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But attendance and the number of shows shrank, and the festival eventually tanked in 1990. stores to fly in and check out the collections. (That year, a young label called Comrags caused a stir with their designs.) The festival flourished through the rest of the '80s, with the federal government actually footing the bill for 200 buyers from U.S. The roots of our present-day fashion week appeared in 1985 in the form of the Festival of Canadian Fashion, a four-day tradeshow orchestrated by Steven Levy.
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But the city's fashion scene made some major strides during the '80s - gains that are still seen today, including the founding of the Toronto Fashion Incubator, which still provides support to emerging designers, and the creation of the city's first fashion week.
#Toronto 1985 and the style council tv#
If you want a window into Toronto's retail scene in the '80s, these truly incredible TV ads paint an incredibly vivid picture. Sung aside, the '70s also gave rise to designers that remain household names today, including eveningwear designer Wayne Clark, and Linda Lundstrom, who's sold more than 125,000 of her staple La Parka coat over the past several decades. In sharp contrast to the rise of punk, Sung - who would come to dominate the Canadian fashion world - offered mostly loose-cut clothes in sophisticated neutrals. In 1977, over in Cabbagetown, Alfred Sung opened a tiny boutique called Moon. In 1972, the Creeds department store, selling fur coats and European designers, set up shop on Bloor (in the space now occupied by Ashley's china shop) Holt Renfrew followed suit, moving to its current home on Bloor in the spring of 1979.ĭown on Queen West, between Spadina and University, the city's burgeoning punk scene was taking over an industrial area vacated by fading textile manufacturing companies.
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As the '70s dawned and the Bloor-Danforth subway line jacked up property values in the area, an influx of high-end stores swiftly displaced the bohemian community. In the '60s, Yorkville was a hippie mecca - one an MPP decried as "a festering sore in the middle of the city". (Taylor refused to be measured for the dress she was ordering, so Haddad asked an assistant to smuggle out one of her bras.) A local boutique called the Unicorn sold muumuus and oddball imports the owner, Marilyn Brooks, soon shot to fame around Canada with avant-garde pieces like vinyl jumpsuits and chain bras.Īt the time, Toronto already had a rep as "Hollywood North" in the '60s, and designer Claire Haddad was called on to dress celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor and Mary Tyler Moore.
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Over on Gerrard, near Bay, the swath of parking lots near Toronto General Hospital was once a vibrant area of candy-coloured buildings where artists, designers and intellectuals congregated. Toronto's fashion district on Queen West was experiencing a boom, thanks to an influx of tailors and seamstresses moving south from Kensington Market. In honour of World MasterCard Fashion Week, I decided to take a look back at some of the need-to-know designers, stores, trends and fashion scenes from the last 50 years. There's a lot to be proud of: a history of great tailoring and craftsmanship, designers that have made magazine covers the world over, and - in recent decades - a local fashion industry that's been becoming steadily higher-profile, banding together and structuring itself to better support the city's best and brightest talent. The last 5 decades of style in Toronto are proof that our city's design community has long held a vibrant creative energy.