Friday, 23 September 2016

Vintage Shopping in Kensington Market with my Sister

While I’ve written a number of posts about a favoured part of Toronto, Kensington Market, I’ve never specifically concentrated on a main reason many people love this area — the wonderful vintage shops that line both sides of Kensington Avenue. There are fourteen different vintage stores on this short street, which runs north/south between Dundas and Baldwin. It’s a vintage lover’s dream place, and there’s no one better to go there with than my sister Camille, a fellow-fan of all things previously loved.

She and I learned to appreciate old things at a young age, after being brought to many the country flea-market by our parents. We know each other’s tastes well, and can quickly pick out items that the other will appreciate/want or get a good laugh over.

After meeting in the market we made a beeline for that vintage strip, beginning at Exile.

While this shop looks small from the outside, it is huge, going back a long way and getting much wider at the back. One thing they specialize in is getting people kitted out with awesome Halloween costumes. In addition to having lots of vintage clothes and accessories that can be worn as costumes, they have a wide range of new costume related things that you might not want to have secondhand, like wigs and hats.

But, while there is an abundance of choices year-round for people looking for costume items, they also have a lot of great stock for anyone looking for everyday or party clothes.

I quite like wearing men’s vintage shirts as jackets over a tank top and skinny jeans and quickly found a great cotton shirt in the western shirts section. (There are some detailed pictures of the shirt and other things I got on the shopping trip at the end of the post.)

↑ I got this shirt ↑

Courage My Love is a shop I’ve been going to since I was a teen. I liked it then because it had things there that I could actually afford, as they offer a wide range, including reasonably priced jewellery (although they also have some very special pieces too), trinkets, beads, buttons and the like.

Courage is the place to check first if you’re looking for cashmere sweaters. They have lots of beauties, for sure.

I picked up some of their hand-painted buttons to change up a couple of plain cardigans that I have, and Camille got a bunch of funny postcards and some jewellery as a gift for a friend.

↑ Every drawer has an interesting surprise awaiting within ↑

We made our way down one side of the street and back up the other

Kensington Market isn’t only a place to shop, lots of people live there too.

Then we agreed that it was time for lunch. There are so many places to eat in the market, serving all kinds of world cuisines, that choosing can be hard. That being so, I’d made a list beforehand of the top places based on Yelp ratings and the kind of food we could get there. (A couple of restaurants I posted about this summer were on that list : El Trompo Mexican and Jumbo Empanadas.)

We decided that Otto’s Berlin Döner would be our destination so headed over to the north end of Augusta Avenue.

We both had a döner sandwich, grilled halloumi cheese for me, and chicken for her. Neither of us had tasted this type of sandwich before and both really enjoyed the food.

After lunch we walked down Augusta to Smart Wear, located just north across from that little park there on Denison Square.

This is a unique place, for sure. I can’t say I’ve ever been anywhere quite like it. It’s a large space filled with a mishmash of things, the majority of which seem to be never-used vintage. They also stock lots of pro kitchenware including a large selection of cast-iron pots and pans.

It’s a hard place to describe so I’ll let the pictures do the talking …