On Tuesday night at Scotiabank Arena ahead of Game 4 of the Eastern Conference final, Drake received a bespoke, diamond-encrusted sports jacket worth an estimated $769,000.Each year for the past four years, MLSE has gifted the Toronto Raptors’ ambassador with a custom jacket, lined with a Raptors jersey. The stakes have been raised significantly for the 2019 version, after the association between the Raptors and the rapper deepened with the renaming of the club’s practice space as the OVO Athletic Centre this past March.The team pulled out all the decadent stops, with 235 diamonds hand-embroidered into the shape of the OVO owl on the right side of the custom jacket, balanced out by a 1.2 carat diamond pin on the left peaked lapel.The diamond Drake jacket has been a year and a half in the making. Michael Nguyen, owner of Toronto’s Garrison Bespoke, knew he wanted to source something special, and it took him nearly that long to persuade the family owners of the French mill Dormeuil to sell him a special piece of fabric from the archives, dating back to 1927. The fabric is a very rare example of original “jersey” cloth, and it is super-soft but structured. Nguyen has his own family connection to the mill, as his grandfather worked for them in Vietnam. “This is truly a 1 of 1 piece,” says Nguyen. “Both the jersey inside, which Drake himself helped design, and this very special piece of cloth. And the diamonds, of course.”The Star was on hand to document the process of setting the diamonds onto the cloth last Friday. The diamonds are themselves special, having been flown in from Diamond Foundry, the world’s first and only certified carbon neutral producer. That means the diamonds have been grown in a lab (Diamond Foundry labs are based in California and Washington), so there is no human or environmental toll. They are grown in the rough and then cut and polished, and are chemically identical to the “re ...
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