Sunshine+Design

Exploring the West: Hello Portland

Almost right after Daryle and I got married last year, he received a call from a potential wedding client wondering if he would be available to fly to Portland, Oregon to DJ a wedding. The only catch was, it was the same weekend as what would be our wedding anniversary. When Daryle asked how I would feel about going to the West for a wedding gig over our anniversary, I exclaimed “of course!” Up until this past week, we had only been to California a few times. We long to be in the west, love the terrain, and oh, what an adventure we could have.
We honestly knew very little about Portland. Back in the day when I lived in the Dupont Circle area of DC all five of my roommates (we lived in a really big, really old [crappy] house) were from Oregon except me. We jokingly referred to house as the Embassy of Oregon and dreamed that we should hang an Oregon state flag outside the house. I knew that Portland was a liberal city with a lot of bicyclists, but that was about it. Upon our arrival, I had (and still am) been so so busy at work that I didn’t have a spare moment to research things to do or the areas to hang out in. We quickly learned that the city of Portland (a.k.a. PDX) is divided by a river with four bridges connecting the east from the west making it easy to get to either side of the city relatively quickly.

One thing we did know about however was the ever cool custom suit shop called Duchess. Daryle had read about the shop and knew they designed suits for the likes of Nick Cave and DC’s most famous musician (and personal friend of ours :)) Ian Svenonius who rocks his suits all over this city. For our wedding, Daryle had wanted to get his suit from Duchess, but we thought it would be a lot of ask all of his groomsmen to have custom suits made to match his. Before we even arrived, Daryle had made an appointment to get his measurements taken to have a suit made to speck. We were so excited to see the hundreds of different colors and textures of fabric available to choose. Daryle settled on a Rat-Pack, slim cut, three-piece suit with a thin lapel in a light weight black wool. The most fun part was picking the inside lining of the coat. You can really get fancy and flamboyant if you want to. He picked a gorgeous brown and baby blue pattern. Fabulous.

The suit on the left in black is similar in style to the jacket and vest Daryle picked.
Here’s the seamstress in action.

The suit should arrive in three months. Somebody is going to be looking snazzy at Thanksgiving dinner.

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to be continued…