In the early days of the pandemic, when most of us were hoarding groceries, Dee Dee Taylor Eustace (BArch 1987), a Daniels Faculty alumna and founder of Taylor Hannah Architect, was doing something a little different. She was designing a jacket.

Taylor Hannah Architect had already created a small clothing line before the pandemic started. "When all this happened, I thought, 'I have all the patterns and I have people working on it. So I'm going to keep people busy and employed," Eustace says. Her idea was to create a piece of outerwear that could act as a protective layer for an uncertain time. The design she and her staff came up with included pandemic-friendly features, like a built-in face mask and gloves.

The Jacket of Hope, as the jacket came to be called, is now available on the Taylor Hannah website. Only 500 are available. "Think of it as armour for superheroes and superwomen," Eustace says.

The firm is donating $50 of each sale to Artscape, a Toronto-based nonprofit that supports artists and provides studio and living space to them.

To find out more about the Jacket of Hope, or to place an order for one, visit the Taylor Hannah Architect website.

Top image: The Jacket of Hope. Photograph by Lexy Henderson.