“Keep your glass. We’re running out of glasses,” a woman-in-charge instructs me at a party to mark the opening of the Gucci store in Vancouver. She does so in a firm but gentle manner, like how you’d imagine Sue Johanson would sit you down to tell you about herpes. Another lady – less concerned about the champagne glass shortage than she is about the Celsius excess – fans herself grandiosely. “It’s hot,” the Sweaty Betty declares, not at all content with the distinctly non-Vangroovy heat filling up the boutique tucked inside the grand old Hotel Vancouver.

In this perfect confluence of hot and haute, where boozers, schmoozers and gift bag grifters form a near-perfect union, we’ve come to see this West Coast port lose its fashion virginity. Think of it as a tribal rite of passage. In a city known more for Gore-Tex good sense than it is for Gucci gorgeousness, this store opening – only the second in Canada – is a big, gift-wrapped deal. (People have been talking about this opening for weeks, and many who weren’t even invited have been calling Gucci to RSVP – the oldest of party tricks!)

From where I stand – and right now I’m standing near a shirt so expensive that it makes me understand everything there is to understand about both Enron and Barbara Amiel – there’s a supercilious feeling in the room. For Vancouver, this may just be the fashion equivalent of the smallest village in Eritrea connecting to the Internet.

I’m exaggerating, but only by a teaspoon. “It’s all so yum,” coos a woman who’s absolutely perfected the look of the West Coast fauxhemian (a fake bohemian). She’s standing right beside the handbag section, which, like in all Gucci stores in every part of the world, is located near the front – a nod perhaps to the House that Guccio Gucci built when he started a modest saddlery shop in Florence in 1906. The fauxhemian’s friend, a man who looks like he hikes, says something: “I can’t afford anything in here, but I’m glad it exists. It’s good for Vancouver’s self-esteem.”

There is a tender subtext to what he says. It’s a sentiment I hear often during my time in V-town, even with the 2010 Olympics on their way to this mountain-capped bliss and with a proximity to L.A. that’s rendered it a kind of Hollywood North. Vancouverites themselves still feel the hick in their step, like that really pretty girl who still doesn’t quite think she’s cool enough.

While this place is tip-top in more ways than not – and currently has skies so blue it’s like going kayaking in Paul Newman’s eyes – glamour probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind with the mention of the town that Sarah McLachlan calls home. Indeed, wasn’t this the very town where I attended a flip-flop-themed party some years back? Now there’s a quintessentially Lotusville moment! (And that, ostensibly, was a high-end fashion crowd!)

And that’s why Gucci matters. Though Vancouver has other luxury purveyors (Chanel, for one), the arrival of the Italian brand heralds something else – that thing called sizzle. Even though the label is in a post-Tom Ford phase (its rock star designer left last year), more sexual haze clings to it than all its haute couture cousins put together. It’s the fashion house of cut-to-the-chase, loins-burning sex , where the men in the ads often look like on-call hustlers and the women’s stilettos themselves are mini-pyramids to eroticism.

It’s a long, downward dog way from Lululemon, the yoga-centric label that Vancouver is perhaps best associated with these days. The arrival of Gucci – and more importantly, perhaps, the arrival of the idea of Gucci – puts Vancouver into a different headspace.

I could almost smell the difference around town. At Chambar – a hip, new Gastown restaurant, which is so tasty and so effortlessly cool that I wanted to get down on all fours and howl at the moon – I ran into a woman who was wearing a spanking new Gucci top. It made me smile. Vancouverites have always had fabulous restaurants, but this was different. You know what they say: You are what you wear when you’re eating! 

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Shinan Govani is the Scene columnist for the National Post and frequently appears on television commenting on celebrities and the social whirl. Write him at sgovani@enroutemag.net.