For jean enthusiasts, this Queen West boutique is a raw-denim heaven.
There’s something all-consuming about jeans. Guys who are otherwise not that interested in fashion will find themselves on internet forums debating the best way to ensure killer fades and honeycombs in raw denim, meticulously documenting by way of photo essay the first time they wash them after six months of daily wear and obsessing over vintage pairs of deadstock 501s in the same way a stamp collector would a rare “Inverted Jenny.”
Seeing an opportunity in this denim obsession, Eric Dickstein and Darrin Kenigsberg opened Dutil, a boutique devoted entirely to denim—most of it raw—in Vancouver’s Gastown neighbourhood in 2006 and then later a Toronto outpost at 704 Queen St. W. in May 2011.
For Dickstein, the idea for Dutil came through his involvement in a different sector of the fashion world: eyewear. “I work with Oliver Peoples eyewear, which also designs and manufactures Paul Smith and a brand called Mosley Tribes,” he explains. His work with Mosley Tribes, whose designer “wanted to be in more lifestyle stores,” exposed him to a whole new area of retail and, consequently, to the world of high-end jeans. “At some point, I started putting it together,” he says. “There’s all these optical stores and they focus in on one commodity—they sell eyewear, that’s all they do.” Dickstein realized that he could do the same with denim.
“As I started to do it more and more, I realized that it’s not just selling jeans—there’s a whole culture surrounding it,” says Dickstein. Through this culture of denim, he became immersed in the multitude of brands out there—some of which are very small, producing goods that can at times be difficult for the average consumer to track down. “There could be a million different brands that you’re not exposed to that we are exposed to, because that’s all we do,” he says. By positioning all these brands under one roof, the shopper is not only introduced to new brands, but can now make direct comparisons, rather than running from one shop to another or even resorting to online ordering.
One side effect of stocking these smaller boutique labels, however, is the boutique pricing that can go along with them. It can be hard to understand why there’s such a range to the pricing of products that, for the most part, all look pretty much the same. And the answer isn’t as simple as quality, although that certainly plays a role—a pair of jeans made from the premium fabric produced by Cone Mills will certainly drive up the price.
“A small company just doesn’t have the leverage that a big company has to make units so it’s a trickledown effect,” explains Dickstein. “We have jeans that literally the owners make. Literally. We just brought in a brand called Railcar from L.A. The way [the designer] got the brand name is he works for the public transit in L.A. But he’s literally making the jeans. So the answer is, a lot of the time, what you’re paying for is that the companies are small and they don’t get the [cost] benefit of buying thousands and thousands of yards [of denim] at a time. I wish there was a more glamorous answer, but that’s the bottom line. We made our own jeans, so I know.”
Given these barriers, why did Dickstein go ahead and manufacture his own line of denim? “I love the idea of producing something and putting it out in the marketplace—I just think there’s something gratifying to creating something and knowing that human beings are responding to it,” says Dickstein. “Plus, we knew we could do a great job of it—we’re surrounded by denim all day long, and we’re inspired by the brands that we carry. So we thought we should take the inspiration and make what we call the Quintessential series.”
Finally, it seems appropriate to finish off our discussion with Dickstein’s position on the eternally debated question: Is it really all that important to avoid washing raw denim for months, if not years on end? Will one immediately be shunned from the sanctum of denim heads? Not so, says Dickstein: “I don’t really subscribe to that. I’m an older man, I’m 42 years old. The reality of it is: There are no rules. People will try to tell you that there’s a rule, but if someone wants to buy APC jeans and they want to wash them right out the door, well there’s no APC raw-denim police that is going to come to your house and say that you’re wrong. I don’t care what anybody says, those are their jeans. There’s nothing wrong with washing your jeans.”
End note: While you certainly can wash your jeans as often as you like, should you decide that you want to get the maximum amount of fading, whiskering and other desired effects, it’s still probably best to put off washing them for the first time as long as you can. And when it comes time for that first wash, ACL has a solid guide on how to best go about it.
