Idiosyncratic and fiercely independent, Joyce Gunhouse and Judy Cornish have been two of the most beloved and consistent Canadian designers and fashion entrepreneurs of the past four decades. But at the end of August, 42 years to the day when they launched their label, Comrags, at a Toronto after-hours club, the duo announced their retirement.
Fall/winter 2025 is their final collection, a showcase of their creative experimentation and signature details (a ruched shoulder; unexpected gathers around the knee of a trouser; clashing but perfectly in sync prints).
Look 15 from the Comrags 2025 lookbook. After more than four decades since it launched, fall/winter 2025 will be the label's final collection.
The label’s longevity is testament to the value of staying true to yourself but its secret to success might have been that Gunhouse and Cornish have always lived in the moment.
“We’d make two dresses, and if they sold, we made four,” Cornish says of early days spent keeping financial risks low while working other jobs. “We were really careful.”
Those first pieces were designed so they’d only take 15 minutes to sew. “I just think that’s why we’re still here, right? We didn’t spread ourselves so thin,” Gunhouse says. “We did what we do well – and just continued to do it.”
Gunhouse and Cornish met in the fashion arts program at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Toronto Metropolitan University) in 1980. “We weren’t trained in business, but we were logical,” Cornish says.
That matter-of-fact way of looking at fashion came in handy as they built the brand and encountered lots of bad advice. Wholesale agents would offer feedback like the need to offer two pairs of pants so that a retailer or customer could choose one. “And that was really annoying to us because we just wanted to do the one good pair,” Gunhouse says. “We didn’t want filler – or options.”
Joyce Gunhouse and Judy Cornish present their spring/summer 1998 Comrags collection.The Canadian Press
By the 1990s, they had built a reputation and had four sales agents, and more input: Your name’s so valuable, you should be doing this or that. Home furnishings was a lifestyle category Gunhouse says they were encouraged to get into. Cornish remembers being sensitive to unsolicited opinions about scaling: “Why didn’t we send more stuff to contractors? Why didn’t we sell in bigger markets? Why weren’t we embracing growth?”
“But we liked what we were doing and making,” Gunhouse says. “We have never wanted to have a really high volume of something.” Any time they tried using an outside contractor, “we’d bring it back, rip it apart and re-sew it anyway,” Cornish says. The sustainability of local manufacturing was a practical decision and keeping production in-house meant that every step of the way someone was focused on quality.
During a particularly busy period, they found themselves in endless meetings “listening to people tell us to make the skirt longer or shorter or wider or whatever,” Cornish says. “For us, growth felt like we were getting away from the thing we enjoy.”
As they were both also raising young families, the solution was to open their own store and shrink wholesale to like-minded boutiques that understood what they were doing, stores where the owner was actually in the shop. “People always say, ‘think outside the box,’” Gunhouse says. “Where we thrive is thinking inside the box.”
“We made really practical decisions,” Cornish adds, “and they didn’t interfere with our creativity. They gave us more avenues to be creative, in a weird way.”
When the consistency of runway presentations started to wane in Toronto, Comrags shifted to marketing via customer nights, informal in-store fashion shows with the designers offering running commentary, educating the customer by explaining the details of the clothes.
Over time, the cohesiveness of their design sensibility meant customers started to remix outfits across collections, years and decades. It was fun to recognize and identify wardrobe pieces in the crowd, like spotting past tour T-shirts at a favourite band’s concert.
The effect on their business was enviable customer loyalty, a quality that many makers and creatives who passed through the doors of the shop and studio as assistants and retail clerks noted. Kirk Pickersgill first worked as a studio assistant as part of a co-op program while still in high school and stayed on after graduation, into the early 1990s. “I didn’t go to design school,” he says. “They were my professors, my schooling.”
Later, when Pickersgill worked as a stylist in Milan, he remembers Comrags mixing combat boots with dresses years before grunge. “I always called them the original Miu Miu because, even back in the day, they did things that were not overly fashion, but that made you think.”
“These women were pivotal in my life,” he says. Everything he learned (the importance of balancing a work ethic with time off to recharge, of listening to the fabric when it tells you what it will do, and keeping production close to home) has been applied to Greta Constantine, the luxury label he co-founded in 2006. Its array of special occasion cocktail and evening clothes have graced the red carpet on Lucy Liu, Angela Bassett and Julia Roberts.
Although they occupy a different section of a woman’s closet, he can trace their sensibility of ease paired with impeccable fit to Comrags. “They’re about grace and comfort for women,” he says. “A cocktail dress doesn’t have to stick to you.”
Hamish Thwaites, who after years as a creative tailoring pattern cutter for Erdem in London now works with Victoria Beckham, credits his time at Comrags with his pursuit of technical mastery. He recalls popping into the store in 2012 while still a fashion student and sticking his head inside the clothes to inspect the construction. “I was so impressed by what they presented and just really wanted to learn how they did what they did,” he says of becoming a part-time intern. “It actually had such a huge influence on me – my interactions and observations with Joyce and Judy surrounding technical execution – because I just had no skills when I joined them. And they are so particular,” he says.
Alexis Venerus worked retail at Comrags in 2017. With mentorship from Gunhouse, her career has evolved to focus on garment production, carrying on the Comrags made-in-Canada ethos. As the founder of Sew-Rite Studio, a small-scale fashion production facility in Toronto, Venerus oversees a team of 10 skilled artisans and works collaboratively with brands like Wanze, Libero and Body of Work to refine and execute their ideas. “I feel like my mission now is to try and figure out how to really create esteem around the work that we’re doing,” she says.
Venerus traces her dedication to cultivating manufacturing and technical skills back to Comrags, something she passes down to interns of her own. “Watching them grow, I think it’s probably a similar feeling to what they would have felt watching us,” she says. “There’s a certain tenderness that forms towards the effort of the work.”
Comrags will wind down operations at the end of the fall season, with a final December delivery riffing on their greatest hits using vintage fabrics they’ve collected, before closing the shop at the end of the year. Its legacy will continue rippling through Canadian fashion – in people, not just in closets.
