I was sitting in a gala last month chatting with a Canadian celebrity (Amy Lalonde – fantastic woman) about fashion in Canada.  The nutsell of it was how we tend not to exploit what’s clearly in our own backyard and instead, tend to gravitate ourselves to the ‘cooler’ labels of the south.  She joked that she knew every label she was wearing with the exception of a tres cool hat she was dawning, a creative masterpiece, which was designed by a Canadian.  She remarked that she got the hat from a Canadian celebrity shop pushing Canadian designers called ‘stylebox’.  Check it out if you’re a Canadian designer looking for some red carpet exposure: ‘the stylebox’.

It surely isn’t a lack of talent but has everything to do with marketing and volume.  The United States engine carries so much volume and with it are the dollars and cents that make it purr. Pop culture is the high octane fuel – cue Gossip Girls – and I swear the backbone of every high-end retailer in Canada has 80% of their stock from the fashion mecca of LA.  With these facts in hand, designing a Canadian Tee shirt is never an easy ordeal, especially if you’re looking to step out of the sporting limelight and into the urban grunge of cool.  That being said, we are proud Canadians, and given this opportunity, we wanted to at least try.

Designing tees of nationalistic importance is generally a faux pas and a direct mail sentence to tourist-y land.  Our goal was to snatch the trendy side of the world with a much more subtle approach on being patriotic.  being Chinese myself, it made sense to give a personal touch to the celebration of our cultural mosaic by using Chinese to ‘spell’ out ‘Canadian’.   The first three characters are actually the closest Chinese phonetic characters that sound like the three syllables of ‘Ca-na-da’.  The final character is the character for ‘man’ or ‘person’ and together, you get ‘Canadian’.  So voila.  enjoy our expression of being proudly Canadian.  This was a first hack – I’m currently musing about a version 2.0 so stay tuned for that in the months to come.

Design notes:  Designs in all three colours are available in both ladies and mens.  The gold is a brilliant foil design and really pops from its black base.  Both the red on black and red on white colours are ‘distressed’ prints to give it a more of an edgy feel.  The back design is a ‘stamp’ design entitled, ‘Canadian’.  Crew neck, organic cotton, and fitted.