FASHION Magazine

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“Just when you thought you had everything, along comes a camouflage mink stole,” drawled Michael Kors, as a model glided into Holt Renfrew’s café in an outfit from his Fall 2013 collection.

The mini-show followed lunch for 20 or so top clients at Holt’s Cafe yesterday following a fête at his Bloor Street store on Wednesday night, with hostess Hilary Weston presiding over the affair in an aqua Oscar de la Renta tunic and pants.

Elsewhere there was much Michael Kors Spring 2013 about, including a dermatologist in a colourblock dress, and a capital markets trader a peony pink sheath. After tucking into sweet pea ravioli, lobster over fried green tomatoes and a sliver of cheesecake, there was an exodus downstairs to the racks of fall clothes available for special order.

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 39 street style photos from New York Fashion Week »

Chanel’s hula hoop bag! Anna Dello Russo in head-to-toe Prada! A post-Rodarte psychedelic ombré! Boy, are there ever some treasures to behold in today’s batch of street style photos out of New York Fashion Week. All that realness we talked about on Friday seems to have poof! melted with the snow—fashion’s show ponies are truly working for their place in the Fall 2013 spotlight.

While capturing the latest from street style regulars Susie Bubble, Miroslava Duma, Man Repeller Leandra Medine and Shala Monroque ducking in and out of It ticket shows including Rodarte, Narciso Rodriguez and Kate Middleton-favourite Jenny Packham, a few old favourites made their return to our the Fall 2013 radar. Case in point: the newly blond Ulyana Sergeenko, who with regal walker in tow, looked every bit as poster princess for Moscow’s matryoshka doll society as ever. Oh, to be a pore on that skin.

Jeanne Beker averages one fashion fundraiser a week (that’s a lot), and tomorrow, she will take her place as the host of Zareinu’s ninth annual fashion show for “one of the most inspiring things that I get to do every year”.

The fundraiser benefits the Zareinu Educational Centre—a treatment centre for children with disabilities ranging from cerebral palsy to down syndrome and other developmental challenges—and don’t expect a dry eye to be in the room. According to Canadian fashion icon, Jeanne Beker, “When you see the kids from the school walk out on that runway—I can’t tell you what it does to you. Your heart swells with so much joy and inspiration and these kids are real fighters.”

This year’s event features the resort collection from international luxury brand, Escada. It’s the first time the collection will be shown in Canada, and alongside the high fashion designs will as many as 30 children from the Zareinu Educational Centre walking the runway in Gap Kids with therapists and teachers from the centre.

The fashion industry just got a set of mini mes all thanks to The Coveteur. The re-launch of the site started by Torontonians Erin Kleinberg and Stephanie Mark is kicked off by a video starring child actors as Taylor Tomasi Hill, Kimye, Leandra Medina aka Man Repeller, Rachel Zoe and many, many more.

The self-proclaimed party of the year was DJed by Leigh Lezark and had the Courtin-Clarins girls looking disinterested on their cellphones and wearing designers from Altuzarra to Osh Kosh. As per real life, mini Anna Dello Russo stole the show yelling, “everything is fashion, darling” to a regular sized Jeanne Beker who just so happened to be working the carpet.

Fashion Television (RIP) was ahead of its time in several ways, and here is one of them: In 1985, when executive producer Jay Levine launched the program, he imagined it might become a channel for short narrative videos about clothing. Fashion films, now so inescapable a phenomenon, were then just a thought without a name: if music videos could revolutionize the way we consume pop, couldn’t a little cinematography do the same for clothing? The ’70s had seen then-living legends Guy Bourdin and Richard Avedon experiment with the moving image, and as film-recording cameras became less expensive, it seemed likely they’d land in the hands of younger, emerging lensmen. As MTV was to music videos, so might Fashion Television be to this new mode of image-making.

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The tutus were out in full force for the official opening of the National Ballet of Canada’s twofold exhibitions celebrating the company’s first 60 years. 60 Years of Designing the Ballet and the Tutu Project debuted with a glitzy reveal at Toronto’s Design Exchange, with everyone from the ballet’s own dancers like Greta Hodgkinson, Tina Pereira and former prima ballerina Victoria Tennant to Jeanne Beker and Vawk’s Sunny Fong raising a glass in toast. The first exhibit, a look back at some of the most notable costumes and sets curated by the company’s former costume designer Caroline O’Brien, came complete with ultra-lifelike dessert tables and a magical blue sleigh from The Nutcracker and several costumes for the wishful dancers to try on and pose with (we indulged, obviously). The second, an assembly of 60 specially designed tutus—one to celebrate each year in business—was displayed throughout the room. Guests seemed to take their toast quite literally, with Kara Alloway in a voluminous Mary Katrantzou lampshade skirt, Karolyne Ellacott in an actual tutu dress and several other attendees sporting pulled-back ballet topknots.

“It’s a blessing and a curse,” Sky Ferreira opines about the conflicting aspects of her sound, a duality in tastes that has seen her through gritty Debbie Harry–esque melodies to raw Jon Brion–produced ballads. The 19-year-old singer is a bit of a dichotomy herself: she will unabashedly profess her adoration for Britney Spears in the same breath as her love for David Bowie, and makes no apologies for being tricky to label.

Last night, Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum opened its latest exhibit, a retrospective of Parisian shoe designer Roger Vivier, with a glittering fête complete with champagne flutes and many a pilgrim buckle. The exhibit follows the designer’s career from his couture-style creations for Christian Dior in the 1950s to his legendary pilgrim-buckle flats made famous by the likes of Catherine Deneuve in the swinging ‘60s and beyond. Italian-born designer Bruno Frisoni, who helms the label in the present day, was there to toast to the exhibit, alongside our editor-in-chief Bernadette Morra (donning—what else?—pilgrim-buckled silver flats), Alexandra Weston, Jeanne Beker, Marilyn Denis and the museum’s grand dame, Sonja Bata, whose star shone brighter than ever with her lively opening remarks.

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After 27 years of bringing some of the best/most vibrant/most in-your-face/most decadent fashion show, news and creative coverage to television sets across the country, Jeanne Beker announced this morning via Twitter that Fashion Television has ceased production. We’re having a McQueen moment. Can this be? After tweeting about its demise, Beker followed up with: “But […]

The post The end of an era: Jeanne Beker announces Fashion Television’s final days appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

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Looks like everybody was thinking the same thing when they got dressed for the shows yesterday, as Toronto’s finest stepped out in some of the juiciest brights we’ve seen all season! (And by season, we mean the unseasonably warm few days we’ve been having). There was tons o’ tangerine and even pastel It bags, from Céline to Prada and beyond! Take a look at our best shots and get inspired to brighten it up yourself.

It’s not every day that you get to play host to a living, breathing masterpiece! The Canadian Art Foundation was lucky enough to showcase Yugoslavian performance artist Marina Abramovic, who was in Toronto for the Canadian premiere of The Artist is Present at the Reel Artists Film Festival. The new documentary film chronicles her prolific and often painful career and follows the preparation for her 2010 retrospective show at the MoMA—she spent more than 700 hours over the course of three months staring into the eyes of museum visitors. Beyond her lifelong love affair with performance art, Abramovic is a designer devotee (having discovered fashion after a particularly nasty breakup); in the film, she’s shown shopping at Givenchy with none other than Riccardo Tisci. It’s no surprise then that the 65-year-old wore head-to-toe Costume National to the premiere, or that she counts Fashion Television’s Jeanne Beker as a fan. At the a swank soiree, held at the TIFF Bell Lightbox and bookended by not one but two cocktail parties, we spotted a smattering of guests from Canada’s creative set including Luminato’s Jörn Weisbrodt (who also made an appearance in the film), the Beckerman clan, and gallery owner Daniel Faria.

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