Fashion forward

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This article was published 21/10/2024 (663 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s the Anna Sui bellbottoms Jeanne Beker wore to interview Madonna — who was wearing the same pants. There’s the polyester top from her eponymous clothing line that she wore to paddle a canoe with Kate Moss. And there’s the leopard-trim string bikini Beker wore to interview Andy Summers of the Police. In a bubble bath. When she was 55.

Those are just some of the stories the Canadian fashion icon and trailblazing host of Fashion Television tells in her new memoir, Heart on My Sleeve: Stories From a Life Well Worn.

Released earlier this month via Simon & Schuster, the book is composed of conversational, non-chronological vignettes, each centred on a different garment or accessory from a lifetime of clothes, giving readers the effect of rifling through the fashion legend’s closet while she tells them about all the treasures they find.

The creative guardrails offered by the book’s premise also helped focus her writing.

“I knew that I could only tell stories that had a garment or an accessory or a piece of jewelry associated with it,” says Beker, 72, over the phone from her home in Toronto ahead of the book’s launch in Winnipeg Monday at McNally Robinson.

“There are a lot of other stories I wanted to tell, but if they weren’t really driven by a piece of my wardrobe, I thought, no, I’ll save those for another book.”

Beker has written two previous memoirs, 2000’s Jeanne Unbottled: Adventures in High Style and 2011’s Finding Myself in Fashion. But her recent journey with breast cancer — which began in 2022 following a routine mammogram — brought her life into sharper relief.

“I’m at an age and stage now, obviously, where there’s a lot of reflection going on. What I went through the past decade with the cancer journey, and just entering into my 70s, one tends to get more and more reflective. And so, I only wanted to tell stories that really had life lessons in them as well,” she says.

The first story she wrote is the first in the book. It’s about a worn brown leather satchel that was stuffed at the back of her mother’s closet.

“I remember being really intrigued with that because all her other purses were in the front hall closet,” Beker says.

Beker’s mother, Bronia, had brought that satchel to Canada from Austria in 1948 after surviving the Holocaust with her husband Joseph, Beker’s father. (Their story, recounted in the book, is jaw-dropping.)

“I discovered early on that the satchel was stuffed full of these old black-and-white photographs and many that had survived the war and were really my only connection to a family that I never knew because my parents lost everyone in the Holocaust,” Beker says.

The book features plenty of photos — including some from her mother’s treasured collection — but Beker didn’t have a visual record of all the pieces she wrote about. Enter her eldest daughter, Bekky O’Neil, a multimedia artist and animator, who provided the book’s illustrations.

“To have my daughter be that much a part of my book, that really meant a lot as well,” Beker says.

Beker’s younger daughter Joey O’Neil, who is a musician, wore her mother’s iconic 1970s hooded wedding gown in a music video and curated a Spotify playlist to go with the book.

The stories that make up Heart on My Sleeve aren’t just about clothes, of course. They’re also about people.

“It’s people that make the world go round, and that’s the reason that I ever even became so immersed in the world of fashion, because fashion, ultimately, to me, is about people. It’s about what we wear and how we wear it, and what it tells the world about who we are,” Beker says.

Beker’s goal in interviews was always to try to show “the humanity behind the artistry.” The book includes many dishy stories about the celebrities she’s encountered over her career — the “bling,” as she says, that one might expect from a Jeanne Beker memoir — but she also wanted to include important figures from her personal life.

“My mother’s fashion-maven best friend, Mrs. Jaskolka, was just as influential on me and just as inspiring to me as Karl Lagerfeld. I wanted to make sure that people understood that there are other incredible people in my life that inspired me and that I’ve learned so much from,” she says.

While loss and reflection are certainly woven into the fabric of these stories, there’s also an ebullient sense of joy. Beker has been “dopamine dressing” since before it was a TikTok trend.

To that end, Jeanne Beker wants you to wear the dress. Wear the shoes. Wear the hat.

“The problem with a lot of these great pieces in our wardrobes, we get them and we love them, but we only pull them out so infrequently. It’s almost like that saying, ‘Use the good dishes.’ I think it’s time to really celebrate all that we have and put it out there,” she says.

There were a few stories left on the closet floor, so to speak, but that’s just fodder for the future.

“There’s always going to be stuff to write about when it comes to fashion, because fashion just triggers so much in the imagination — I mean, I think that’s why we all love it so much,” Beker says.

“Fashion inspires us. Fashion has the power to transform us. And fashion really has the ability to empower us in wonderful ways.

“On one hand, it’s a pretty superficial thing, that’s for sure, but on the other hand, there’s something pretty magical about it. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of playing with fashion.”

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com