FASHION Magazine

See Luminato opening party photos »

On Friday night, Toronto’s arts elite flooded the sprawling canopied lobby of Brookfield Place for the opening of the Luminato arts festival. The event was activity-stacked, with Yves Saint Laurent handing out engraved Touche Eclat pens and branded cigars and a gigantic claw arcade machine in the centre of the room. The machine, entitled Stockpile, is actually one big performance art piece, with the part of the claw being acted out by nine different artists and the curious items in the cage being donated by the community. Naturally.

Fresh off the debut performance of The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic, Marina Abramović and Willem Dafoe joined in on the festivities alongside Luminato creative director Jörn Weisbrodt and husband Rufus Wainwright, who wore a custom made Jean-Charles de Castelbajac cloud-print suit. Elsewhere, Knot PR’s Amy Burtsyn-Fritz was making her own festive statement in a shimmering 3.1 Phillip Lim cocktail dress alongside freshly minted husband, Graham Smith.

See The Room’s Viktor & Rolf party photos »

Viktor & Rolf’s love affair with Toronto began last night with a fittingly springy fête at Toronto’s Hudson’s Bay Queen Street flagship. In town to celebrate their recent collections as well as to do press spots for their upcoming Dolls retrospective exhibit with Luminato this summer, designers Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren sported matching embroidered jeans (Horsting’s featured sunglasses while Snoeren’s featured moustaches) and matching thick rimmed frames, making them the ideal models for Toronto’s new eyewear-specific blog, The Spectacled.

In keeping with the Dutch duo’s eccentricities, The Room was transformed with newly papered walls featuring the Fall 2013 runway room’s eerie black and white floral print, a string quartet playing instrumental takes on pop music and strapping waiters, who passed many a prettily-decorated Perrier-Jouët champagne flute while wearing V&R-esque (and maybe even a little Denis Gagnon) glasses.

See all the party pictures from the Canadian Stage Theatre Ball! »

Based on an informal poll of FASHION’s online department, an event that allows you multiple chances to talk with Jason Priestley is the best event of all. Such was the case at last week’s Canadian Stage Theatre Ball, which celebrated 25 years of the company—a company that just happens to include Priestley in its forthcoming season. The gala event was more cabaret than fundraiser, with Canadian Stage performers singing hits from classic productions as partygoers found their seats for dinner. As an oversized birthday cake was wheeled on stage, Hair’s “Let the Sunshine In” echoed throughout The Carlu. (Though to the dismay of this attendee, no naked hippies jumped out.) “Every time they say CanStage we have to drink!” shouted one guest at the Corus Entertainment table during host Seamus O’Regan’s opening remarks of the evening—and the energy stayed just as palpable until the last guests shuffled off the well-used dance floor at the end of the night.

See the photos from RAFF’s opening night »

As it’s getting to be in Toronto, there are so many festivals, exhibits, parties and things to see, that you can’t very well see ‘em all. And while we once would have lamented over the lack of such a problem, we’ve got it now for better or for worse. In order for a working art mind to grow, you have to work hard not to let any potentially mind-opening experiences fall through the cracks, and that’s why despite the weather, I dragged myself out into the cold on Wednesday night for the opening of the Real Artists Film Festival (RAFF) held at the TIFF Lightbox. In its 10^th year, RAFF brings some of the best art-related documentaries to the city, this year launching with an excerpted version of Megumi Sasaki’s Herb & Dorothy 50×50, the follow-up to the 2008 original, Herb & Dorothy. The original tells the story of Herbert and Dorothy Vogel, the postman and librarian also known as the “proletarian art collectors,” who amassed a collection of almost 5,000 works of contemporary art in their one bedroom Manhattan apartment. Collecting only what they liked, could carry home on the subway and could afford (while living solely on Dorothy’s income and using Herb’s for art), the Vogels amassed one of the biggest collection of post-1960s minimal and conceptual art in the world which includes such lauded artists as Sol LeWitt, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, John Chamberlain, Chuck Close, Mark Kostabi and Charles Clough.

See the full gallery of Operanation party pictures »

Last Thursday opera lovers, patrons of the arts and faces who frequent Toronto’s party circuit came together to support the Canadian Opera Company for Operanation 9: Sweet Revenge. Attendees reflected the event’s theme of high-brow-opera-meets-pop-culture-concert well: Women in floor-length evening gowns navigated the many staircases of the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts with ease—proving there’s no architectural challenge a mermaid dress can’t master—while others used the Centre’s sprawling steps as seating throughout the night.

Actress Gabrille Miller looked stunning in a peplum’d dress from Lucian Matis Fall 2012 while Nelly Furtado had two costume changes throughout the night, starting with a gown by Denis Gagnon and later switching into a Holy Tee dress. On the third floor a group of Argo players attracted many eligible ladies—perhaps the popularity of The Bachelor Canada has given the CFL a new social standing?

View FASHION’s 35th anniversary party photos »
Check out our archive of every FASHION cover since 1977 »

What’s better than a birthday party? Your own birthday party! On Wednesday night, the FASHION team (well, that’d be us) celebrated the magazine’s 35^th anniversary, and as you might expect, Toronto’s most stylish guys and gals were out in full force. 700 of our closest friends packed into the Distillery’s Fermenting Cellar to toast us with Skyy Vodka cocktails, mini burgers and musical performances by Divine Brown and The Parallels.

View the party photos »

The National Ballet of Canada must be feeling quite royal this year because it’s celebrating a diamond anniversary (that being 60 years) of pliés, and toasted as such at last night’s glittering Diamond Gala. The special edition of the company’s annual Mad Hot gala featured five performance works, including premieres of two spellbinding works, Polar Night (choreographed by Robert Binet and danced by real-life couple Heather Ogden and Guillaume Côté) and Silence Screams Venom (choreographed by Côté and danced by Greta Hodgkinson alongside Giorgio Galli, Keiichi Hirano, Patrick Lavoie and Christopher Stalzer) and finishing off with the most glittering of all: an excerpt from George Balanchine’s Diamonds, complete with the entire company decked out in jewel-encrusted costumes.

After the performances, the full house, including the ballet’s artistic director Karen Kain, Rufus Wainwright and Jorn Weisbrödt and the fabulously feathered Lynda Prince (who was overheard giving Kain posing directions) mingled all around the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. The designer-clad doyennes, Victoria Webster, Trinity Jackman, Cleophee Eaton and Amy Burstyn-Fritz, made Katrantzou/Erdem/McQueen sightings seem as simple as it could be with vodka cocktails and rock candy stir sticks in hand.

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Lauded as the hottest art party of the year, the Power Plant’s annual Power Ball fundraiser certainly lived up to expectations last night. Complete with wall-projected animations, Kobos hanging on trees, an old fashioned swing and a pre-party hosted by the much-hyped Soho House, almost 2,000 partygoers danced into the wee hours while carving off pieces of Marc Thuet’s bison on a spit. Some of our favourite duos—The Society’s Ashleigh Dempster and Amanda Blakely, designer Philip Sparks and NOW’s Andrew Sardone, Knot PR’s Amy Burstyn-Fritz and Tatiana Read, designer Jeremy Laing and Frank Griggs, and eTalk’s Tanya Kim and CP24’s Melissa Grelo—flitted around the scene. There was a mock television talk show (which we took part in) with a dancing robot sharing hosting duties. There was a performance by Dragonette. There were ladies dressed as sailors and men dressed as women. There were, always, many types of cocktails a-flowing (shout-out to Grey Goose, who created a timely Diamond Jubilee mix at the pre-party). Surely, more highlights will come to us throughout the day, but we can’t be asked to recount them all, given how late we were up.

View the party photos »

The 6th annual Luminato festival kicked off with major buzz on Friday night, as word spread through the opening night party that Nelly Furtado had joined K’Naan at his free concert at David Pecaut Square.

The swishy event at 25 York St. had its own surprises. Martha Wainwright jumped onstage for a sultry take on “Stormy Weather,” and spin duties were handled by Koala Kid (who must have ended the evening a few pounds lighter after sweltering in his faux fur koala costume). Yves Saint Laurent hosted the party, offering makeup touch-ups, samples of Opium and the new L’Homme Libre fragrances and the opportunity to write messages on an iPad that were then projected on a wall.

View the photo gallery »

Last night, the sister duo behind one of fashion’s darling labels, Rodarte, descended upon Toronto for a fête in their honour at the Bay’s glittering designer den, The Room. As the finest champagne flowed, the city’s finest, freshly sunned partygoers crowded around Laura and Kate Mulleavy to get a look—albeit a look-but-don’t-touch. “You can’t just sidle up beside them and say, ‘I love you,’” one guest lamented. And isn’t it strange but true? The moment one of your idols is presented on a platter, the nerves tend to overcome. Such wasn’t the case, however, for Toronto’s version of the sister power duo, Chloé and Parris Gordon of Chloé Comme Parris, who got in there to articulate their crush. (I was afforded a private one-on-two with the designers earlier in the day, the gush-laden results of which are forthcoming).

Today we’re going inside the bag belonging to our favourite marketing/public relations/art world gal about town, Amy Burstyn-Fritz. Known for her killer wardrobe (“Oh this? It’s Katrantzou”), and her ability to be the life of the party—even at 10 a.m. (“Are you going to finish that?”), Burstyn is equally awesome on all accounts. Her linen Yves Saint Laurent Muse bag is equally awesome. So without further ado, let’s check it out!

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