Dime

Dime was founded in 2014 in Montreal by Phil Lavoie, Vincent Tsang, Antoine Asselin, and several other skater-friends, as a skate-anchored streetwear brand and a board-distribution company built around the Montreal skate scene that had been gathering since the early 2000s. The brand's foundational thesis was specific: produce skate-grounded, deliberately ironic, French-and-English bilingual streetwear that read as the heir to the Palace-and-Polar generation of skate brands without copying their visual vocabulary. The Dime vocabulary settled around several recurring elements: heavyweight cotton tees and hoodies with the brand's iconic 'Dime MTL' or 'Skateshop' typographic graphics, the cursive Dime monogram, French-language jokes and slogans (Montreal's bilingual culture is a core anchor), deliberately retro 1990s skate-video-aesthetic visuals, and a long-running collaboration programme with Vans, New Balance, Lacoste, Levi's, Nike SB, and Champion. The Dime Skate-Glory show — an annual amateur skate competition — has become a defining North American skate cultural event. The brand is independent and held by the founders. Dime operates flagship retail in Montreal (Saint-Laurent Boulevard, Plateau), Toronto, Los Angeles (Fairfax), New York (Bowery), Paris (Le Marais), and a small set of carefully chosen wholesale relationships through skate shops globally. Few skate-anchored brands of the post-2010 generation have built such a culturally specific bilingual French-Canadian vocabulary while becoming a globally legible reference point.