This is the first one. We've been wanting to send it for a while.
There are too many fashion newsletters. There are also, somehow, not enough.
The ones worth subscribing to have a voice. They're written by people who care about the medium, not just the market. They argue. They pay attention. They notice when something has shifted before the trades pick it up.
The ones we skip read like search-engine optimized aggregations of yesterday's runway recaps. We don't need another version of that.
So we're starting this - Oro Insiders - to do the thing we wish more fashion publications would do, especially in Canada: pay close attention to what's actually happening, develop a point of view about it, and write it down with care.
This is for people who think about their clothes - what they wear, why they wear it, what it does - more than the average person does. If you treat your wardrobe like part of who you are, not a problem to solve, you're in the right place.
Who we are
We're Oro. We're a handful of students in Toronto building a personal styling app that helps you wear what you already own. The app reads your closet, learns your taste, and tells you which outfits you've never seen sitting inside it.
We're starting this because we think the conversation about fashion in Canada is thinner than it should be - and because we believe that the most interesting moves in fashion right now aren't happening on the runways everyone's already covering.
We want to write about all of that. With care, and in our own voice.
What we'll be doing here
Two columns, twice a week.
The Take. Tuesdays. A weekly column on fashion trends and where they come from.
Styling. Saturdays. A weekly column on the principles of styling what you already own.
Reply to any issue and we'll read it.
What we won't do
- We won't write listicles.
- We won't ask you to "shop the look."
- We won't quote a Pinterest stat without checking where it came from.
- We won't run anything that reads like a press release for one of our brand partners. If a piece is sponsored, it'll say so at the top.
- We won't pretend to have the answer when we don't.
The most reliable way for a fashion publication to lose its readers is to start dressing up its commercial interests as editorial. We'd rather grow slowly than do that.
A note on AI
We have to talk about this once, because it's going to come up.
Oro is an AI-native company. Our app uses computer vision to segment clothing, embedding models to understand outfits, and a large language model to generate recommendations. We're proud of the technology - it works, and it does something meaningful for users.
But we are skeptical of "AI" in fashion as a marketing posture. Most of what's been shipped under that banner - the AI stylists, the algorithmic outfit-rating apps, the trend-prediction tools that mostly predict yesterday - has flattened taste rather than expanded it. The risk in fashion is always that personalization becomes conformity in a friendlier wrapper.
So we promise this: these issues aren't AI-generated. When something runs here, a human at Oro wrote it, argued for it, and stood behind it. No one is letting an AI publish a newsletter under our name.
Where we're starting
Tuesday: what fashion's been telling us about the economy.
Saturday: old money on a student budget.
We're glad you're here.
- Oro