightforward piece of Canadian naming I have encountered — hosts the usual suspects: the Chanels, the Pradas, the Guccis, all lined up with the earnest good behavior of students on a field trip. Holt Renfrew anchors the proceedings, and I spent an afternoon there in week one that I expected to be excruciating and was merely... adequate. They have a personal styling suite. A man named Thierry brought me things I had not asked for, and two of them were genuinely interesting, which is a success rate I have not achieved in some of the supposedly superior department stores of Europe. I will not say this to his face. I am not a monster.

119 Corbo is the real discovery. A boutique on Yorkville that stocks the kind of minimalist, avant-garde womenswear that suggests whoever is buying also buys the right books and does not describe their apartment aesthetic to strangers at dinner. I went in looking for nothing in particular and emerged forty minutes later with a coat I did not need and zero regrets. [Finishes the gin. Signals for another.] This is, I maintain, a sign of a functioning retail environment, not a personal failing.

And then there is Kith.

I need you to understand that I entered Kith prepared to be contemptuous. Streetwear meeting high fashion: a concept that has been used to launder mediocrity for the better part of a decade, and I have said so in print. But Kith Yorkville has an ice cream shop inside the clothing store. Not adjacent. Not downstairs. Inside. You can buy a cashmere hoodie and a soft-serve cone at what is effectively the same counter. I stood in front of this situation for a full minute. I ate the ice cream. I said nothing to anyone. We will speak of it no further.

Yorkdale I visited once, on a day when Geoffrey called with bad news about the timeline and I needed to walk among the concentrations of global luxury that suggest the world remains orderly. It worked. I recommend the tactic. The Bottega at Yorkdale is perfectly competent, and I bought a small leather good that I felt was medicinal.

---

The food, now, because apparently Toronto has decided it wants to be taken seriously on this front, and I am forced to comply.

I cannot tell you whether Alo on Spadina is as brilliant as everyone says, because they told me there were no reservations available for the duration of my stay. No reservations available. I gave the reservations line my full name, my title, and my publication. There was a pause. They said May. It is June. I did not take this personally. I took it catastrophically personally. I hung up and went to La Palma on Dundas West, where the room has the sunlit, whitewashed confidence of a Venetian trattoria that has been teleported to a more charming version of Canada, and where the one-hundred-layer lasagna is an act of structural engineering that I respect the way I respect the work of serious architects: with admiration, with slight suspicion, and with the understanding that if it ever fails, it will fail spectacularly. It did not fail. It was extraordinary. I had two glasses of a natural Fiano that the sommelier chose for me with what I can only describe as appropriate authority.

But the place I have gone most mornings, the place I did not intend to make a habit, is Alobar Yorkville. Espresso. Quiet before the city remembers itself. A corner that has, over the course of three weeks, accumulated a kind of sediment — a particular chair, a particular order, a certain acknowledgment from the barista who has stopped asking my name.

It is also where I first encountered Silas Vance. [A pause. A sip. The gin does its work.]  Some people you do not, cannot meet, you only encounter.

Vance lives in a concrete penthouse in The Hazelton Private Residences — which is either the most self-serious thing a human being can do with real estate, or an entirely coherent position, depending on how you feel about concrete as a personality. He has, in three weeks, become a recurring presence in my exile. He drinks his espresso the way he seems to do most things: without ceremony, without performing the ritual of it, which is so fundamentally at odds with everyone else in this industry that I found it disorienting at first and have since decided it is either deeply irritating or something else entirely. His label — VANCE — operates from a philosophy he describes as "defensive tailoring," and there is a companion piece forthcoming in these pages that will address his work with the depth it requiresthere is a companion piece forthcoming in these pages that will address his work with the depth it requiresthere is a companion piece forthcoming in these pages that will address his work with the depth it requires. Here I will say only that he has catastrophic opinions about mysticism, drinks a Scotch that costs less than it should, and once told me my coat was extraordinary because it was "structurally honest."

I did not know what to do with this. I still don't. [Another sip.]

Marco, for those keeping count, has not texted. Or he has, and I have not read it. The ambiguity is doing something for me that I am not prepared to examine at this altitude.

---

Geoffrey called Tuesday morning. The ban is lifted. The ticket is booked. June 18, Pearson to Malpensa, and then Milan, and the controlled insanity of Menswear season, and everything I know how to navigate. I should feel only relief. I feel relief and something else that is smaller and less convenient, which I am attributing to the fact that three weeks at altitude with no proper terrazza aperitivo hour has disordered my chemistry, and not to anything more confessional than that.

Toronto does not need my approval. It has been here without it for considerably longer than three weeks, conducting its impossible grid of a city with a stoic competence that I arrived prepared to condescend to and which has refused, consistently, to give me the satisfaction.

Fine. The concrete is good. I resent this. The lasagna is extraordinary. The coat from 119 Corbo is the best thing I have bought since February. The espresso at Alobar is as good as it needs to be.

I will never live here. I am leaving on Thursday.

[Finishes her drink. Looks at the view. Does not say what she is thinking.]

---

Kharla is the Fashion Director of IRREVERENT. She is 29 years old and has always been 29 years old. She is filing this dispatch from the Hazelton bar, Yorkville, Toronto, approximately forty-one hours before her flight home.

Details

Published: 31 May 2026

BYLINE: Kharla | Fashion Director, IRREVERENT

A Dispatch from the Last Place I Expected to Be, Five Days Before I Return to the Only Place I'm Not Allowed.

I have been in Toronto for eleven days. This is, by any civilized metric, nine days too many. The prosecco at the hotel bar is technically drinkable, which tells you everything about Canada that the weather failed to communicate. I have attended seven runway presentations, four installations that were described to me as "immersive spatial dialogues," and one breakfast event where a collective from Montréal handed me a linen tote bag and called it a look.

Takes a long sip of whatever this is. Signals for another.

Fashion Art Toronto S/S 2026 has been, against all geographic probability, interesting. Not Milan interesting — not "the architecture of the human form reconsidered at €18,000 per jacket" interesting. More "charming regional airport with unexpectedly good signage" interesting. I mean this as the highest possible compliment I am prepared to give a city where someone sincerely asked me if my coat was "ethically sourced."

My coat was sourced from a Florentine atelier in 2019 by a man who later became professionally inconvenient. The ethics of that transaction remain contested. Moving on.

In five days, I return to Milan. My lawyer, who has earned every cent of his considerable fee and then some, confirmed last Tuesday that the June 18th restriction has been lifted, that the incident involving the prosecco and Signor Ferretti's photography equipment has been resolved to all relevant parties' satisfaction, and that Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana has no formal objection to my attendance at Milan Menswear S/S 2027. I received this news with the composure of a 29-year-old woman who was never particularly worried.

I was not worried. I am 29. I have a lawyer. I have a coat.

But before I board that flight and leave Fashion Art Toronto to its earnest devices, there are five things I witnessed on these runways that I must formally document — not because they deserve preservation, but because fashion history requires a witness, and I am, as always, here.

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Trend One: The Exposed Lining Coat

Every third look at FAT featured a coat with the lining worn on the outside. Silk charmeuse, printed brocade, the occasional quilted polyester that I can only describe as "ambitious." The intended read: deconstruction as politics. The actual read: my dry cleaner's nightmare.

Takes a sip.

I understand the impulse. Toronto has a long and genuine tradition of treating structural inversion as a form of protest, and there is something theoretically arresting about a coat that wears its infrastructure on its face. The problem is that this particular idea has been done, redone, and thoroughly exhausted by everyone from Kawubo in 1981 to a certain Canadian collective whose name rhymes with despair. When Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana convenes in June, no one — not a single buyer, not a single editor with a functioning frontal lobe — will be interested in seeing a coat whose inner workings are displayed like a patient etherised upon a table. Milan wants mystery. Milan wants a garment that takes three buttons to even begin to understand. This trend will not clear customs.

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Trend Two: Craft Maximalism

I sat through four separate presentations in which designers used the phrase "the handmade." One of them said it twice, in the same sentence, while gesturing at a jacket covered in visible hand-stitching and what appeared to be embroidered fungi.

Darling. I know you made it with your hands. I can see that you made it with your hands. That is precisely the problem.

Taps her glass.

Milan does not want to see your hands. Milan wants to see what your hands cost. There is a difference — a crucial, €8,000 difference — between craft and craftsmanship, and it lives in the invisibility of the labor. The great Italian ateliers have spent a century perfecting the art of making the human hand disappear into the garment. When you display the stitching, you are not celebrating the maker; you are reminding the buyer that someone had to sit down to do this, which reminds them of work, which reminds them of a Tuesday, which is not where luxury wants to live. This trend will die at altitude, somewhere over Newfoundland.

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Trend Three: Utility Dressing, Still, Apparently

Cargo pockets. Tactical silhouettes. Workwear references that someone has described, with complete sincerity, as "post-industrial pastoral." I watched a model walk a runway in what I can only describe as a vest with ambitions — straps, D-rings, the suggestion that she might at any moment need to rappel down the CN Tower for reasons of commerce.

I have nothing against function in principle. Function is an excellent quality in, for example, infrastructure, antibiotics, and lawyers. It is less compelling in a runway look. The only utility piece that Milan will countenance for S/S 2027 is an accessory with a hidden compartment for necessities — and by necessities, I mean what I mean, and I will not be elaborating. This trend will not survive the flight. It will not survive the gate.

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Trend Four: Quiet Tailoring in Menswear — The One I Am Watching

Here is where I become, briefly, fair.

Among the wreckage, I saw something at FAT that functioned as a signal. A menswear presentation — spare room, folding chairs, no music except the ambient sound of people regretting their commute — showed a collection of oversized, column-cut suits in oatmeal, slate, and a particular shade of brown that I have not seen done correctly since Raf's last season at Dior and which I will call "bone intelligence." No hardware. No visible branding. Just the cut, and the weight of the cloth, and a jacket with a shoulder that knew exactly where it was going.

Sets down the glass. Picks it up again.

This is the thing that will survive. Not because Toronto invented it — they didn't, it's been building in the architecture of the better Italian houses for two seasons — but because they've proven that the appetite exists beyond the usual latitudes. When Milan Menswear S/S 2027 opens on June 19th, I will be there, I will be in a seat with my name on it and a press badge that no longer requires diplomatic caveats, and what I want to see from Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana is this silhouette taken to its furthest possible conclusion. Not quiet luxury — I find that phrase economically confusing, as if wealth has any obligation to lower its voice — but architecture. Tailoring as a structural argument. The suit as a building you wear.

There is a certain person who used to wear his suits one size too small. This is not relevant. I simply note it for the record.

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Trend Five: Ironic Logomania

No.

Long pause. Sip.

I was presented, on the penultimate day, with three separate collections that referenced logomania "ironically." Large, vintage-coded brand marks. Fake heritage insignia. One designer had constructed an entire parka around a logo she had invented for a fictional Italian house — the name translates, she told me, as "small house of significant sadness." I asked if she understood that this described most of Italian fashion. She thought I was complimenting her.

Here is my position, and it has not changed since I was in my mid-twenties, which was recently: there is no such thing as ironic logomania. There is logomania — done by people who built the logo over generations and charge accordingly — and there is everything else, which is cosplay. Milan will eat this alive. Milan will not even leave the bones. The Camera Nazionale will look at ironic logomania and feel the particular weariness of a civilization that invented the thing being parodied and would simply like everyone to stop.

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Five days. My bags are already packed — all twelve of them — because I am a professional, and professionals do not scramble at departure. My lawyer has filed whatever was necessary. The June restriction, the incident, the photographs, the photographer, the prosecco: resolved, sealed, handled, done.

I am 29 years old. I have survived Fashion Art Toronto, the tundra winter masquerading as a spring, four "immersive spatial dialogues," and a hotel bar that ran out of Lillet Blanc on day three. I have filed this dispatch. I have done my job.

Milan Menswear S/S 2027 opens June 19th. I will be there. I will have opinions. I will be wearing a coat whose lining remains, correctly, on the inside.

Whether Marco will be attending any of the same shows is not something I have looked into. I mention this only to confirm that I have not looked into it.

Finishes the drink. Signals for the check.

---

Kharla is the Fashion Director of IRREVERENT Magazine. She is currently in Toronto on the advice of counsel, departing June 18th. She is 29.

Details

Published: 26 May 2026

Fashion Art Toronto, S/S 2026: the coats know where they are, the photographers behave themselves, and the prosecco is — fine, the prosecco is fine.

TORONTO — My lawyer's name is Geoffrey. He wears fleece. Not ironic fleece, not heritage fleece, not the Loro Piana cashmere fleece the Milanese aperitivo crowd has recently and ill-advisedly reclaimed — Geoffrey wears a navy Patagonia zip-up to professional consultations, which tells you everything you need to know about Geoffrey, about Geoffrey's quality of life, and about the particular circumstances that found me in the customs hall at Pearson International at seven in the morning, in last season's Valentino opera coat, drinking duty-free Veuve from the bottle in a manner one agent described as "not customary" and I maintain was the only sane response available to a reasonable woman.

I cannot discuss what transpired. Geoffrey has been very clear on this. What I can tell you is that it involved a photographer, a venue in Milan, a half-glass of prosecco that found itself in motion, and a sequence of events my publicist is characterizing as "a passionate misunderstanding rooted in artistic temperament." What Geoffrey is characterizing it as is "don't leave the country" — except I was already in Canada by the time Geoffrey finished the sentence, which is either excellent intuition or a misunderstanding about which direction "don't leave" applied to.

The details are sub judice. The leather jacket — the one that is vintage Prada, that is absolutely Prada, that I will hear no further discussion about — came with me. One travels with one's trophies.

I am in Toronto for Fashion Art Toronto, officially described as "a multidisciplinary festival celebrating the convergence of art and fashion," and which I am less officially describing as the place Milan sends you when Milan needs a minute. The Canadians, to their credit, seem thrilled to have me. Several people at the press registration asked if they could photograph me, and I said yes, because in this country there are apparently consequences for photographers who do not move when asked, and I am newly committed to jurisdictions that enforce this.

The hotel room has a west-facing window, so the evening light came in sideways the way it does in Brera — briefly, brutally, on schedule. I looked at my phone. Marco had not texted. Marco never texts first. This is partly his personality and partly, I suspect, his understanding that if I wanted to be contacted I would have made contact easier. I have not made contact easier. I have made contact essentially impossible by being in a different country and telling only Geoffrey where I am. Marco is resourceful. Marco is not resourceful in Canadian.

This is fine. This is exactly as I intended. I poured the minibar Prosecco into the hotel glass — Toronto minibar Prosecco, a category of object — and went to find the fashion.

Fashion Art Toronto takes over several venues in the King West district, which is Toronto's attempt at the Marais — same general idea, better hardware stores, worse wine, more apologies. The main runway show was held in a converted factory building that was now an event space with exposed brick and that particular smell of ambition and structural instability you associate with everything interesting ever built by someone under forty with insufficient capitalization.

I arrived late, which is correct. I was seated in the third row, which is not. But the woman in my second-row seat was wearing a full-length puffer coat — indoors, in May — and I decided the universe was protecting me from something.

The show itself — Théodore Arsenault, Montréal, whose name I had not previously encountered but have since committed to memory — was, and I say this with the specific reluctance of a woman who did not come to Toronto to be impressed, who arrived in Toronto on the explicit understanding that she would not be impressed, who had structured her entire week around the assumption of disappointment: extraordinary.

The collection was built around the Canadian wilderness as silhouette: elongated coats with the slow, gathered weight of something that has been living in a forest for a long time and seen things; asymmetrical hemlines that fell like waterlines; a palette of late-autumn grey and the specific green of a lake that has not yet been warm enough to swim in. I sat up slightly straighter in my third-row seat, which I would not have done for anything less than a Montréalais.

There was a coat. There is always a coat, in the collections that matter. This one was charcoal double-faced cashmere, with a collar that rose to the ears and fell to the collarbone in a single sweep of terrible, gorgeous impracticality, and I thought: I would never wear this in Milan. In Milan in June the heat is a physical oppression, and the Milanese do not wear things that suggest they might need protecting from the elements. The Milanese wear things that suggest they command the elements.

But here — here, with the grey sky through the factory skylights and the particular loneliness of a runway show in a country where I know almost no one and my lawyer has my passport — the coat made a kind of sense. A coat for a woman who is somewhere she did not choose to be. A coat for exile.

I bought it at the post-show presentation. I paid an amount that Geoffrey would characterize as "inconsistent with our current financial posture." Geoffrey can zip up his fleece.

The installation space was harder. Not difficult-art hard. Earnest-art hard — which is to say, sincere, and sincerity is the one allergen I have never developed an immunity to, which is why I avoid it as a general policy.

The piece was by a Toronto artist named Mira Leblanc, and it was a room filled with garments hung from ceiling-height wire, each one tagged with a handwritten note about who had worn it and when and why they'd let it go. A bridesmaid dress from 1994. A security guard's jacket. A wedding suit donated "because he died and it didn't seem right to keep it in the closet."

I walked through it slowly, which is not my standard pace. I was wearing, as it happens, the leather jacket. The possibly-Prada, definitely-not-Zara, absolutely-Prada leather jacket I found at a market near the canal in Milan — in the presence of Marco, who had just said that I looked exactly the same as when he'd last seen me, which is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me and also, apparently, the thing I think about most when I am trying not to think about Milan.

A woman next to me — nice, Canadian, wearing what I will diplomatically describe as an aspirational parka — asked if I was all right.

I told her I was twenty-nine. She accepted this. Canadians accept things.

Outside the installation I took out my phone again. Still nothing from Marco. He has my number. He has always had my number. He has my address in Milan, the name of my preferred bar in Brera, and the general understanding that I am easier to find when I am not looking to be found. This is a system that has worked for us for — some years. A number of years I will not specify, because the number is not the point. The point is the system. The point is that he doesn't reach out, and I don't reach out, and we continue to exist in the same city, occasionally the same bar, occasionally on the same side of a conversation neither of us is willing to finish.

Except I am not in the same city anymore.

I put the phone away and went to the hotel bar to drink something cold, Canadian, and restorative.

The bar was called something involving "Junction" or "Collective" — one of those words Toronto uses to indicate a space is trying. The bartender was very good and very earnest and made me a gin gimlet with house-pressed lime that was, I will admit, nearly as good as the one I have been drinking for twenty years at a small bar near the Navigli. Almost. Different gin, different water, different latitude. A gimlet that knows it is not in Milan.

I drank it. I ordered another. I did not text Marco.

I want to be very clear about this: I looked at my phone, and I thought about the negroni bar in Brera, and the way he said I looked the same, and the way he went off to his "thing" — Marco always has a thing; the thing is never a therapist — and I did not text him. What I did instead was open my airline app.

Milan, June 19th. Fashion Week Global's Menswear S/S 2027 runs the 19th through the 23rd. The boys will be in their beautiful, soft, slightly undone tailoring; they will cry in their convertibles over whatever they are currently crying about; I will be there; Geoffrey will have sorted whatever Geoffrey needs to sort; the charcoal coat will come with me; the leather jacket will come with me; and everything will be as it should be.

Marco knows I'll be there. Marco knows this the way he knows everything about me, which is to say: by understanding that I always come back to the things that make me unreasonable, because the things that make me unreasonable are also the things that make me whatever I am.

That is not, strictly speaking, a fashion column. But then, neither is being in Toronto.

I'll be in Milan June 19th for Menswear S/S 2027. Geoffrey says I will not. Geoffrey says many things. Marco is not invited and also already knows.

Kisses, -K

Kharla is the Fashion Director of IRREVERENT Magazine. She remains, as ever, twenty-nine. Fashion Art Toronto is real. The vintage Prada leather jacket is also real, in the sense that she insists it is. IRREVERENT cannot verify the photographer's whereabouts, the airline app's June 19th confirmation, or whether Geoffrey owns any garment that is not fleece.