Toronto Fashion Week, as we know it, is a 10-year-old phenomenon: the white-tent pageantry of catwalk models and front-row seating, of drunken runway speeches and after-after-party scheduling. It’s a spectacle reproduced in real time on an outdoor screen, searchable online with 140-character status updates (see “Live from the runway,” page 21) and consumed in posted-then-printed runway shots and reviews.
But what came before this ready-to-watch incarnation? Rewind the VCR for a “you had to be there” history and you’ll see a stark white runway with models strutting seven at a time, clad in Wayne Clark sequins, Alfred Sung preppy chic and Comrags’ austere hip. Back when Spadina had a garment industry, the Festival of Canadian Fashion packaged homegrown ’80s excess and optimism.
“It was a runway that every designer dreamt of having,” reminisces fashion designer/Project Runway Canada mentor Brian Bailey. “It was an audience that instead of being 500 to 600 people, suddenly became 5,000 to 7,000 people.”
In 1985, Torontonians were told to “come for the fashion, stay for the show” at the brand-new Metro Convention Centre. The Festival was a five-day, multi-tiered trade show behemoth. Illustration and photography exhibits! Awards and galas!
Five years later, designers still weren’t seeing buyers in their booths and the attempt to mix wholesale with the general public ended with the recession and free trade. What remains now is the back-row fantasy of the Festival’s shows.
“The runway — oh my god, it was huge. It was 10 feet off the ground, about 25 feet wide and extended forever,” says Comrags’ Joyce Gunhouse. “[But] it was hard to imagine, even at this point in time, that you could fill that space with [Canadian] fashion. Even with all that money back then.”
When Paris just had its invite-only salons and New York its embattled lofts, the Festival of Canadian Fashion forecasted our 10-year-old Fashion Week brand. So why don’t we remember it?
Before 1985, Toronto’s fashion shows were private affairs. You were either invited for champagne and Wayne Clark cocktail wear at the Renaissance condo near Avenue and Bloor, or hung out with the local Blitz Kids at the Voodoo Club and saw the Comrags collection at midnight. The Wayne Clark events were Steven Levy’s introduction to Toronto fashion, thanks to his friend and veteran fashion designer Linda Lundström.
At the time, Levy — a former Montreal social worker who founded The Canadian Craft Show (now known as the One of a Kind Show) — didn’t understand why the fashion was so exclusive. He thought it should be democratized.
“He was looking at the sociological aspects of this thing called fashion,” remembers Lundström. “This wasn’t just about the clothing — it was a form of entertainment, it was a circus.”
The businessman started going to more shows and reading Lundström’s old Women’s Wear Daily issues a little more closely, recognizing a burgeoning trade industry needing a platform to reach consumers.
“To look at New York and say, ‘Well, I’m going to go now and put tents up somewhere and have a Fashion Week called the Festival of Canadian Fashion’ — I didn’t want that, because I didn’t think it would work,” says Levy, who recognized the growing trend towards vertically integrated businesses.
Levy didn’t know fashion, but he knew how to sell it: he secured sponsorship from Holt Renfrew, Citytv, the Toronto Star and Toronto Life, and hired creative director Peter Laurence to oversee the first round of 24 shows, which attracted an opening night crowd of 3,000. (Footage from the Festival’s shows would screen on early episodes of Citytv’s Fashion Television.)
In 1986, former high-fashion model Sam Turkis and then-fashion-show producer Philip Ing took over directing duties. Ing would be responsible for handling the M*A*C show, a new designer showcase.
At the time, M*A*C was a small makeup company operating from a third-floor Carlton Street apartment. As an early sponsor, much of M*A*C’s initial exposure came through the Festival. And, in turn, many of the Festival’s models, designers and makeup artists participated in the first Fashion Cares in 1987. (Ing is now the brand’s vice-president for international special and retail events and has continued to be a force behind Fashion Cares.) Indeed, it was the crowd backstage — local hair stylists, photographers and makeup artists — that made the Festival an outlet for underground talent.
This fresh atmosphere created genuinely experimental “mixed media” shows. You had contemporary dancer Louise Lecavalier — “so edged out with her flying white bleached-blond hair,” marvels Ing — surrounded by male and female models in cod pieces, and Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet backing up a Bent Boys show.
But there was the issue of quantity over quality; another typical runway “show” was a woman demonstrating silk scarf tying techniques, sponsored by the Albertan government. The balance between customer and industry needs was precarious; with the Festival focused largely on promotion rather than sales, visiting buyers lacked access to the designers. An American buyer asked a Women’s Wear Daily reporter at the time, “Why are they spending all this money on booths when they can’t take orders?” At $6,000 a piece, the booths were expensive and it was difficult for the sponsorship to significantly subsidize that cost and a runway show.
The Festival created momentum in Canadian fashion. There was a significant 1988 showcase of designers for London’s posh West End Liberty department store, a symbol of international recognition. But the Festival itself was waning: low buyer traffic made designers question its sustainability. Free trade and the early ’90s recession added further stress, and fantasy got a dose of pragmatism.
The end came when Levy turned down a $25,000 Hugo Boss sponsorship and sold the Festival to the City of Toronto in order to establish a non-profit organization that would keep it Canadian. Despite a spectacular 1990 presentation — notable for a Hoax Couture silver ’60s-retro space-age runway show set to Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power” — a lack of clear-cut leadership and insider support triggered a $400,000 financial loss, and the Festival folded.
“I’ve seen it my entire career: every time something gets on its feet… it all falls apart because there’s all this negativity around it,” says fashion designer Wayne Clark. “People should have been kissing Steven Levy’s feet. There’s never been anything like that.”
Today, Fashion Week is a global spectacle. But New York, London, Milan and Paris leave many buyers and press exhausted; it doesn’t exactly endear Toronto as the necessary fifth week addition.
“I’m not sure [international] buyers come up to Canada,” admits veteran Holt Renfrew buyer Ruth-Ann Lockhart. It’s why Canadian talent like Toronto’s Jeremy Laing does New York and Manitoban knitwear designer Mark Fast does London.
“But I think it’s still important to continue Toronto Fashion Week,” continues Lockhart. “It’s more than just the designers — you have to keep elevating Canadian talent and supporting the next Coco Rocha.”
This season has seen LG Fashion Week enlist powerhouse agency Endeavour Marketing (who’ve handled marketing for the Stratford Festival and Luminato) to promote the event.
“I think the success of any business is a fine balance between finance, product timing and management,” reasons Fashion Design Council of Canada (FDCC) president Robin Kay.
The LG Fashion Week brand is a cultural spectacle with glossy ancillary promotions attached, like the Uniq Lifestyle Betsey Johnson “runway event” at the Brant House with big-name DJ Princess Superstar, showing pieces from the Spring 2009 collection.
“[The Festival of Canadian Fashion] spectacle has gone out of style, and the whole notion of that public ‘thing’ has never really successfully unfolded,” says veteran fashion journalist David Livingstone on why the Festival isn’t exactly recognized as a Fashion Week precursor. “[But] it broadened the embrace of the runway.”
That said, on-the-rise local labels like Greta Constantine and Philip Sparks — both of whom have shown in New York already — presented their fall collections a week before Fashion Week at the Courthouse and Burroughs Building, respectively.
“It ends up being a consumer event in Toronto,” says Sparks, who opted out because he wanted an intimate off-site presentation for buyers and clientele. “I think a lot of new designers misunderstand that, and think they can do a fashion show during Toronto Fashion Week and the orders are going to start rolling in. But even from a Canadian buying perspective, most people have closed books.”
Twenty-four years after the Festival began, the Canadian market remains small, with the understanding that national visibility hits a Project Runway Canada glass ceiling. The Festival gave us fashion for the masses, and now the tall white tent. (Never mind that the economic downturn has led to the cancellation of CBC’s Fashion File, or that rumours are swirling about Fashion Cares 2009 being cancelled as well — at press deadline, the organization had not yet made its decision public.) Whether or not the outsized spectacle is real, in fashion it’s the fantasy that gets us into the shops.
“Go big or go home,” sums up Levy, who has continued the trade-show model with the Interior Design Show and the Artist Project. “The public wants to be around big things.”