Just as we were ready to move on (honestly), a newsmagazine across the border posts a follow-up on our article Wednesday about Detroit designer Tommey Walker Jr. versus a Toronto copycat.
Maclean's, a 110-year-old weekly published in Toronto, bypasses legal questions about upstarts selling echoes of Walker's three-year old Detroit vs Everybody garments. Digital editor Adrian Lee instead ridicules the popularity of "the borrowed slogan" on Toronto's "statement-making wardrobe item of the season," as he puts it.
Lee, who quotes and links to Walker's comments at Deadline, suggests that the makers and buyers of Toronto vs Everybody styles cross the line "between pride and insecurity." The Canadian commentator writes:
This imbroglio over embroidery is more than an issue of plagiarism. It speaks volumes about Toronto’s pervasive lack of self-esteem. . . .
We want to be New York, instead of Toronto. That’s not inherently a bad thing, but it’s also something of a zero-sum game; it’s hard to compete against America when you are, well, not in America. . . .
The fact that Toronto imported a civic movement from a city where the forces against it are economic and deep-rooted makes this issue stink all the more. The borrowed slogan punches down — a change of pace from Toronto’s typical punch-up attitude.
Whatever happens to the legal fight over Peace Collective’s branding, it’s a perfect moment for Toronto to awaken to the fact that it deserves a civic movement all its own. Something that says something about who we are, rather than defining ourselves against what we are not.
-- Alan Stamm
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