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When Leslie Jermyn moved from downtown Toronto to the small Eastern Ontario town of Napanee, she expected some agreeable tradeoffs – lower real-estate prices, an easier rural lifestyle and proximity to her new job heading the faculty union at Queen’s University in nearby Kingston. The downside? “I thought I was coming to a fashion desert.”

Six months later, she cheerfully admits her error. On a late-summer afternoon, she is carrying a bright-pink bag, containing new shoes, through the Starlet complex of shops that dominates the main drag of Napanee, a town of 15,500 people along Highway 401 between Toronto and Montreal.

“I can find shoe brands here that I have trouble finding in Toronto,” Jermyn says, wandering around Starlet’s three linked boutiques, past the rows of retro dresses, jewellery and accessories, with Patti Page singing The Tennessee Waltz in the background.

Surely this isn’t Napanee, a 150-year-old relic with the hard-to-shake image of a hollowed-out downtown dominated by the empty shell of a shuttered furniture factory. Once blessed with a thriving core of hardware and grocery stores, Napanee had, by the 1990s, become typical of many towns along the 401: bustling big-box stores and fast-food outlets along the highway and derelict buildings in a depleted centre. One empty store window after another was testimony to this economic shift away from downtown.

Cat and Jefta Monster/Photos by Matthew Sherwood for The Globe and Mail

Today, though, it is hard to find vacant space on Dundas Street, the town’s main thoroughfare, where Starlet is the linchpin of a vibrant cluster of women’s fashion stores that have suddenly positioned central Napanee as a shopping destination. It’s a turnaround based on Michael Kors shoes, Myka jewellery, Lug bags and Joseph Ribkoff dresses. The jury is still out on the resilience of this urban-renewal-through-fashion model – can it, for example, survive economic downturns? It is just possible, however, that style will save Napanee.

According to estimates by the downtown Business Improvement Area, store vacancy rates in the core have plummeted to less than five per cent from more than 35 per cent a decade ago. Should that decrease prove sustainable, Napanee’s experience offers hope for small towns across North America that have been bypassed by superhighways, the explosion of Internet shopping and the draw of the box stores. The transformation in Napanee owes much to Starlet’s owners, Jefta and Cat Monster, the husband-and-wife team whose bubbly enthusiasm belies their arresting surname. Still in their early 30s, they are retail veterans who landed in the town in 2006 and built Starlet into a powerful word-of-mouth brand known for its vintage-style accessories, quality shoes and a small but stylish complement of dresses. The Starlet phenomenon has inspired a dozen or so other entrepreneurs who, drawn by the couple’s energy and success, have put down roots within Napanee’s 19th-century brick storefronts.

When the Monsters arrived – they too get a chuckle out of their surname – a handful of merchants were trying to keep downtown alive. “We were among the first to come from outside and choose to make it our home,” says Cat Monster, who grew up two hours to the west in Peterborough. As a bakery counter clerk, she had met her Dutch-immigrant husband while he was out buying baked goods for the little restaurant he owned at age 20. By the time they married, she had experience in a jewellery store and he had sold his restaurant and was selling electronics at Future Shop. Sharing a dream of building a business in one of the 401 corridor’s historic downtowns, they were drawn to Napanee by its welcoming people and helpful civic government.

Doris Lucas, a tough retail survivor who has run businesses around Napanee for about 60 years, was among the welcoming group. She had opened April’s Image, a mid-range dress shop, four years earlier on the main street. Lucas and a few others were fighting a lonely battle when the Monsters burst into her shop. She helped the young couple get established, setting the tone of co-operation among the town’s fashion pioneers.

Initially, the couple started with a jewellery store in an old bank building; two years later, sensing a void in the market, they bought space for a shoe store two doors away. They then acquired the pawn shop in between. When they got rid of the bars, removed the dark windows and put in an ornate high ceiling, they had their “fusion store” offering frocks, gifts, greeting cards and cosmetics. On the morning of the new store’s opening last year, there were long lineups on Dundas Street.

Cat’s love of nostalgia is reflected in 1950s-era touches – big photos of Audrey and Marilyn, a jukebox, video clips of Leave it to Beaver. Most of the dresses, including the popular Stop Staring line of form-fitting apparel by Los Angeles designer Alicia Estrada, have a largely retro look. With Starlet’s emergence, fellow Napanee retailer Teresa Hendrick felt confident moving her dressy apparel shop, Touch of Class, from a site beside Highway 401 to a converted restaurant downtown. She rented the upstairs to another ambitious female entrepreneur to build a spacious spa. Lucas now has a hat store and two apparel shops, and there are swimwear and lingerie shops as well as one survivor of the old Napanee, a traditional jewellery store. Beyond fashion and beauty outlets, a fine food shop has also opened, and there are new restaurants and a rash of renovated downtown apartments.

Once desolate, Dundas Street is currently a lively scene, luring shoppers like Diane Richardson from Kingston, 40 minutes to the east. She comes at least once a month, taking swings through Starlet and a couple of dress shops. Buttressed by its location near Prince Edward County, the wine-and-food hot spot, Napanee has become a favourite destination for girls’-day-out excursions.

Bucking modern shopping trends, its turnaround is built on consumers who still relish the exercise of trying things on, aided by attentive salespeople. But can in-store fashion survive the onslaught of online shopping? The Monsters continue to build their Web presence, but remain convinced that fashion buying remains an experience, not just a transaction – and they’re betting on the idea that women will still drive 40 minutes to get the feeling that they are, well, starlets.