You can’t put Jeanne back in the bottle
Fashionista to be honoured
Jeanne Beker may be getting a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame, but it doesn’t mean the fashion entrepreneur thinks she has her career all sewn up.
Sure, she hosted internationally syndicated series Fashion Television for 27 years. Writing five books and being appointed to the Order of Canada was great, she admits. And ditto being a columnist for newspapers, creating a clothing line and taking a style editor gig at The Shopping Channel.
But there’s always something urging her to do more. Jeanne, it seems, isn’t ever going back in the bottle.
“Someone once said the hardest thing about being a success is continuing to be a success,” Beker says. “I still want to dance as fast as I can, although there are times when it’s nice to sit back and smell the roses a little bit. But I do think it’s important to be engaged and remain relevant.”
Having her name etched in the pavement of Canada’s Walk of Fame is a good start.
The annual ceremony will broadcast Monday on Global, and Beker will be inducted along with singer Corey Hart, filmmaker Deepa Mehta, actor-directors Jason Priestley and Al Waxman, and hockey player Darryl Sittler. Country artist Brett Kissel will receive the 2016 Allan Slaight Honour.
“It was just a wonderful feeling, the icing on the cake — not that my cake will ever be fully baked,” she says of the recognition.
“So many of the proudest moments of my career happen when I’m walking down the streets from St John’s to Victoria, or in international cities, meeting people who grew up watching Fashion Television who tell me it was their first window into the glamorous world of fashion. That was the reason they fell in love with fashion.”
Next on Beker’s plate? Making her signature show, Fashion Television, available to future generations by digitizing the thousands of hours of footage.
“Happily I’m working with BellMedia now to repurpose the Fashion Television archives and bring them back in some way — whether we do a documentary series or a new kind of programming that would make us understand what kind of incredible fashion era we lived,” she says.
She also wants to do nothing less than help save the world.
“I’m starting to think of ways of making the fashion industry more sustainable. People are saying that textiles are one of the biggest pollutants of the planet now, next to oil, so we’ve got to save the world to some degree, or at least try to,” she says.
“We’ve got to find ways of upcycling this stuff. We’ve been living in an age of excess too long.”