Our story
Reimagining brick & mortar to create community through fashion, decor and experience.
Stories are what connects us.
We built cloth + home on a single conviction: the story behind what you wear matters as much as the piece itself. Everything here comes from a small, independent designer or artist — many of them working in Chicago and the neighborhoods around us, others further afield, all of them making in small batches or one piece at a time. We know most of them personally. That is rather the point.
Founder Pam Kendall spent more than two decades in the fashion industry — as a buyer, a designer, a Chicago Fashion Incubator resident — before she built cloth + home as a deliberate antidote to fast fashion and anonymous retail. Here, every product has a name attached to it, a process behind it, a reason it exists.
But cloth + home has become something larger than its inventory. Customers come in and stay — sometimes for an hour, sometimes more. Friendships form between strangers. Designers meet their collectors. We know our regulars' families, their travel stories, their milestones.
Over the years, we've hosted runway shows, trunk shows, workshops, and author talks. We made history as the first Chicago Fashion Week event to feature live audio descriptions for visually impaired attendees.
Now, with our new home on Dempster Street, we're expanding our capacity to do what we've always done best: bring people together around creativity, craft, and connection.
This isn't a boutique that sells clothes. It's a community built on storytelling — a network of friends who personally know most of our designers and local artists, and many others who simply come in to share their own.
Come find your story with us.
Evanston, Illinois
Evanston is the first town north of Chicago. Lake Michigan runs along its eastern edge, Northwestern University sits on the lakefront, and the whole place is close enough to the city to be an easy trip and separate enough to keep its own habits.
We are at 610 Dempster Street — a corner of red brick, a tree over the sidewalk, our name lettered across two windows. We moved here from 1503 Chicago Avenue, and it is a better street for what we do.
It is a street you walk rather than drive down. There are other people's windows either side of ours, and whoever chose what is in them is usually the person you meet inside — which is the whole argument for a street like this one. We would rather be one address among many than a name repeated in every town. Come on foot, and give the block an afternoon.
