ON2 -- Fashion Show Frenzy: The Dawn of a New Career

By Anthony Majanlahti

I uttered as I looked around me. It was an hour before the fashion show I was producing was supposed to start. Guests would be arriving momentarily, the press and VIPs needed to be shown to their places, the models had to be corralled into the correct order, and we still didn't have the seating plan in place, the electricity wasn't working, and the curtain hadn't been hung yet. Everyone was asking me a thousand questions, and I had to be everywhere at once. How had I found myself at the center of this chaos?

Rewind two months. I was sitting in the studio of Richard Lyle and Jennifer Halchuk, two young fashion designers who were planning their next show. Jennifer had started their company, Mercy, on her own; Richard joined her after designing for two years under his own label in London, England. Richard is my oldest friend, and I'd had helped him with previous shows, though always in an unofficial capacity. Richard and Jennifer were talking to me excitedly about their new collection for spring/summer 1998. Mercy planned to show jointly with Lili Sac, a handbag design company, and the designer's husband, a chef, was prepared to offer hors d'oeuvres for the reception afterward. I said, "Well, if I can help, let me know." Richard said casually, "We thought you could produce the show for us."

So it began. For me, it was a crash course in the world of fashion, something for which my career as a graduate student in Renaissance history had ill prepared me. Richard was show director as well as co-designer, and he would be giving me the guidelines I had to follow -- it was my job to make his ideas come to fruition. I was also handling all the public relations, contacting the media and writing press kits, bios, and letters. I felt competent when it came to words, which are the tools of my trade, but when it came to managing people, I was more apprehensive.

We were laboring under severe budget constraints, so my first priority was to find donors who could sponsor us, either with money or with goods and services. Richard and I drove through the city many times looking at possible sites. When doing an independent show, the director and producer look for a unique space to get the most attention, ideally one that has never been used for a show before. In our case, it had to be free, too. Richard and I had our sights set on one space, a vacant ground-floor office in downtown Toronto, which had recently housed a bank. We liked the idea that passers-by could look in through the floor-to-ceiling windows and watch the show.

We also had a few fall-back sites we were looking at, a warehouse in the garment district, and a car dealership. We found out who owned or managed these properties, and I sent letters asking for the use of the spaces for one night only. Surely one of these would bear fruit. One night as we were driving back from the Mercy studio, Richard stopped in front of a high fence. "I'd really like to do a show in that," he said, pointing over the wire. Behind the chain links rose a kind of conical structure which I identified as a shed where the city stored road salt. There are a number of these dotted inconspicuously around town. "I wonder who I'd ask to use one of those," he said thoughtfully.

Probably City Works, I said, and since winter was coming on, it would be a better idea to use one of the other indoor spaces we'd asked for. Not to mention the fact that those sheds were needed for storing salt for the roads. "I don't think we'll ever get that," I said. Richard found out the name and address of the appropriate City Works person and I duly dispatched a letter to him, detailing our plans for the space. Within a few days we had the surprising response: we could use the shed as requested, as long as we followed the city's safety guidelines and submitted specifics of the show to the site foreman. The salt shed was our first choice, and in the end, all our other prospects said no.

We had found our site. A lot of work was necessary to convert the salt shed into a show space. We had to come up with ideas for lighting, seating, and a runway for the models, all without going beyond our miniscule budget. We needed a DJ for the show, a reception with wine for the guests, and a band. Richard and I took our cues from the philosopher Rene Descartes' Discourse on Method: we broke each problem down into smaller and smaller units until each one could be solved. I made list after list of things to take care of.

Toronto's small fashion industry revolves mainly around the large ready-to-wear shows that take place in two Toronto Fashion Weeks, one in October and the other in March. The Ready-to-Wears are group shows held in large public spaces. They are managed by the Matinee Fashion Foundation, an offshoot of the Matinee cigarette company, which maintains rigid control over every aspect of the show, and charges a great deal of money to produce it.

Many young designers in Toronto can not find the $2600 fee the foundation charges to be a member of the show, and those who can pay find that they have no creative control over how their work is presented. We planned to pull off a coup against what Richard referred to derisively as "the cigarette people" by putting on the first show of Toronto Fashion Week, the best show, and the cheapest.

The Story Continues