Less but Weirder with Lopez
Denis and Graeme of Lopez talk custom projects, creativity, and empowering weird stuff.
Scrolling through Instagram two weeks ago, a particular post caught my eye: Lopez, of Plaza St. Hubert, posted a carousel showing off a workshop. The caption announced that Lopez was booking custom projects for September.
This struck me because Lopez is one of the most interesting shops in Montreal; taking an eclectic “we stock whatever we want” approach to outfitting the store. The result is a store where you can leave with a skateboard deck, a t-shirt featuring ODB on a RAMQ card, and a Wong Kar-Wai boxset. It’s all held together by a genuine belief in what they sell and over a decade of retail experience.
I absolutely needed to know more about this custom project space, so after asking nicely I popped down to the shop to talk to two of Lopez’s owners, Denis and Graeme, about the space and their goals for it.
The following interview has been edited for clarity.
Has the custom space always been part of the plan for Lopez?
DENIS: When we first opened, the plan was to be as self-sustaining as possible. Every time you rely on somebody else there are hiccups, there are unforeseen circumstances that happen, and to a certain extent we all need to be doing multiple things to feel satisfied. So printing, cut & sew, all that stuff fell into it. A couple of years before we opened, we would even do stages1 just to learn pattern-making, cause none of us ever went to school. We just self-taught everything. Our big goal was the store, then the brand, and then our own facility to produce and make our own things.
What can we expect in terms of cut & sew Lopez stuff in the future?
DENIS: So this summer we’re gonna have our own shorts, and then in the Fall we’re gonna do pants, shirts, and jackets. We’re not trying to go too big too fast, we’re trying to take it slow. We don’t want to get caught up in timelines; when it’s ready it’s ready. We’ve all done brands in the past, whether for ourselves or for other people, so definitely in the plan we wanted to first nail the graphics, and the hats, hoodies, standard streetwear stuff. After that, we wanted to slowly evolve. So we’ve been doing a lot of accessories the past year. We’ve been doing belts, lanyards, caps, a lot of bags. The next step in the plan was to start doing cut & sew, so it would be like one new piece every year, and then just do fabric stories2 and colorways after that.
A lot of times it becomes “you’re not fashion enough, you’re not cool enough”. He was just “I wanna do something weird” and that’s where we are.
I noticed you guys tagged Trame in the post announcing the space. What’s the connection there?
DENIS: They’re our partner in the space; we’ve known John for like 10 years.
GRAEME: We used to run a store downtown where we rented out space. John was one of the people renting out some of that space for his own little production company, and ever since then, we’ve done projects with him.
DENIS: He’s the one who’s been actually sewing all of our tote bags.
So he’s the one in the lab.
DENIS: Yeah, he’s the main one running the cut & sew lab; we’re kinda in and out because we’re doing so many things. He’s been producing things for a lot of people. For us, the partnership came because a lot of people looked at him and went “oh, he’s not cool”. He’s not a fashion guy, when you see him you would never guess that he’s the biggest textile nerd in the city that we know. Then once you start working with him and talking to him you realize that his knowledge is just beyond… I don’t think there’s anything I’ve thrown at him that he hasn’t been able to make. Since we’ve started, we’ve always partnered with other people to make stuff, and we want to do as many things here as possible, and a lot of times it becomes “you’re not fashion enough, you’re not cool enough”. He was just “I wanna do something weird” and that’s where we are. I don’t wanna do the standard set-up that everyone does; it gets boring. We’ve been working retail for so long that we know that everything comes back and you see it a million times.
GRAEME: We have enough context in the city that we can reach out to people and say “oh, this tote bag, this basic thing that you’re making in China, we can help you make it here”. And that keeps production running3 so that we can have more fun with the weirder stuff.
I wanted to talk about the weirder stuff. When it comes to taking customer projects, is there an ideal kind of person that you want to work with or an ideal kind of project you want to take?
DENIS: Personally I’m always really interested in seeing what people have to offer. Obviously, the projects that we will embark on are the weirder ones. Today we met someone who wanted to do rock-climbing shoes. I’ve never done it, none of us on the team have ever done something like that, so for us, it’s a challenge and that’s interesting. If someone comes to us and wants to make the perfect white tee, that’s going to get shoved aside. It seems like everyone is trying to make the perfect something and it’s like… well it depends on what your body type is, your height, and all that stuff. It’s a conversation that I’ve had countless times and it kinda gets annoying to us, when it’s repetitive. Whereas if it’s something that hasn’t been done or isn’t even in the shop, we’re more likely to jump on that.
I understand that you might not be at liberty to say, but what can you tell me about what we can expect from the space?
GRAEME: Some fun stuff is starting to do sampling for some great brands, and designing their samples here, so they take that sample and then they go produce it-
You’re like Holt Renfrew for Dior4!
GRAEME: Yeah, if we can have the fun and gain the knowledge of working with a big Montreal company and work on their samples, and then eventually take that knowledge through John, through our own projects and apply it to our own stuff too, and that’s a big win for everybody. Cause some things John doesn’t want to do, or it’s repetitive to do, or we just don’t have the manpower. But with sampling, we can do one-off stuff and it’s a lot of fun.
For us, it’s more fun to do less, but let’s do something wild.
DENIS: Anything to do with the creative process is what we like. When it gets to production we don’t do big runs, mainly because we don’t have a full-fledged manufacturing operation. Once you start doing three hundred, four hundred, in the thousands, you have to hire a whole bunch of people, you have to get a lot more machines…
GRAEME: It just becomes a different business.
DENIS: For us, it started more as “we need the space to make things for ourselves”, and then we’re not making stuff 24/7. We got our collections that come out twice a year, we’re happy with that, and it’s more that we opened it to fill that time. On a weekly basis we have someone that comes in here and asks us about how to make things, or can they do this, or how stuff works, and we saw there’s not really spaces that are open to small projects. Everyone is like “you need to make 300”. The mins are too big and it’s a shame because obviously, when you start something and you’re doing 300 jackets, that’s a lot of money for something that you’re not that sure about, and in turn, it makes people play it safer and do something that’s tried, true, and tested. For us, it’s more fun to do less, but let’s do something wild.
GRAEME: If I’m meeting somebody that wants to do something different, we get some of that energy too and we become inspired. Sometimes it’s soul-sucking to say “no, you can’t do that, it’s already been done”, and we don’t want to get there, except for the white t-shirt person, but everything else, we want to get inspired by new designers and get that energy.
Do you have anything that you would like to plug?
DENIS: Shop local.
GRAEME: Support small, local businesses.
Basically an internship, mais en Québec.
Referring to switching the textile of a garment, i.e. last collection this shirt was cotton, and for this collection, it’s being re-released in linen.
This makes me think of the parts of W. David Marx’s Ametora that detail how a big obstacle in the development of authentic Japanese denim was the lack of appropriate factories. Having contacts and access to suitable facilities opens a lot of doors.
Back in the day, Dior served Canadian customers by having designs sent to Holt Renfrew in Montreal, where the dresses would actually be made.