In some ways, Toronto has got the makings of a world-class city: considered the most multicultural in the world, it’s also an international centre for tech, finance and the arts. But our fashion scene, burgeoning though it is, has long been missing a true, city-wide fashion week that is the mark of a true cultural destination in comparable cities. A few designers, creatives and entrepreneurs in Toronto are finally looking to change that.
Toronto’s fashion scene has long felt competitive and siloed, while also remaining largely under the radar compared to fashion weeks in other urban capitals like New York and Paris. Efforts to gain international exposure for Toronto fashion talent have been hindered further by the lack of a collective “Toronto Fashion Week” label which once identified the scene in the early 2000s.
The non-profit entity Fashion Design Council of Canada hosted annual showcases under the official Toronto Fashion Week trademark for 13 years before selling it to American Sponsor IMG in 2012, only to have the company pull out four years later. The trademark was then purchased by real estate mogul Peter Freed in partnership with First Capital (the developer of Yorkville Village), only to have production cease indefinitely after another four years, in early 2020. Though the show no longer runs, the trademark remains, thus preventing other entries from adopting it. (Streets of Toronto reached out to Freed and First Capital for comment on the current status of the trademark, but received no response.)
In its wake, Toronto’s longest running annual fashion event — and de facto fashion week — is Fashion Art Toronto’s (FAT) “1664 Fashion Week,” a showcase founded in 2005 by designer Vanja Vasic.
This season’s FAT has been celebrating its 20th anniversary by hosting a month-long fashion celebration for the first time in its history, which is culminating in the show’s bi-annual four-day runway showcase, Spring/Summer 2025 1664 Fashion Week, taking place from May 29-June 1.
While the month-long calendar honoured the fashion entity’s own two-decade milestone, it also served as a means to invite the wider Toronto community to interact with local fashion.
“I want people to embrace and celebrate fashion like we celebrate Pride or art,” says Vasic.
The events have included FAT’s collaboration with Artist Project, a secret “Fashmob” as a homage to the entity’s early days of guerrilla style runway shows, a collaborative party and outdoor runway show with The Bentway and a 20 year anniversary party in collaboration with Gotstyle clothing, hosted by The Distillery District.
Though FAT attracts thousands of attendees each year, including travellers from outside of the city, it doesn’t garner international headlines the way that other fashion capitals such as New York or Paris do. The consensus among industry professionals behind the city’s leading fashion entities is that a lot of barriers remain in the way.
Vasic points to a lack of government funding, and insufficient media interest as two main culprits. “We need our media to be interested in Canadian fashion, to attend these events and showcase designers, to go to school grad shows and see what the emerging designers are doing,” says Vasic.
The third culprit is a lack of collaboration, she adds. Fashion Art Toronto partners with organizations like Vancouver Fashion Week, Indigenous Fashion Week and Toronto Metropolitan University’s fashion program, where Vasic sits on the Program Advisor Council.
“We want to continue building on those relationships, not just with TMU, but with other schools as well,” says Vasic, noting that FAT has collaborated with Seneca College in the past, and is now building relationships with George Brown College. In the future, she hopes to expand these partnerships to schools outside of Ontario as well.
“In order to succeed abroad, we need to make bigger relationships with local and international organizations [alike], to unify amongst each other,” she says. “Toronto has always had a hard time with that — [there’s] typically a more competitive scene than a collaborative one — but I think if we embrace that collaborative spirit, we can succeed.”
The founders of Toronto’s Rchive Fashion Club, Ion (Jai) Sobaliu and Sadaf Emami, agree — which is exactly why they started hosting fashion shows of their own, coinciding with FAT’s seasonal showcases. After hosting their first show in May of 2024 in Lower Bay Station, ultimately creating multiple fashion stages for Torontonians to visit, Rchive launched its own fashion week label, Toronto’s Own Fashion Week, (TOFW) during their second season in a hanger at Billy Bishop Airport.
The new name both bypasses the Toronto Fashion Week trademark and pays homage to Drake’s October’s Very Own brand. It points to the reemergence of a collective Toronto Fashion Week, years after the actual Toronto Fashion Week closed its doors. Rchive most recently hosted its third fashion showcase May 24–25 at the Toronto Reference Library.
Similar to FAT’s month-long calendar of events leading up to the S/S showcase, Rchive hosted a week of events leading up to TOFW themed around different forms of creativity —poetry, comedy, music, and art — with the intention of pulling in a wider community of Toronto creatives.
They are also working on building international relationships to bolster their platform.
“This season, we’ve made connections with buyers from New York,” says Sobaliu. They have also strengthened their own resources by building a larger backstage team, and are starting to host training sessions for models. “We really want to bring the show to that standard that New York has, and Paris has. I think through practice, and specialization, that’s what we’re on the road to achieving,” he says.
As for the new fashion week label, they consider it a way to unify Toronto’s fashion community. During New York Fashion Week, numerous entities host informal pop-ups coinciding with the formal shows, simply to take advantage of the exposure, but the same hasn’t historically occurred in Toronto. “Just because we can’t use the Toronto Fashion Week name, I don’t think that should stop us from growing the fashion community and putting on events,” says Emami. “We want to see brands do pop-ups during the fashion week period.”
For this to work, Sobaliu and Emami feel that more Torontonians need to be interested in buying locally made clothes.
“In a small market like Toronto, a lot of work is being done pro bono. But every single creative person in the city continues to do cool stuff anyway and it inspires me everyday,” says Sobaliu. If no one is buying, designers aren’t able to fund their collections and repeat the cycle of creating new ones each season, which subsequently affects models, stylists and photographers.
“We’re happy that multiple platforms are able to showcase and celebrate Canadian fashion, because the more platforms there are, the more opportunities there are for designers and artists and models and photographers to participate in fashion,” echoes Vasic.
“Oftentimes we look to bigger fashion capitals, like New York Fashion Week and Paris Fashion Week, but what does Toronto fashion look like? We have a distinct identity and a distinct voice,” she says. “[This fashion season] comes at a time that Canada is actually supporting its own. And I think it’s about time that we do.”
