Even if style is ostensibly an individual pursuit I’d like to make a case for the fashion uniform. Most of you know this by another name: street style. And that, in its pretense to individualism, is perhaps the closest thing we’ve got to assimilation, when it comes to clothing.
In Toronto, most of us don’t have close ties with heavyweight designers and subsequently, Canadian bloggers can’t really borrow the latest Prada creation to wear to fashion week. We’d have to purchase it, which is why, sometimes, affluent people with marginal connections to the fashion industry are the ones who get photographed most, at the tents.
What the photographers – who have been trained to spot a Celine bag inside a cab before it even turns onto King Street – don’t know, however, is so-and-so purchased their tickets online or got an invite from whatever socialite mailing list they belong to. They aren’t media darlings. They aren’t the Annas. They just have enough money to buy the global harbingers of chic.
But the rest of us paupers do need to look good. So, in lieu of Miuccia Prada and a large bank account, Toronto’s real (and broke) fashion insiders assimilate in a different way. We turn to our local designers.
This season, my favourite collection in terms of wearability was Hilary MacMillan‘s Fall ’14 Scottish Highlands offering. There were enough pieces to sustain a photographable street style look, like the floor-length plaid dress and a rabbit fur skirt. But what’s most pertinent to a discussion of a fashion uniform (and how bloggers residing in the non-fashion week circuit cities can still unite over micro trends – ie., me; i.e., Toronto) is MacMillan’s pheasant trope. Sabrina Maddeaux and I already agree that it’s going to be the next new thing for Toronto’s fashion set. “It will make for an epic photo,” she howls. All of us in our coordinated pheasant blazers, skirts, shorts and dresses? Ca-yuuuute. *Like *like *like.
And that, my friends, is how we eschew Phoebe Philo and Prada and still make it onto the front page of Toronto Life.
True or False: The fashion uniform does not exist. Photographers cannot spot a Celine bag inside a cab before it turns onto King Street. I am rich.
