Suzanne Timmins is being interviewed on CTV and she’s wearing a coat, the style of which reminds me of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s voyageurs of a couple-hundred years ago. Coats were sometimes made out of HBC’s wool blankets. Hers is white, with the traditional broad (horizontal) stripes.
Is it likely that she designed the coat she’s wearing? Is the HBC ‘blanket coat’ a fashion in Canada? Or is it a ‘retro’/‘historic’ design that people recognise but don’t wear?
(And no, I don’t want one. Looks a bit girly to me. )
It’s a Hudson’s Bay Blanket Coat. These are coats that were originally made from Hudson’s Bay blankets. You could buy them at the Bay’s department stores. Apparently, they are no longer made, but they are available (as you might expect) secondhand, which is probably how Suzanne Timmins got hers. From the Hudson’s Bay Company’s FAQ page on its blankets:
Interesting. They are (apparently) much in demand and command high prices, yet HBC don’t make them anymore. You’d think they’d see an opportunity to make some money.
Just one of the reasons that the HBC will soon be going as belly-up as Eaton’s did. Walk into their main store, still located on Portage Avenue in Winnipeg and see how long it takes for the staff to ignore you.
Oh, sure, they’ll come running up to you as soon as you show up in their department before you even know what you want, but if you tell them you’re “just looking” they have this tendency to totally disappear in the time it takes for you to actually find something you want or at least want to ask about.
It was hoped that when Target bought out the HBC/Zellers that the service would actually improve to what the norm is in the US, but unfortunately it hasn’t happened. True “Customer Service” is one of those things that just doesn’t exist in Canadian department stores, and really never has to the extent that it exists and has existed in US stores.
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