On the weekend I was treated to a Canadian stage adaptation of the book Love, Loss, and What I Wore
by Ilene Beckerman. The original book was a collection of memories and drawings by Beckerman, who was a grandmother, not a novelist, who just wanted to record something for her children and grandchildren, to give them a sense of who she was when she was young. Chick-lit novelists and screenwriters Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron expanded on the simple premise to create a stage play which is more like a reading, not only using Beckerman’s stories but a variety of stories from various characters.

The cast of accomplished actresses includes Canada’s formidable fairy godmother of fashion media, Jeanne Beker. Beker’s at the top of her game right now – writing books, designing clothes, and celebrating a 25 year run as the face and force of Fashion Television. I can only hope that at Beker’s age, I’ll have a fraction of the hotness she’s got – her career is on fire. As an actress, she’s amazing when she tones it down (as she tells a story of being a breast cancer survivor), though when she tones it up (as when she mimics a teenager) she gets very brassy. The stand-out story of the night was actress Sheila McCarthy’s rant against the burden of handbags, which I found relatable and hilarious. Sometimes it seemed like the humour was a bit old-fashioned, designed to appeal to moms and grandmas, but overall it was an entertaining evening and probably just the thing to bring your mom or your grandma to, if she doesn’t mind a bit of swearing.

In the play, the character who corresponds with Beckerman, played by Barbara Budd, even shows the audience how to draw a simple figure, encouraging them to record drawings of their own sartorial memories.  In the spirit of the play, I was inspired to sketch and remember a few things from my own brief history, though I had to stop at the point where love and loss really started to come into play. I’ll save that for when I’m much older. Its funny how so many of my early memories involve clothes, and often some kind of distress. Maybe its because distress is such a strong emotion, it sticks.

My Nana used to knit all of her grandchildren matching sweaters and hats.  I had a white sweater and a maroon coloured hat with a white pompom.  One of my very earliest memories is chewing the pompom off of this hat, and then feeling, with great intensity, regret. I didn’t know why I had done such a thing, and I couldn’t put the pompom back on.

One Christmas, my cousins came to visit, and we were all dressed up in our best clothes for pictures. My cousin Sarah, who is the same age as me, had a new white dress and white stockings and white shoes, and she looked so exquisite. I had a hand-me-down dress which was all different colours, I think the skirt was striped and the top was white with plaid trim, and I wore with it itchy, fuzzy red wool stockings which fell down with the crotch around my knees, and black shoes. I remember being photographed next to Sarah and feeling deep envy.

When I was around four years old, I remember dressing myself for the first time, by myself. Alone in my room, I tugged every item of clothing I owned out of the dresser, and put things on and took things off for what seemed like hours until I had successfully assembled an outfit, a pink top and a maroon-red pair of corduroy overalls. Feeling very proud, I ran downstairs to show my mom, and the first thing she said to me was that pink and red clashed. I had no idea what clashing meant and didn’t understand what I had done wrong. The funny thing about this story is that my Mom is anything but a fashion expert, quite the opposite, and what she said was just something she remembered her mom saying, and she remembers this story with a similar sort of bemusement for totally different reasons.

When I first went to school in the cold winter, my mom would put hat and mittens on me every morning. She put a little white hat on my head that tied under the chin. At school, a redheaded boy in the grade ahead of me told me it was a baby hat. I don’t think I had ever been insulted before in my life. It was massively distressing and affected me all year – not just with a total revulsion towards anything babyish or hats, but I remember actively avoiding this little boy, literally hiding from him, for the remainder of the school year, not that he would have noticed.

When I was in middle school, I realized I needed glasses when I had to copy notes from the boy who sat behind me. My first pair of glasses, which I chose, were large and round and unstylish, and by grade 8 I totally regretted my choice. Unable to get new glasses due to the expense, and not being devious enough to break them by “accident”, my response was to wear my hair over my head and wear a very floppy, suede hat overtop that almost totally obscured my entire face. I looked like Cousin It. I wanted to be invisible. I didn’t even want to take my hat off for the school formal dance at the end of the year, to the objection of my mom, who once again remembers saying something her mother would say: “you can’t go to town in that hat”.  For grade 9, I decided to homeschool, thus achieving total invisibility.

When I was in my early teens, flared pants became fashionable. Unfortunately, all of my pants were tapered, and terribly uncool. Since I was wholly unable to find any flared pants in the church thrift store, I looked through my parent’s old clothes and found my dad‘s wedding suit, made of corduroy, naturally. The pants were massively flared, and even though I was a tiny 90 pound girl and my dad was a 6 foot tall man, I wore these pants, using his old ties as a belt to keep them from falling down.  I wore these pants so constantly, I wore holes through the knees, and patched them, and then wore holes through the patches, until they were literally rags and my parents finally relented and gave me $80 (a price they found ridiculous for a pair of pants) to go buy a pair of flares from Jean Machine at the Quinte Mall.

Raver pants became the thing as I entered my mid teens, and again I couldn’t figure out a way to get them.  I remember seeing a copy of Seventeen Magazine, either at a friend’s house or somehow acquired, which had a teeny tiny little quarter-page feature in it about a teenaged girl who made her own DIY raver pants. I obsessed over this article (much like I did over these ones, later). She would achieve this by laying another pair of pants on a piece of fabric and tracing over them, but bigger. I thought I could do this, and the first clothes I ever made were a series of these pants using old fabric my Oma got from the Levi’s factory. They were horribly cut and sewn. I didn’t finish the hem or the waist, and I couldn’t figure out how to insert a zipper so instead I just made them too big so I could tie them on with a strip of selvage. I wore these pants all the time.

I was telling the stories in this post to my mom on the phone and we both shed a few tears and laughed a bit. She said how all of these stories reveal just how clueless she is when it comes to style. I think what they all have in common is how strongly I always felt that I was wearing the wrong things, and how little resources I had to do anything about it, and how this struggle, these intense feelings of distress, so completely defined the path I would choose for my life and my career. Now, at the age of 27, I am often filled with a inordinate sense of wholeness as I wear clothes that I love and feel comfortable and attractive in. I can never take this feeling for granted.

The coolest thing about Love, Loss and What I Wore, is that it is a meme. What items do you remember that defined a moment of your life? There’s something about this simple idea which is so irresistible.

Dermalogica sent an invitation for me and a “significant teen” to go rollerskating and learn a bit more about their new line for teens, Clean Start.

I invited the only teenager I know in town, Vanessa Faulkner.  Vanessa interviewed me for a school project last spring and is entering Fashion Communications at my old school, Ryerson, so I thought she might be into checking out a press event.  She gamely skipped out on orientation activities to come along, thanks Vanessa!  I asked Vanessa to contribute some thoughts – her comments are indented.

When we entered Scooters we were all given name tags and funky roller socks from American Apparel, and were then asked to take a photo with our ‘teen’ (which I guess would have been me). The place was decorated like a 60’s diner, with all sorts of fun, colourful decorations, and was filled with all sorts of Dermalogica products; face washes, moisturizers, masks and toners.  As soon as most people arrived we all sat down with our burgers and chicken fingers and snacked while listening to their presentation. I enjoyed the video presentation we watched, as although I found it corny at some parts, it was very cute, fun, and was a good video to market towards teens.

It was fun to be roller-buddies with blog friend Monica of Beauty Parler (who took the photo) and hang out with friend-of-a-friend and freelancer Felicia (on the right).

I had never rollerskated before, so obviously the first thing I did when stepping out onto the rink was fall down.  Ow. Vanessa says:

To my surprise roller-skating was a lot harder than it looked! At first we were all wobbling around, and for the first 5 minutes Danielle was clinging onto my arm for dear life.

Thanks for saving my life, Vanessa.  After a few I was able to wobble along on my own.

Soon enough we got the hang of it and by then Dermalogica had begun to organize fun games for us all to participate in, giving away Dermalogica products as prizes. They had us doing all sorts of things from the Macarena to the chicken dance, to musical chairs (and don’t forget this was all while on roller skates!).

I wasn’t about to start hopping around on wheels so I took some photos during the games and couldn’t resist making a GIF out of these two girls – they were so full of energy I couldn’t tear my eyes away from their impressive, and self-consciously beautiful, performance.

I think the girl on the left won a prize pack of the complete Clean Start collection.

Finally we were given our gift bags, thanked for coming, and were about to board the school bus to take us back to the city when they announced that there was one more surprise. Waiting outside for us all was an ice cream truck where we were each allowed a complimentary ice cream – any kind we wanted. It was a great way to end the day, however I couldn’t help but find it somewhat ironic that they were promoting a skin care product to help clear acne, while feeding us junk food all day long – one of the major causes for oily skin and breakouts. Overall I enjoyed participating in the event and it was a great learning experience for me.

I guess its in Dermalogica’s best interest to promote topical stuff rather than addressing the internal aspect of skin health – but it does seem a bit disingenuous for a company that emphasizes education.  The scooters experience was fun and teen-appropriate but considering it was such a gorgeous late summer day outside, maybe an opportunity for a slightly more wholesome event was missed? *had an idea in the comments.

So what about the products?  The packaging design is really clean and gender-neutral.  The products themselves are just as good as Dermalogica’s adult lines – quality botanical ingredients, fresh scents and nice textures – but with the added bonus of being delivered in a simplified way.  Personally, I would buy the Clean Start stuff for myself – I don’t think it will only appeal to teenagers, but also to people like me who are looking for a less fussy kind of skincare.

I’ve been experimenting with the samples all weekend – especially enjoying the welcome matte spf15 which is the least slippery and fastest absorbing face moisturizer I have ever used.  I also really liked the bedtime for breakouts “stealth treatment”.  My skin is not easy to please these days so it was really a delight to get to use such nice products.  What did Vanessa think?

I have yet to actually try out Dermalogica’s Clean Start samples I received in my gift bag, but I will be sure to do that soon, and I will update you all when I do!

Ok, we’ll follow up with her soon – I am pretty sure she is overwhelmed with her first few days of fashion school right now.

Thanks to Dermalogica Clean Start for treating us to such a fun day!

After listening to Derek McCormack criticize Valerie Steele’s Gothic: Dark Glamour in person at ILORI and then on Q, the radio show, I was prepared to tear apart his book, The Show that Smells, and avenge my fashion hero.  I am kidding.  He is a professional contrarion so it is his job to turn discussions into debates – and I am just a dilettante who likes talking about dresses.

Fact is, I am way too busy right now to be doing a review, plus its way to early to do The Late Review.  He has not even had his book launch yet – it is happening on October 2.  Yet I read it already despite myself.

Thanks to Nathalie Atkinson (who is enabling my fashion book habit these days), I had an advance copy of McCormack’s book in my hands at Louisa McCormack‘s launch event for her new book The Catch.  (That event is going to get its own post soon.)  I forgot to ask if the two authors are related.  They certainly are both clever characters with a talent for radio show-worthy repartee.

The Show that Smells is a lean little book which I was able to read on a couple slow trips on the Queen streetcar.   I do not know what genre it is.  It is like a Busby Berkeley dance routine of a book, full of palindromes, punctuation, and perfumery ephemera.

Whatever it is, I liked it.  This is flash for fashion nerds – all obscure jargon, fashion history factoids, and literary conceits telling an absurd, macabre carnival kitsch story.  Delightful.

Grace Mirabella’s memoir In and Out of Vogue came to me courtesy of Nathalie Atkinson. Have a book you would like to see on the late review? Lend me a copy and I will get to it eventually.

Mirabella was the Editor in Chief of American Vogue in the 1970s – sandwiched between icons Vreeland and Wintour, her own contributions are somewhat overshadowed in the modern memory. Yet it is exactly this transitional position which makes this memoir a fascinating read.

Mirabella’s experiences offer a sense of how a leading fashion magazine struggles to maintain its position. Editors come and go – sometimes you are in, sometimes you are out. The insider’s view on Vogue’s daily business in the 50′s, 60′s, and 70′s is fascinating. Beyond the changing attitudes and the editorial personalities, Mirabella also describes the daily tasks involved in producing a fashion magazine. With a retail garmento background, Mirabella’s unique take on Vogue comes from the perspective of a working woman who thinks of herself as straightforward and practical.

As a memoir it is clearly intended to satisfy Mirabella’s need to have her side of the story on the record. Hirings, firings, and rumours are rife in the world of magazines. While Mirabella does her best to justify her own decisions, in the end she seems less like a heroine than an ordinary woman.

Her two greatest positions both ended in a disappointing way – being fired from Vogue and then watching as her eponymous magazine slipped away from her original vision. Mirabella sometimes hesitates to trust her intuition – she adopts a “wait and see” attitude, and leans on others to make decisions. Eventually this unraveled her ambitions. That said, her great qualities are a strong vision of modern women, humility, a sense of caring and respect for her readers, and a healthy work ethic. Her story offers lessons for all women with careers – both what not to do, and what to do.

The Beautiful Fall. Amazing book! Anita just finished it and loved it, and she lent it to me. This was a page turner – I could not put it down.

The subject is two of the greatest designers of the past 50 years, Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld. These two contemporaries were friends and rivals, and the timeline of their struggles and successes juxtapose two very different men inhabiting the same scene.

As is customary with the late review, my review follows the reviews of many others. Susie Bubble found Saint Laurent easy to identify with, and percieved a bias against Lagerfeld. I don’t think that the book was particularly biased one way or another, if anything Drake takes great effort to show both the talents and torments of both men equally. They both have enormous talent and great legends, and Drake shows the reader a hint of the humanity they both try to hide.

Saint Laurent and Lagerfeld are both polarizing figures in fashion. Saint Laurent represents the intuitive and emotional – fire and water. Lagerfeld represents the intellect and ambition – air and earth. How you read The Beautiful Fall might say something about your own attitude towards fashion – in my case I finished the book identifying more closely with Lagerfeld.

Saint Laurent’s career could certainly be described as a Beautiful Fall… starting from the very top at the beginning of his career, and by the end he was burnt out. By contrast, Lagerfeld’s career built slowly, and his great accomplishments have been achieved in the last decade. Saint Laurent glorified the past; Lagerfeld rejects it.

The other aspect of the book I found fascinating was the scenario. So many great moments in fashion that still echo today were produced by small cliques of very influential, talented, and creative people. The characters are important. The parties are critical to understanding fashion’s ever-shifting focal point. They say it is who you know – it also seems that it is where you are, and your own innate ability to adapt to the zeitgeist that wins you a niche in history.

Have you read the book? Did it change your attitude towards the designers or reveal an insight on the nature of fashion? I’m up for a discussion if you feel like it.

I had the great luck to discover Louisa McCormack’s work in a roundabout way. I had recently discovered Auntie Fashion and of course was fascinated by her glamour and wanted to learn more. I googled around for recent interviews with Simon Doonan and discovered this one by McCormack.

However, when I asked Auntie Fashion if she was in fact Louisa McCormack, Auntie corrected me. She is Prunella Crudsworth, fashion’s most enduring muse. That was that.

I was still curious about McCormack… and my curiousity turned to fascination upon the discovery of her website. I love authors who blog, and Louisa’s Latest is both candid and clever.

This led me to her novel, Six Weeks to Toxic which I purchased new on Amazon.ca.

I liked the cover, which promised risky fashion. Is the girl in the pink tights and mules wearing what appears to be a laser cut ultrasuede skirt? Wow. The book itself was like nothing I’ve ever read. It is not Weisbergerish fashiony chick lit. Nor is it an Atwoodian Toronto fem-literary. McCormack describes it as “chick literary” but you can be sure that all references to Baudelaire fly over my fashion-schooled head.

The descriptions of the outfits, and the beauty products, that these women wear does hit home with me. Critics with literary pretensions may scoff, but I am the kind of reader for which the words “Happy and Herbal Essences” do in fact tell me exactly what kind of woman Bess Grover thinks she is.

The women in the novel are adventurous dressers. I wonder if the novel is a bit of a time capsule for 2001 – I can’t remember, was there really that much velvet being worn back then? I can’t help but think that Auntie Fashion would approve of all the outrageous outfits. McCormack and Auntie Fashion also share a penchant for the word “soupçon”. I had to look it up. It means “a dash” as in a very small amount. Again, McCormack and Auntie Fashion are not the same person. There is a whole continent of separation between their many coincidences.

I think my lack of experience being 30-something and single kept me from identifying with the characters too closely. All the banter – often witty – made it hard to extract the character’s real feelings from their ironic chatter… a lot like real life in the city I think. We all develop a superficial skin to survive socially and McCormack does a good job of showing that. It takes sensitivity to tone to read the increasing tension between the two leads… and it makes the ending seem very abrupt. Given the excruciating nature of best-friend-breakups, I would have found it satisfying to dig deeper into the character’s discomforts, beyond the dialogue.

Also, sex scenes. I have never read a book with so many detailed sex scenes – and deftly done. Also, Toronto. Yes its snowy streets do play a role in the story without being intrusive or exclusive.

The review? Six Weeks to Toxic is an enjoyable long-weekend read, and you will get extra kicks from it if you have lost a best friend, love your novels liberally peppered with fashion and sex, or have lived in Toronto.

Simon & Schuster slipped Lauren Weisberger’s Everyone Worth Knowing into the gift bags at Melinda-Mae Harlington‘s fashion show.

This book was amusing, but I did not find it satisfying. The story is not over the top enough to be camp or believable enough to identify with. The main character Bette drifts through the story without ambition or spunk. She is obviously wrong for PR from the beginning.

The author makes an effort to show a bit of the art of PR, but predictably, PR plays the villain. There are so many vivid characters and interesting conflicts in the world of public relations, I wish Weisberger had taken better advantage of the material.

P.S. The one really satisfying moment in this novel was the outing of an anonymous gossip blogger. :)

Toronto Alternative Fashion Week was intense and fascinating. Each night had a different theme and a vastly different vibe.

Daryl Banks took some terrific photos of the events and let me use a few of my favourites. See more pictures here.

The first night “Transitory Space” was kind of giddy.

Amie Scott gave us punny, punchy dresses that had the audience in stitches. Amie loved the laughter!

Naughty magpies strutted for Kirsty McKenzie, and there was some front row shenanigans going on too.

The models were gorgeous – all different and full of personality and easy vivacity – those girls you do double takes at when you see them on the streetcar. Girls like these ones.

The second night, “Urban Experiment” was super fun.

Babu et Moi (photo above left) brought rave to the runway and the audience to its feet – at the end everyone busted a move together.

Hipster peacocks strutted out of the pages of NOW Magazine.

Fellow Ryerson 06′er Rachel McGillivray showed an upbeat collection of kicky shorts and cropped jackets. Since I have not seen her since graduation, it was neat to see her grinning ear to ear when she took her bow.

The Deadly Nightshades movie was cute as hell and full of optimism and Jägermeister. Politics aside (thinking gives you wrinkles), the Nightshades bring something to fashion that is new and entertaining and I look forward to seeing where they pop up next.

Heidi Ackerman (photo below) took home the Beefeater award for a collection with a distinct point of view, full of designs that were desireable and somehow both rustic and luxurious at the same time.

Krane (below right) showed hard edged menswear with lots of zips which the front row loved.

The last day, “Conflict” was darker and finished the week off with a peculiar discord. Visual artist Katharine Piro (below left) was possessed as a zombie bride for Magdelina. The makeup was outrageous, amazing.

I loved the event overall and was left with a lot of strong impressions. Cheers to everyone who participated!

I just finished Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World. Subtitled “A Plant’s Eye View of the World”. Pollan shows how plants go out of their way to use animals to propogate their own species, suggesting that we are just another seed carrying dupe in the grand plan of plants… like corn. Pollan’s book was a powerful one, expressing perceptions I have not encountered before.

There has been some interesting discussion happening, about how fashion seems to be failing a little. Well, interesting to me, this is Final Fashion. Sitting here in Paper Denim and Cloth and American Apparel, I got an idea.

There is a cotton conspiracy. The profligation of denim and t-shirts is destroying the diversity of clothing around the world. This democratic fiber dresses almost everyone regardless of social class or location. And throughout history, cotton seems to have even convinced us to senselessly exploit our own species to reproduce its jeans.

Cotton gets foisted upon us in an ever-more continuous barrage – instead of two seasons, fast fashion gives us new variations on t-shirts and genes every week. The appearance of diversity is nothing more than an insistent flogging of the same thing. Like the way a flower goes out of its way to attract a hapless bee to spread its pollen, fashion goes out of its way to find new ways to sell us more cotton.

Evolutionary domination is fleeting; once one particular plant becomes a monolithic monoculture it becomes vulnerable – whether it loses its resistance to parasites or disease… or it overwhelms its environment.

It is not just fashion that seems to be imbalanced these days.

Every season is a little bit different – and of course, I am not talking about the clothes.

1.

Cathy Horyn sees an industry transitioning between old ways and new values, when she reflects on the real importance of fashion shows. No, she is not talking about the clothes – “…is the show and our almost compulsory attendance really about something else, about preserving distinct power bases in the face of their rapid erosion?”

There is a reason why Horyn is the reigning voice of reason in the voyeuristic void of fashion journalism. She cuts right to the bone.

In the tent, we don’t just watch the models and the clothes; we watch the faces across from us, picking up clues from who is sitting where and what their faces betray. In the media lounge, we don’t just focus on reviewing the runway – we study eachother, we see who is working and what they are working on, who is talking to who, and always keeping an ear cocked for anything worth overhearing.

In a small tent like the one in Nathan Philips Square, the clues of change are laying in the open for everyone to notice – and if you need confirmation, check Google. The big news? The newspaper and magazine writers are blogging harder than the fashion bloggers. NOW Magazine, the National Post, FASHION Magazine, Fashion Television, Flare Magazine, and others were doing it daily – posting that is – if not show-by-blow live-blogging it.

It seems like the past few seasons of blogger infiltration (infestation?) have inspired established sources to step up their game. With more more people, more equipment, more photos, and paycheques, the professional journalists had their chance to show that they can do it faster, shinier, and more extensive than any blogger.

Now that the hurricane has died down and we can count the survivors, we can also see the evidence of what got posted and what did not, and maybe who came out on top, if anyone did.

I think L’Oreal Fashion Week itself was a clear winner; a hot frenzy of coverage connected designers of all levels to the attention of everyone who reads the news and checks the magazines.

The readers and watchers receive a mixed bag of benefits and bombardment. Fashion mediaphiles like myself were treated to more stories in their feeds than we had time to read – and some were exceptional – I found myself glancing through a lot of information with less interest than usual. It wasn’t just because I was attending – I didn’t see all of it and I was curious for other perspectives – it was a combination of time, duplication of information, and a certain unsatisfying lack of insight that happens when the post button gets pressed too quickly.

The quality of blogging fashion week is not measured just by stopwatch and quantity. I love to read a considered point of view, a level of observation that transcends a recording, a soundbite, an immediate reaction. A story from someone who experienced it.

So I am trying little media projects, striving for something a little different. Like the Haiku Review and Rags and Mags.

For Final Fashion, I try to post only when I have something to say or show. I am not here on the internet to compete with anyone, only to offer what talents I have towards this thing called fashion.

2.

At the Fashion Week Drake Salon, a few fashion week survivors were treated to something fascinating – a panel of insiders candidly discussing the week with eachother and an intimate audience. There were many empty seats in a very small space – apparently fashion week is fatal for most people. Still, this was a moment that I thought many of the designers who showed this week should have been listening, taking notes and asking questions. There were very few.

Many of the panel’s most fascinating moments were the contributions of Barbara Atkin, Marlene Schiff, and David Livingstone.

The most strong impression on me was left by Barbara Atkin. She rejects all the usual excuses from the Canadian Fashion contingent. She is so right – merit speaks for itself. Being Canadian is not an alibi. Canada is a small country in the world, and yet we have produced a few world class fashion designers; and it wasn’t because the designers were Canadian, it was because they were talented, persistent, and borderless.

Bitching is so over. Complaining does nothing. If the scene sucks, its our responsibility to learn from our mistakes and our choice to make it amazing. It is possible to create a scene we are proud of. I see a lot of smart people around me who are striving towards something amazing, and every time I see them they get closer and closer.

These are not the only thoughts that I am processing right now. L’Oreal Fashion Week for Fall 2008 was an inspirational one for me. It is going to change how I approach the months leading up to the Spring 2009 collections.

I want to bring more new ideas to every season. I love to see fashion move forward.