Sneaking her high-heeled snakeskin pumps gingerly under construction tape, Robin Kay, president of the Fashion Design Council of Canada, leaves behind an office full of people pushing their priorities, loudly, to dash out for a bowl of soup.
Kay's a new convert to the BlackBerry, and her gizmo is on fire. In the 20-minute soup break, she has a half-dozen feverish conversations – and her team of four staffers seeks her out in person to deal with the problems popping up on their BlackBerrys. Her bowl still half-full, Kay leads a tour of the FDCC offices, in the middle of the high-energy construction zone at the new Liberty Market building in Liberty Village, which is being transformed from a starving-artist repository to a lofty, clubby ‘hood.
Kay settles in at her desk, located at the back of the open-concept room, as fancy chocolates and flowers arrive for her simultaneously. She stops to scratch her two small dogs, who are cuddled in their bed in the corner. Master and canines all seem oblivious to the melee around them.
“This is it. This is what we've been working for. All those years, all those naysayers. A dozen heart-stopping crises a day,” she says, flourishing the plans for the L'Oréal Fashion Week tents, gleaming white temporary structures that will stand in the centre of Nathan Phillips Square (the spring/summer 2008 runway shows begin on Monday). The tents follow the model of the Bryant Park shows in New York and the London shows, which take place at the Natural History Museum, not far from Harrods and Harvey Nichols.
“We could be more smack dab in the centre of the city, but we'd have to be showing fashion in a dirigible,” she says with a laugh.
It is a big year for Toronto's fashion week, and not just because of the tents. For the first time, the FDCC has bet heavily on promotion, putting out 2.8 million promo pieces on the industry's top talents in periodicals such as Vogue and Vanity Fair, reaching eyes south of the border. Besides allowing the FDCC to use Nathan Phillips Square, the city has contributed a small amount of money and extended bar hours at hot spots around town. The new crop of boutique hotels will host designer after-parties.
The more commercial players (such as Roots) will participate in on-site installations, and the show for Joe Fresh, the hit grocery-store line, precedes the hush-hush Project Runway Canada finale to be filmed Monday night. Once again, seats for select shows will be reserved for the public.
“Like Pride Week and Canadian Music Week, fashion week has become an event beyond the industry. People are excited about fashion. People who never knew my name now know my name,” Toronto designer Joeffer Caoc says.
The turnaround started 14 (biannual) seasons ago as Kay's lonely effort to pick up the industry from the ashes (literally: fashion had depended heavily on cigarette sponsorship before the smoking ban). There was a lot of fracture and distrust among designers who were burned both by sporadic funding and a bad rash of unpaid bills by stores.
Kay, a former designer, created the FDCC in 1999 in an attempt to unify the industry and create a show system. Initially, there was an effort to make the shows national (hence the “of Canada” in the name). But just as shows have spun off from New York (Los Angeles's fashion week is growing vibrantly; Miami is the centre of swimwear runways), both Montreal and Vancouver have their own fashion weeks. Actually, Vancouver has two, because of inter-scene squabbling.
Yes, all the movies and TV shows are not far from the truth: The fashion industry is a hissy snakepit. Kay, herself, is a lightning rod: a woman who minces no words and does not hesitate to mince anyone in her path. But she has wrestled a splintered industry into a single show calendar under a title sponsor (which has been L'Oréal for the past four seasons) with buyers from across the country and more than 200 accredited media attendees (nearly all the major fashion talents are now on board, along with a significant roster of up-and-comers).
This past week, a nasty anonymous petition and blog made the rounds of the industry in an e-mail frenzy. Mainly a personal attack on Kay and filled with misquotes and slander, the protesters, claiming to speak on behalf of the fashion industry but refusing to reveal their identities, succeeded only in causing one day of fuss. Basically, Kay suffered a barrage of tiresome phone calls while simultaneously trying to smile through a Hello! Canada photo shoot.
