Fashion Week news: Drunken ramblings

Apparently I missed the most talked about event at L'Oreal Fashion Week.

It wasn't about famous models or celebrities or a collection. Rather, it was Robin Kay, the woman behind Toronto's biggest fashion event, who had gossip mills running.

Kay made a huge fashion faux pas: making a speech while drunk in front of the country's fashion elite.

The Toronto Star reports:

"I was exhausted and I didn't realize what was happening to me," said Robin Kay, president of the Fashion Design Council of Canada, who made the drunken speech on Monday night. She admitted she had had too much to drink.

Just before the Mango fashion show that night, Kay was called up to welcome guests and sponsors in the tents set up in Nathan Phillips Square. Instead, she delivered a rambling, incomprehensible address that had many of the hundreds of guests squirming in their seats and shading their eyes from the embarrassing display.

One of the L'Oreal Fashion Week sponsors is Holt Renfrew, whose vice-president of fashion direction, Barbara Atkin, said Kay's conduct was hard to overlook.

"This kind of bad behaviour is the equivalent of wearing a bad accessory. The problem is no matter how beautiful your outfit is, everyone is looking at the bad accessory."

What I would give to have seen this. This is so bad in so many respects. L'Oreal Fashion Week is trying to establish itself as a stylish event that the fashion world will take seriously. The goal of course is to compete with New York and have the event covered in international fashion magazines and media.

Now, Toronto and certainly Canada are not known as the fashion epicentres of the planet, so this event is so important for the city to be seen as culturally relevant, hip and fashionable.

The fact that Robin Kay, who is the face of L'Oreal Fashion Week, made such a stupid mistake, could have huge ramifications. I'm sure the sponsors were not pleased. And what about the international media? How does that make us look to them? It's putting it mildly to say that that behaviour is unprofessional. But it also makes us look like amateurs. This behaviour does not make us look like a serious contender in the fashion world. It's an embarrassment.

(Photo: The Toronto Star)