Savvy businesswoman Sandy Stagg helped spark a hip Toronto scene
Running her Antique Clothing Shop on London's Portobello Road in the 1990s and 2000s, Sandy Stagg was particular when it came to the touching of dainty vintage garments for sale. 'This is a two-handed shop,' she would tell customers in no uncertain terms. 'Be gentle and put your bags down. If not, get out!'
The rule applied to all, dames included. The great actress Maggie Smith entered the store in 2002 in full film-star disguise: hat, silk scarf and huge sunglasses. When she pawed one-handedly at a rail of Victorian blouses, Ms. Stagg read her the riot act. To which Ms. Smith lowered her shades, uttered 'Indeed!' and walked straight from the shop.
'Sandy was so impressed she laughed for hours,' said her friend, Jo Headland, a seamstress and salesperson hired by Ms. Stagg. 'Sandy was infamous for being rude to her customers, in a way that only a fabulously dressed Englishwoman could be.'
Ms. Stagg, from London's working-class neighborhood of Shepherd's Bush, had come to Toronto in 1968 with a lot of nerve, a sewing machine and a Canadian husband who would not be her partner for long.
She would establish herself as a savvy restaurateur, pioneer trader in second-hand garb, model and beautiful muse of the General Idea arts collective, cutting-edge scene starter, skilled gardener, pale gamine about town, dog lover, enthusiastic party person and patroness of the arts.
She returned to Shepherd's Bush in 1988 to look after her ailing mother, whose landlord wanted her out of a rent-controlled flat. Ms. Stagg was having none of it. 'I'm here and we're staying,' she told him.
Ms. Stagg stayed until 2008, when she sold the Antique Clothing Shop and returned to Toronto to live out the rest of her life. She died from the effects of a stroke at Toronto Western Hospital on May 28. She was 84.
Ms. Stagg was different things to different people in Toronto. Some shopped at her popular Amelia Earhart Originals, a small vintage clothing store on Charles Street off Yonge Street (and later in Yorkville). Others dined and hung out at her hip restaurants: Peter Pan (which helped spark the Queen Street West art and music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s) and Fiesta.
The grooviest people did both.
'She dressed a lot of the people who came to eat at her restaurants,' said artist AA Bronson, the last surviving member of Toronto's groundbreaking General Idea trio. 'I don't think one can simplify Sandy, but above all she was interested in people and helping people make things happen.'
When the General Idea artists would throw ideas around the dinner table, Ms. Stagg encouraged and facilitated their audacious notions.
'Next thing you knew, you'd find yourself in Vancouver or New York or on top of the CN Tower doing something,' Mr. Bronson said. 'Sandy was a magnifying glass. She took whatever was going on and blew it up into something bigger and more interesting.'
At her clothing boutiques in Toronto and London, Ms. Stagg elevated second-hand attire to high-fashion status. She had a magpie's eye for lovely, discarded things and the entrepreneurial flair to exploit the finds.
While in London, she would visit Toronto on shopping trips. Once, she found a disassembled dress at a boot fair that was made by French designer Madeleine Vionnet. Ms. Stagg purchased it for $13 and took it back to London where she and her assistant, Ms. Headland, pieced it back together with traditional couture stitches and vintage silk thread.
The reconstituted garment graced the cover of a Doyle Auctioneers & Appraisers catalogue and sold for $35,000, according to Ms. Headland: 'It was typical Sandy, saving something and building it back to money-spinning glory.'
The reclamations of Ms. Stagg extended to cool eateries. She and two partners took the Art Deco greasy spoon Peter Pan Lunch, got rid of the grease and updated the spoon. The Globe and Mail restaurant critic Joanne Kates praised the just-opened place in 1976 for its rare marriage of trendiness and friendliness and its 'intelligently limited' culinary aspirations.
'It has obviously been very carefully put together by people who understand that the best way to exploit nostalgia is to avoid exploiting it,' Ms. Kates wrote.
Though Ms. Stagg enjoyed vintage objects, old fashions and retro culture − she jitterbugged with the best of them − she hardly lived in the past. 'Sandy read about history for research purposes, not pleasure,' said her one-time romantic partner and longtime friend, the architect Paul Oberst.
She not only listened to the new sounds of the day but supported and befriended the musicians. Ms. Stagg danced to disco, vibed to new wave, was pals with Rough Trade's Carole Pope and dated singers from influential Toronto punk bands the Diodes and the Viletones. 'She was interested in whatever was going on,' Mr. Oberst said. 'We went to see Roxy Music, Bob Marley and Elvis Costello, all at Massey Hall, I think.'
The New York art rockers the Talking Heads were introduced to Ms. Stagg and the Peter Pan crowd through two influential Toronto modern art hubs, A Space and Art Metropole.
'Sandy took us under her wing and made us feel part of that world – a crazy and wonderful world that sadly no longer exists,' Talking Heads singer David Byrne said in a statement to The Globe. 'A reminder that a person, or just a handful of people, can be a catalyst that enables all sorts of people to come together and interact − at least for a while. What she did was special."
In her later years, Ms. Stagg was a 'feisty old lady' devoted to her backyard garden, according to artist and close friend Charles Pachter.
'Sandy would beam and talk about her roses and peonies and the birds in her garden,' Mr. Pachter said. 'It made her happy.'
Ms. Stagg cultivated scenes, friendships and flowers with a maestro's touch. Though a style icon, she believed that fashion should not be considered separate from food, furniture, music or politics.
'She takes an interest in observing how fashion functions as a code of being,' The Globe's David Livingstone wrote of her in 1984. 'Glamour, as a thing of the spirit; style, as a matter of soul.'
She was born Sandra Penelope Newton on Oct. 3, 1940, in Dorset, England, at a manor converted to a maternity hospital for evacuated Londoners during the Blitz. Her parents were theatre carpenter Thomas Newton and seamstress Dorothy Newton (née Burke). They raised their only child − a much older stepbrother died in 1960 − in a rented flat in London that had a bomb shelter and a lemon tree in the backyard.
Her dad was an air raid warden near the end of the Second World War.
'That is why they had a telephone, and she was always very proud of having one of the first telephones in Shepherd's Bush,' Ms. Headland said. 'Also, she loved sitting in the basket of her dad's bicycle and being taken to see the bomb sites.'
She attended Godolphin and Latymer School, an expensive private day school for girls in Hammersmith, West London, that in 1951 became state-supported and ceased to charge fees to pupils.
By 1960 she was married, in a gown she had made with her own hands, to John Stagg, a friend of her father's. 'He was much older and she only married him to keep her dad happy,' Ms. Headland said.
They lived in the parents' flat in Shepherd's Bush until Ms. Stagg left her husband after four years of marriage.
Though she would go one to enjoy a glamorous lifestyle, Ms. Stagg took pride in her gritty British upbringing and looked up to John Lennon, a lowly Liverpudlian who as a member of the Beatles became a celebrated person in a class-conscious society.
Without him, she told The Globe in 1984, 'I would not be who I am today.'
Though she is not known to have crossed paths with Mr. Lennon, the anti-establishment figure who released Working Class Hero as a solo artist was an inspiration to many of her generation.
'The world had changed somewhat in the 1960s,' Ms. Headland said. 'A working-class Brit could make their way in the world and not be ashamed of their roots.'
In 1966, Ms. Stagg met and married a Canadian in London, Bud Petersen. Two years later, they moved to Toronto, where their suburb-dwelling marriage would dissolve. She headed downtown to begin her eclectic career.
She made costumes for the maverick Global Village Theatre company and created one-of-a-kind shirts for the Brick Shirt House. At a flea market outside the Church of the Holy Trinity, now surrounded by the Eaton Centre, she sold clothing brought from London or bought cheaply at Salvation Army thrift stores.
'She could look at a huge mound of old clothes and spot a designer number from 50 yards,' General Idea's Mr. Bronson remembered.
Gravitating to the city's nascent avant-garde art scene, she was a fashion designer for General Idea. Her image appeared in many of their projects.
Ms. Stagg had a flair for the theatrical gesture. Intending to move her Amelia Earhart Originals boutique from Yonge Street to the ritzy Yorkville shopping neighborhood, she was informed by a city inspector that a bylaw prohibited the sale of second-hand goods in the former village of Yorkville.
'Sandy quickly made an appointment with the boss of the bylaws and went to his office on the 10th floor of City Hall,' Mr. Oberst recalled. 'She marched straight from the door to the plate-glass window, turned dramatically and said, 'I may as well throw myself through this window if I can't keep my business!'
The stunned bureaucrat saw to it that the bylaw was changed.
Her vintage clothing shop in London drew celebrity fashionistas John Galliano, Jean Paul Gaultier, Stella McCartney, Alexander McQueen and model Kate Moss.
Fashion designer Paul Smith was chased down the road by Ms. Stagg as he left with his purchase. Because his credit card didn't work, she grabbed back the bag containing a pair of men's brogues.
'He had to send someone the following Friday to pay and pick them up,' Ms. Headland recalled. 'I think he was terrified of Sandy.'
In her final days, Ms. Stagg, who had no children, was looked after by a group of friends − dubbed Team Sandy − that included Mr. Oberst and Erella Ganon. One of the visitors was the great Toronto singer Mary Margaret O'Hara.
'She came to the hospital and the two of us sang songs to Sandy at her bedside,' Ms. Ganon said. 'It was beautiful.'
You can find more obituaries from The Globe and Mail here.
To submit a memory about someone we have recently profiled on the Obituaries page, e-mail us at obit@globeandmail.com.
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