The Orangina girls with the mobile soda carts and shaggy orange wigs—a fixture inside the tents at L'Oréal Fashion Week this past spring—are nowhere to be seen this season. The event, which kicked off Monday and runs until Saturday at Nathan Phillips Square, has adopted a "fabulous" theme for the 2009 spring collections, and the tent has taken on a decidedly more grown-up look. Monday's giveaways—tubes of lip gloss and mascara from L'Oréal Paris—were passed out by models dressed in fashionable brown dresses.
The sponsors' displays—coordinated by Rob Dittmer of Three Events—have a more contemporary and subdued feel this season, tying in with the decor throughout the tent. “I'm like the middleman between the Fashion Design Council of Canada and the sponsors,” said Dittmer, who worked with companies like LG Electronics Canada, Lincoln, and Schick Quattro to translate their vision while enhancing the overall decor, which was designed by Nicholas Pinney of Nicholas Pinney Design to feel like a lobby in a high-end hotel.
A black Plexiglas bar sponsored by Exclusive Affair Rentals fills the center of the Fashion Environment in the main tent, and a range of sponsor installations line the walls along each side of the space. Guests can relax in the all-black Lincoln Lounge, have a snapshot taken of their legs on the Schick Quattro runway, inquire about the benefits of Restylane at an intimate display sponsored by the company, or watch footage from the week's fashion shows on a wall of LG screens.
