Smoking Lily
- Smoking Lily
- 1221 Wharf St. Victoria, BC
- @smokinglily
- smokinglily.com
Learn more about Smoking Lily
I fell in love with Smoking Lily in 1997 when I attended Uvic – at the time SL was selling items out of a tiny store front on Johnson Street in Victoria. I loved the prints and the edginess of the design – no one else I knew was doing the prints. Fast forward to 2024 I started to explore a 3-5 year plan of buying a business to tap into my love of fashion and creative side that I do not get to express as a lawyer. One fateful day I googled businesses for sale on Vancouver Island and the first one that came up was Ethical Women’s Clothing Business – I couldn’t stop thinking about it so I reached out to the broker, set up a meeting with the owner and in July 2024 I became the new owner of Smoking Lily.
We have a small team that creates all of our products by hand in-house in our studio on Wharf Street, Victoria. We are known for our silk screens, but we create our own designs, cut all material and sew everything in studio. We try to plan ahead, but because we control the whole production cycle we can remove things from the line if they land flat and add new prints or designs based on customer feedback. We try not to overproduce – we start with small batches and add more in production if we get more requests. I have no formal fashion training, but I have sewn pieces of my own clothing since I was a teen and I LOVE fashion.
Rotator Dress.
The Rotator Dress is versatile – you can dress it up and dress it down. It is also reversible. We make it from a variety of fabrics, including some pre-printed cottons and some of our own print designs (these tend to sell best). It is something that pre-dates my ownership and had a large following of people asking for a come back.
We just made a “Way More Skirt” skirt (which just as it sounds has a lot of skirt to it) and some “Sovereignty” pants that are a super wide leg pant made from a linen type of material. These haven’t been released yet, but I have been wearing them to work (at the law firm) and I love them. So comfy and stylish (IMHO). They will come in black, pre-printed fabrics and some of our own prints.
Horses (Toronto) and HoiBo (Toronto) – not local to me, but I just love what they are doing.
See More: Local VICTORIA BC Shops
