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.