Artist Monacco Dunn Looks for Vintage That Has “A Story or Perhaps a Ghost Still in the Threads”
Where are you from?
I’m originally from Vancouver, British Columbia, but when I was 10, I moved to a tiny, tiny town in Northern Ontario called Deep River, where we lived in a cabin in the woods. The population of the town is 4,200 people, so it was really, really isolated. It’s a nuclear reactor town. It’s very beautiful; it looks exactly like Sweden.
We always played pretend. We had a TV, but we didn’t have cable, so we didn’t watch it. I wasn’t allowed to play on the computer or anything like that, so it was a lot of going outside and playing with sticks and making up games. I had a lot of books on medieval times and a lot of fairy stories. My grandfather would travel the world, and he’d always bring back artifacts. I spent a lot of time with him, and he had a parrot—he still has the parrot—called Socrates. He’s from Greece. We’d walk in the woods, and my grandpa would tell me it’s like a fairy forest and we’d build fairy houses.
Is there a story behind your name?
My mother just wanted to give me an interesting name. I like it because it’s very decadent and luxurious—I must love things like yachts, champagne, and oysters, and live my life in glamour and mystery, ha ha!
Have you always been interested in fashion?
I’ve been obsessed with dressing up for as long as I can remember. I used to either dress up as a princess or a dog—or I’d dress up like a boy to fix cars with my dad. I always loved dressing up; my stepmom makes clothes, so she made me a lot of purple costumes that I asked for. And then I have a lot of hand-me-downs; my parents never bought new stuff.
