Le Chateau is dead; long live Le Chateau

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/10/2020 (1805 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There are still, after all these years, bins in my closet piled with Le Chateau clothes. I’ve never counted exactly how many pieces I own. A rough estimate might put it somewhere in the range of 150, accumulated thanks to the terrible combination of an employee discount and what was then a near-total lack of fiscal responsibility.

Hey, I was young. It was the dawn of my writing career; there I was, fresh out of my teens, slinging stories about local rock bands for $30 a piece. At first, working at Le Chateau was supposed to be a temporary gig to keep myself afloat. I ended up staying four years, funnelling half of every minimum-wage paycheque back into the store.

So the clothing bins in my closet are about all I have to remember that time in my life. Here are four pairs of black gaucho pants, in identical cuts and slightly differing textures. Here are a few babydoll dresses. Here are a slew of tank tops, some plain and some striped and some dotted with sequins. It’s not special, it’s just a lot.

Yet I keep them because to me they still have a story. I remember unpacking stock crates, gushing over these things that I liked. I remember how often I wore them, and how well they sold. What strikes me now, 15 years after I worked my last Le Chateau shift, is how pointless those stories are, and how little they brought to my life as a whole.

That, in a nutshell, is my eulogy for one of Canada’s best-known fashion chains. It looked cool on the surface, and pumped out a lot of passably chic clothes. A lot of fun people worked there, or shopped there, but other than that it didn’t do the world any particular good. Le Chateau is dead; long live Le Chateau.

On Friday, the Montreal-based company announced it was filing for bankruptcy and would shutter all 123 Canadian stores, no longer able to “continue its operations as a going concern.” That move will throw 1,400 employees out of work; Le Chateau, in a release, named the final straw as the retail damaged wreaked by COVID-19.

That last part is probably true, though even without the virus, the chain was probably facing a terminal diagnosis. In truth, the writing’s been on the wall for a long time. The company’s escalating financial woes have been a subject of Canadian business news for some years, and it showed little hope of recovering its former moxie.

To former Le Chateau hands, like me, the news comes with some mixed emotions. In a flurry of texts and social media messages on Friday, some of my former co-workers eulogized the store as “a beautiful trash fire” and “the vortex that robbed people of their potential.” It’s sad to see it go, and at the same time, we won’t miss it.

Still, the closure does mark the end of a certain era. As with all things — The Bay’s doomed downtown location, for instance — it’s the memories people carry of a place that defines its meaning. And, as HuffPost Canada wrote in a Tweet linking to a story about the bankruptcy: “who among us doesn’t have a Le Chateau memory?”

To be fair to the store, it was, for a time, an innovator in fast fashion. Founded in 1959 as a stuffy Montreal menswear store, by the 1980s it was famous for hawking cutting-edge alternative styles. It would also prove adept at rebranding itself, eventually transitioning towards more sophisticated knock-off designer looks and satiny clubwear.

So when news of the bankruptcy broke, people took to social media to share their anecdotes about the place. They remembered shopping there for prom dresses, or crying when they couldn’t fit into the store’s notoriously tiny sizes, or how the staff at many locations ran the place with a certain air of hauteur. (On this, I plead guilty.)

I feel all of this nostalgia, I do. For many years, it held that allure for me too. Shopping there gave me thrill of being able to buy the coolness that eluded me in the storms of adolescent life. Working there also imparted some kind of emotional currency, a feeling of being at the hip apex of malls’ oddly regimented social hierarchy.

Le Chateau staff got recognized around town, believe it or not. It happened to me a few times. Young women would come up to us at a club, purring that we’d sold them that dress, or that they hoped to work there someday; a strange and painfully hollow imitation of fame, but it bolstered the illusion that we worked somewhere special.

In reality, though, it was no more special than any other mass retailer. It touted its Canadian roots and some of its higher-quality clothes were made here, but much of the stock was shipped in from cheaper factories overseas. (On one memorable occasion, my co-workers and I opened a shipment from China to find a dead rat inside.)

Like many other big retailers, it exploited its workers’ labour: in the five years I worked there I got exactly one raise, bringing my wage from the $7 per hour minimum to $7.20. A few weeks later, Manitoba’s minimum wage jumped to five cents above that. I asked management if I could get the extra $0.20 applied again, and they declined.

What kept me there was the people. Today, I still count many of my former co-workers as friends. We were a tight-knit group, at times almost cultish, and we shared all sorts of misadventures. The Polo Park store accounted for at least one marriage, and a few other romances besides. We sold skirts. We laughed. We had a lot of good times.

Now, as Le Chateau’s history in Canada comes to its close, I look back on that part with gratitude. But I also look at all those bins of old clothes, and wonder how I ever thought so highly of it. For five years all I did was sell people on the idea that they’d be happier with more: more shoes, more tops, more little black dresses.

Maybe I bought into that idea myself, too. In the end, it never made me happy, and it never made me cool: so all I have to remember Le Chateau are some good memories, a whole lot of stuff, and a realization that fast fashion is never worth becoming overly attached to.

 

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca