Welcome to Hit the Racks, an inside look at the vibiest stores in the GQ universe. This time around, we're tearing through SSENSE’s flagship in Montreal, Quebec, the e-tailer’s sole brick-and-mortar location.
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.
