“Mile End Kicks” may center around Grace Pine (Barbie Ferreira), a music journalist who moved from Toronto to Montreal, but the real main character is 2011. Set amongst the Montreal underground music scene, the film reintroduces its audience to a time where Mac DeMarco was up-and-coming and peep-toe Toms could be made sexy if paired with the right rise of American Apparel disco shorts. The era is a character that the film’s costume designer, Courtney Mitchell, knows well, having spent much of it working the sales floor at an American Apparel in Montreal. “People in Montreal, even compared to Toronto, really go for it, and there's a creative essence in the city that energizes people to get dressed with a little bit more fun,” Mitchell says. 

While any viewer can appreciate the indie-sleaze nostalgia of “Mile End Kicks,” it takes a seasoned Canadian to identify the film’s stylistic homages to Montreal. Mitchell took a “method costuming” approach to sourcing clothing for the film, using people that she knew personally as references on the mood board. She wanted it to feel like each individual member of Bone Patrol—an indie band the film’s protagonist becomes involved with— “wasn't just any boy in a band” but someone who “really felt like they existed in our time in that era.”

When it came to dressing the band’s eccentric lead singer, Chevy (Stanley Simons), Mitchell avoided exact recreations of existing music icons to create something idiosyncratic. Looking toward The Strokes and Ariel Pink for loose inspiration, Mitchell aimed to recreate a time when individuality triumphed over trends in the underground music scene. Accordingly, Bone Patrol is introduced at Grace’s first loft party, where Chevy rocks a green and yellow nurse costume from a rental house in Montreal. “[Chevy’s outfit] was written in this script as sort of a Kurt Cobain, Laura Ashley look, and while that is an amazing stage look, we wanted to find a version of it that was our own and our own to the film,” Mitchell says. 

At the same party, a new-to-the-city Grace sports an oversized jean jacket over a white collared shirt, black vest, and burgundy circle skirt with tights. Her style combines Kathleen Hanna's spunk with Zooey Deschanel's whimsy. The outfit reads as “the most fun twist on a work uniform,” highlighting how closely Grace’s identity is tethered to her job. “Grace wanted to meet people and then [for them] to ask about her job and what she's up to and that she's a writer and to look that way. And I think the surprise of moving to Montreal is that you move there and no one cares about your job. They actually wanna know what you're into,” Mitchell says. Simultaneously, the look emanates a quintessentially 2011 sensibility. “We had just come out of wearing blazers to a club, so wearing a collared shirt to a loft party still felt in the era, but it was always mixing a little bit of twee with the sort of lightheartedness of a skirt and then the grunge-ness of a jean jacket,” Mitchell says. 

When Grace runs out of money, after having spent the entirety of her writing stipend, Mitchell ensured there was “always a little bit of cheap play” in her rotating wardrobe of thrifted clothing. To achieve a realistically modest look, she sourced clothes from many of the actual thrift stores that existed at the time, including Eva B. The designer wanted to create the impression of “grabbing a t-shirt off the floor or thrifting a silky pajama set or a nightgown and throwing that on with something else.” 

For Mitchell, recreating the physical sensation of clothes from the era played a huge role in bringing 2011 to the forefront of Ferriera’s performance. “I needed to make looks that could then walk out of our fitting room and be part of the film without needing to be so constantly adjusted or restyled or considered too thoughtfully,” Mitchell says. “I kept thinking about what it felt like to wear all those tiny leather lace-up shoes and how the inside would be destroyed, so you'd be wearing nylons, but you needed to wear a sock as a buffer, and that was both style and function.” Accordingly, she sought to source some of the exact items she grew up wearing, including many classic deadstock silhouettes from American Apparel. Five hundred Facebook Marketplace pickups later, Mitchell had a working wardrobe.

From archive American Apparel denim to Grace’s iconic, comically millennial owl necklace, Mitchell wanted the fashion moments to feel "tongue in cheek” while still expressing “a little bit of earnestness in how we used to get dressed.” One of the film’s most iconic pieces of clothing, a vintage Sonic Youth baseball tee, previously belonged to the film’s writer and filmmaker, Chandler LaVack, who “pulled it out of a bag and was like, ‘I have this ratty old t-shirt. Is it something you guys would be interested in using?’” Mitchell recalls. “Our producer had such a hard time getting it cleared, and we were on him every day. I was like, it needs to be this t-shirt.” Even as Grace adapts to the eclecticism of the Montreal scene and settles into her personal style, the Sonic Youth shirt remains a staple in her rotation.