On the stark white walls of Gastown's mooncruise gallery hangs one of photo-artist Jean-Frédéric Bourdier's abstracted urban landscapes: an ethereal detail of a swimming pool's modernist tiles. Below it, displayed on a white shelf, sits a single shoe: a sky-blue patent-leather clog by Sweden's Skåre Toffelin. Both are treated like fine art, and that's the point. Vancouver's newest boutiques are doubling as exhibit spaces, and they're curating the apparel as much as the framed pictures.

Gastown and Main Street's style hubs are seeing a small explosion of the gallery/fashion fusions that have thrived in the cooler neighbourhoods of New York and Europe for years. Dadabase and its attached Xeno Gallery (183 East Broadway) was one of the early entries on the scene; now stores like mooncruise gallery (235 Cambie Street), Urbanity (207 Abbott Street), and Lark (152 East 8th Avenue) are putting their own spin on the concept. In each case, the clothing and the art combine to reflect a look and a lifestyle.

"I'm very careful about what fits together. It has to match the store," explains Claudia Schulz, who recently opened mooncruise with her partner in life and business, photographer Trevor Brady. She says customers seem to appreciate the editing that goes into the sparse collection she showcases in an expansive second-floor heritage studio. "Sometimes stores are too overcrowded. Here it's very uncluttered, and you can focus on a piece," she enthuses, leaning on a space-agey white counter.

The boutique's genesis as an art gallery-cum-clothing and gift store seems natural enough, considering it actually grew out of the couple's on-line photo-art zine, also called mooncruise. But the idea of melding functions also emerged from their frequent travels to Schulz's home city of Berlin, where many stores multitask.

She adds that, on the practical side, the boutique helps make exhibiting art more financially feasible: "It may be just out of necessity: it would be hard to live off just the photo-gallery part."

Bourdier's dreamy shots, from the gleaming-metal details of patio chairs to repeating grocery-store rows of Evian bottles, seem custom-made to pick up on the lines and colours of many of the apparel items. Mooncruise's Vancouver contingent includes Chulo Pony's tiered screen-print skirts; Hunt and Gather's scalloped denim aprons, sleek jumpers, and holster-style purses; and Schulz's own line of felt creations, from whimsical hats with earflaps to necklaces strung with fuzzy balls. From abroad, there are Hey-Sign felt bags, boxes, notebooks, and photo albums in vibrant fashion hues; clothing by Moscow's art point, with cigarette skirts, blouses, and other pieces set off by silk-screen prints of the Russian alphabet; and German Kultbag totes made from recycled tarps, seat belting, or Bundeswehr blanketing.

And then, of course, there are those clogs, which also come in lipstick red and bright, leafy green. For Schulz, they hit the right balance of ultramodern Euro style and the timeless good design she so values: "I grew up with clogs. A pair of clogs is fashion that will never die out."

Across town, on a hip little block of 8th Avenue off Main Street, the folks at Lark had no intention of ever hanging art in their clothing store. "We thought maintaining a show every month was a lot of work and with starting a new business we had enough on our hands," explains Veronika Baspaly, who runs the six-month-old shop with her husband, Dane.

But the artwork just seemed a natural fit-or perhaps the ghost of the old building was just imposing itself; the address, as it turns out, used to be a gallery. The Baspalys, who sell lifestyle items other than clothes (including bocce sets), decided to carry Sketchbook, a new anthology of illo art by people in the local gaming industry. To promote it, they organized an opening exhibit and suddenly realized hanging pieces on their walls wasn't the hassle they'd expected.

After all, the men's and women's clothing in the shop is all artful-cool without being contrived, unique and crisply simple. Here, too, the mix is sourced locally and abroad. The sleek Danish men's line Kudo hangs alongside sculptural, serene women's clothes by Vancouver's Kulpa; funky underwear by this city's Ginch Gonch joins recycled-skateboard bags and belt buckles by New York's Beck(y). "For us it doesn't matter where it's from; it just has to be good. I don't see why local brands can't compete with international brands," Baspaly says. She feels the art reflects the same criteria: the animation sketches by the Sketchbook guys at first seem to have little in common with the next show, opening in September, of photos by Angela Fama. "The quality of the work is really important and we look for things that are really clean in line and shape," she says.

In the end, everyone wins with the gallery/store combo: artists gain an audience, fashionistas gain an aesthetic appreciation, and Vancouver becomes a more cosmopolitan place.