Spend enough time shopping on the internet, and your URL bar eventually bends towards SSENSE. Since launching in the early 2000s, the Canadian e-tailer has emerged as a digital Goliath, thanks to a staggering assortment of brands both household and hard-to-find, from the cashmere kings of Solomeo to the fresh-out-of-fashion-school kids of Seoul. (For those too shy to ask, the platform’s name is pronounced “essence”—as in, “The essence of a man is measured by how many Balenciaga sweatsuits he owns.”)
You’re likely familiar with the pull SSENSE’s site has on your scrolling thumb. What you might not know, though, is that SSENSE has operated a single brick-and-mortar store since 2015, not far from its Montreal corporate HQ. It’s the sole physical expression of the retailer’s expansive digital presence, and the reason I wound up at LaGuardia Airport one sunny April morning, aiming for SSENSE’s monastic flagship, a five-story triumph of chrome and concrete wrapped in a historic 19th-century facade.
Over the course of six hours at the store, I ignored Montreal’s sleepy charms to hole up in a dressing room with $20,000 worth of clothes, sourced directly from SSENSE’s elite global Rolodex. Here’s what I saw.
SSENSE’s physical store mostly functions like any other, though its purpose remains strategically downstream of the online emporium. Inventory at 418 Rue Ste-Sulpice is technically limited and rotated often, and personal appointments are encouraged. Eyeing a shirt on ssense.com? Save it to your wish list, schedule a visit, and the store’s sales team will ensure it’s trucked in from a nearby warehouse and waiting in your dressing room when you arrive. The “limited” selection becomes limitless, so long as you plan ahead.
Which is why, at around 1 p.m. on the day of my visit, my reserved dressing room was guarded by a formidable rack of spring menswear, plucked from a wish list I’d compiled less than a week prior with the joy of a kid in a candy store—if that candy store stocked Dries.
Items that are now sold out have been replaced by similar picks.
Photos: Avidan Grossman
Look 1: John Wick gets wickeder
Eyeballing a suit online is kind of a crapshoot, but I was optimistic about Copenhagen brand Sunflower’s double-breasted number, a corporate-macher standby imbued with a jolt of bad-guy sleaze. In person, it looked downright dangerous—ready to lead a shadowy crime syndicate into battle in the next John Wick spin-off. The label specializes in boxy jackets and baggy jeans, but its suit looked right at home with Rier’s crisp poplin button-up and Yohji Yamamoto’s star-crossed silk tie, which dutifully prevented the whole getup from veering too far into rent-a-henchman territory. Damn, I whispered to my reflection in the mirror. I might need a catchphrase.
Photos: Avidan Grossman
Look 2: A Canadian Tuxedo by way of Japan
When my colleague Yang-Yi Goh noticed that Soshiotsuki—a decade-old label with limited availability outside of Japan—had popped up on SSENSE recently, he sent up a flare. “You certainly know what you like,” a kind-vibed SSENSE PR maven said to me with a wink, as I sheepishly rifled through a half-dozen Soshiotsuki pieces on my rack.