Fashion maven Adele bids store a fond farewell
When Adele Liebovitz walks away from her famous store at 283 Main St. W. at the end of this month, it will be as though theres an invisible cape of a thousand voices pouring out the door behind her.
They would be the echoes of all the conversations that have vibrated in that space and two previous others (Hess Street and Jackson Square) over the past 35-plus years.
It would be a very stylish, smart, colourful cape, full of quirky folds and unique personality.
Im really not into the R (retirement) word, Adele tells me. Im leaving my options open, for sure.
Adele has never done anything the conventional way and shes not about to start now as she steps up to the threshold of no, not retirement but the next, whatever that might be.
When Adele began her fashion business in the late 70s, she had little idea where it would take her or how long it would last but she grasped one thing instinctively: Clothing reveals character. Fashion should express our individuality, but in a way that makes us interesting to others, thereby fostering community. Clothes are conversation.
This is why Adeles clientele has reacted so viscerally to the news that Adeles is closing, on Aug. 31. Where else are they going to get what they got there?
Some were actually mad at me, before they were glad for me, Adele says, flattered at the backhanded way of it.
Understandable. Her store has been much more than a place to buy clothes. Its a place of spontaneity.
We arent just clients, says client and friend Jan Bielak. Were Adele-ites, part of her entourage. It wasnt just the clothes that were never plain or dull but the creative people she attracts. There were many afternoons Id bring tea and theyd just talk.
Adele grew up in Hamilton, near the rail tracks at Harriet Street, left home at 18 before finishing Grade 12 and moved from one adventure to the next Yorkville Street in Toronto in the 1960s; the club life of London, England in the 70s, surrounded by books, art,! music a nd fashion; then back to Toronto and finally back to Hamilton, where she took a job at a building systems company.
After that job ended, she found herself at a crossroads. So, having always had a gift for fashion, Adele opened a store in the front room of a house and, encouraged by the early action, she later moved to Hess.
Her clients many of them accomplished women and forces of nature in their own right responded to her idiosyncratic, less-travelled style choices.
When I first saw her store, in Jackson Square, I thought, Wow! says Jan Bielak. It was more New York than Hamilton.
Michelle Torsney agrees: On the dreariest days of winter, Id pop in there it was like an oasis of sunshine. Adele and Rosella (Rosella Elgar, Adeles friend and staff person) got to know what works for me. I have even gone over before an event lugging clothes and they dressed me! I enjoyed our conversations politics, art, music and I will miss those visits.
When Adele sent out her group email, letting her clients and friends know shes closing the store, she attached a video about women, many of them elderly, with an unapologetically courageous sense of style.
One of them says she dresses every day for the theatre of my life.
That neatly sums up Adeles approach, if it can be summed up at all.
It has all happened at the store, and beyond it, in the relationships that got started there. Laughter, sharing, fashion, fun, pain, friendship. Her clients/friends were there when she lost her beloved partner, jazz musician Doug Richardson, in 2007.
It has always been about the relationships, says Adele.
That wont change.
The store is closing but somewhere in the theatre of her life a curtain is opening on a new act, starring no doubt many of the same cast of characters.
905-526-3306