Eye candy

Olivier Petitpas brings the designer
toy movement to NDG

HOUSE OF URBAN VINYL: Petitpas at camiondepompier

by MICHAEL CITROME

Olivier Petitpas would have gotten into the mania earlier, but he was in total nerd denial back when he was living in Asia during the time that the first wave of designer toys hit.

“I was supposed to go to the Hong Kong Toy Fair where the first Dunny was released but thought it would be filled with nerds, so I ended up staying home. Ah well...,” he laments.

The Dunny, of course, would become the blobulously white ambassador of Kidrobot, decorated and customized by seemingly every contemporary artist and illustrator of note, from Gary Baseman to Shepard Fairey, to COOP and Huck Gee and David & Sun-Min, the creators of Uglydolls. You can find all of those otherworldly delights and more lining the shelves of Petitpas’s shop, camiondepompier, Montreal’s premier destination for lovers of art toys, urban vinyl, designer toys or whatever you like to call them.

For the uninitiated, art toys are those limited edition hunks of polyvinyl chloride that design junkies, graffiti heads, anime otakus and geeks of every stripe salivate over at trading parties, pop culture conventions and hip blogs worldwide.

“The biggest collectors are often designers and artists themselves—people who are familiar with pop surrealist art,” explains Petitpas about his boutique’s patrons.

“But they’re nice objects even if you’re not familiar with the artists who made them, so people who have never been exposed to the movement also end up buying them, as gifts or for themselves,” says Petitpas.

Petitpas left his former location near Berri UQÀM to set up shop at 5666 Sherbrooke W. in NDG, a gentrifying little patch of hipsterdom that includes vintage shops, a couple of independent cafés, the grease-stained breakfast wonderland of Cosmos, and now the location that he shares with veteran graffiti-centric streetwear shop Sub-V. Petitpas emphasizes the connection between urban culture and vinyl monsters.

“Michael Lau was one of the originators of the art toy movement. He customized 12-inch G.I. Joe figures and gave them hip hop clothes and spraycan heads, so graffiti has been linked in from the very beginning,” he says, pointing out that celebrated grafittistos like KAWS, Futura and 123klan have created toys of their own.

Dunnies remain the knobbly bestseller in Petitpas’s PVC line-up. The next Dunny series, called “Fatale,” is due out this month. It features an all-female line-up of designers including rising art stars Junko Mizuno, Kathy Olivas and Amanda Visell.

Expect a trading party to take place at camiondepompier upon their arrival in-store—and Petitpas reminds you that you can bring all the other junk you have for trade as well. You can keep track of goings-on via the camiondepompier website at camiondepompier.com.