image: factorydarling.blogspot.com
Muah: the sound of a double kiss. I’ve been counting, and this one is number 23. I’m not good at it, and I usually stop after one, hoping I won’t have to migrate to the second cheek. “Your beard is really soft,” says a person I’m basically sucking face with. I’ve been counting, and I’ve now heard this for the twelfth time. (I condition.) A fashion week conversation can last for all of 10 seconds, and depending on how locally famous the person is, it could be much shorter. The objectives are simple: artifice and survival. The more people who want to graze your face, the more relevant you are. It just makes me sick. No, seriously, I now have the beginnings of a cold.
Toronto Fashion Week is fairly medieval. Consumers and media pay tithes to the ruler (they purchase consumer or media passes at personal expense in exchange for strips of land/seats), the upper-middle class get pardons (they are guests and friends of the designer) and the elite reign, occupying the front row. (We don’t get Kanye, he was at Margiela for H&M.) But no one outside of the fashion world itself takes it so seriously. But since you’re wondering, here’s how seriously:
Stylist Linda Gaylard remarked disdainfully during the Mercedes Benz StartUp Competition, “Really? No surprise there.” She was commenting on the judges, nay, the personalities, responsible for choosing the winner: Fashion’s editor-in-chief Bernadette “is lesbian trending yet?” Morra, FashionTelevision’s Jeanne Beker and more. Is it jealousy? Sure, maybe. But it made me think about what makes up Toronto’s upper echelon as it exists right now.
For the ones we know well, it’s timing. Jeanne Beker and Bernadette Morra are old guard. They’ve been working for a while, so people know who they are, and they aren’t going anywhere, so deal with it. There aren’t many of those faces in Toronto, which is why we see them everywhere, all the time. So, if our fashion community is a network of personalities where the personalities get work, I agree, sort of, with Gaylard’s reaction, but for different reasons.
If Toronto is in fact going to be a competitive city in the fashion sphere, there needs to be less navel gazing boosterism, and more true voices. Trill voices, even. Cold fish sponsorship and peppy enthusiasm (about everything) is the current mode (with few exceptions). But it needs to stop, or become more balanced. As the Globe’s Tiyana Grulovic says, “We’re positive because it’s about supporting the industry here. If you don’t like it, don’t write [something positive] about it.”
But there’s a new breed of front row fixture that doesn’t quite bode well: the corporate buy. Samsung, MasterCard and a number of other sponsors have hired personalities as a means to buy tweets and collect hashtags, and it’s the quickest way for people with Twitter or a not-so-fashion-savvy blog to feel like they’re an editor, or a buyer, or a socialite who actually pays money for her clothes. Does it work for them? I don’t know. Is it diluting the discourse? Absolutely.
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Kevin Naulls is a Toronto-based writer and former editor of The Goods and The Hype at Torontolife.com. Follow him on Twitter @kevinjn.
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