Brick, steel and graffiti – sounds like a gritty urban hangout, right? Wrong, what we have with Annie Aime is a bright and breezy clothing outlet in Canada with a colourful freshness and not a speck of grit to be seen.
The brick and steel at this newly designed store in the Ossington area of Toronto comes from the +tongtong studio, who has dramatically named its metal polyhedron display racks Les Aires Noir (The Black Wings). These free standing steel frames lean against the wall without fixings, so owner and Frenchwoman Annie Mesenge can move her stock of avant garde Euro clobber around at will. The central strip of brick displays echo the pre-existing stack of exposed brick on one wall. You have to stand a bit further back to see the graffiti by local artist Pascal Paquette – his huge tags are only obviously decipherable from a distance, but when inside give the otherwise white room a burst of primary pigmentation.
Photography: Ben Rahn, A-Frame
