STACEY MCKENZIE leading the workshop Walk This Way at Fashion Blackout, part of Kuumba, in the Brigantine Room (235 Queens Quay West), Saturday (February 4), 2 pm. Free. harbourfrontcentre.com/kuumba.
Stacey McKenzie admits that her fashion career got off to a rocky start.
Just a few seconds into her first strut down the runway – Jean Paul Gaultier’s Paris catwalk in 1996 – she spotted Lenny Kravitz in the audience and ditched her modelling duties to sashay over to the rock star, sit on his lap and plant a big smooch on his lips.
“You know you’re in a show, right?” asked a cool Kravitz, prompting McKenzie to make a quick return to the runway, where she wondered if she’d just ended her career as it was getting started.
“What was that?” demanded Gaultier backstage later. “It was perfect! Amazing! I loved it,” gushed the designer.
“That showed me right there that modelling isn’t just about my look and my body,” says McKenzie. “It’s about my personality.”
That personality pours from every inch of her 5-foot-10 frame. It makes watching her sit in the front row at a fashion show almost as much fun as seeing her work the runway.
Often dressed in over-the-top looks that show lots of leg, the exaggerated, posey way McKenzie moves is upstaged only by the bold raspiness of her voice.
The seasoned Canadian catwalker regularly attends Toronto Fashion Week, and doesn’t hide her appreciation when a fellow model really struts her stuff.
“I love to see a model on the runway who exudes the confidence of ‘I’m the shit,'” she says.
So it’s not surprising that her latest career move is hosting Walk This Way workshops, where she bolsters the self-esteem of fans – not just models – seeking a confidence boost. McKenzie brings her runway tutorial to Harbourfront Centre’s Kuumba Festival as part of its Fashion Blackout event on Saturday.
She launched the workshops after years of working in front of audiences and cameras as a model-slash-actor-slash-TV personality. McKenzie appeared alongside Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich in the model-stacked cast of 1997’s The Fifth Element and judged aspiring catwalkers on two seasons of Canada’s Next Top Model.
One of the amazing things about her career is that she’s come all this way without many role models.
“I never had any mentors. A lot of [models] don’t,” she says. “As the unconventional beauty who wasn’t supposed to make it [in the fashion industry], I thought it was important to put my experiences out there to help others.”
Critiquing the fashion industry’s narrow idea of what models should look like drives a chunk of Kuumba’s programming. Fashion Blackout also includes a screening of Elizabeth St. Phillip’s fashion documentary The Colour Of Beauty, about Toronto model Renee Thompson’s attempt to break into the industry in New York City, and a panel discussion about the state of diversity on the runway.
McKenzie is no stranger to that ongoing debate, and has witnessed the industry’s fickle and often entirely clueless approach to black models first-hand.
“I almost had a heart attack when one campaign came out,” she says, remembering the thorough retouching job. “I was completely revamped: straight nose, no freckles, small lips, super-extra-high cheekbones, smaller and more wide-set eyes, extra-straight hair. I was a straight-up white girl in that ad.
“My agency had to fight for me, but there’s only so much they can do,” she says. “It’s up to me to stand up for myself.”
McKenzie has been standing up for her right to be fierce since she first started flipping through fashion magazines as a six-year-old in Jamaica. After years of practice posing in front of the mirror and walking imaginary catwalks in her mom’s pumps, the 15-year-old McKenzie, then living in Toronto, crashed the casting for Ryerson’s Mass Exodus fashion show wearing a black cat suit and sky-high stilettos.
Most of the student designers didn’t give her a chance, but Joeffer Caoc, today one of the city’s biggest fashion names, took one look at McKenzie’s walk and declared, “I got dibs on her!”
The path from there to Gaultier’s door was full of false starts, but McKenzie hustled, often pretending on the phone to be a Jamaican model agent to get herself appointments with reps in New York and occasionally spending a week’s worth of after-school job earnings to buy a Greyhound ticket to the Big Apple.
That paid off when she landed her first cover shoot, for New York Magazine, and made a name for herself on Paris runways. But the amount of adversity she faced prompts the question, why host workshops that encourage other young women to enter such a cutthroat industry?
“At the end of the day, it’s up to the person,” she says. “But if you have a dream, why not go for it? Even if there are going to be lots of obstacles, go for it 100 per cent.”
She’s had the opportunity to travel the world and collaborate with a cast of renowned creative types. Still, McKenzie wishes the industry took diversity more seriously, especially here at home.
“Toronto needs to step up. We are known as a diverse city of people from all over the world, so why not put everybody in the forefront? I still have a hard time, even with all my accomplishments,” she says, getting a bit choked up. “But this is me.”
Which brings us to our photo shoot with McKenzie, where her me-ness is out full force. We’re in photographer David Hawe’s downtown studio, and there’s a wig on the makeup table. McKenzie, who’s wearing her hair in short curls, isn’t impressed.
“I hate wigs,” she confesses.
She’s also skeptical of a pair of black leather leggings hanging on a rack with a mix of pieces from her own wardrobe (an oversized-floral mini-dress from H&M’s Versace collection a BCBG jacket with a massive ruffle falling over its left shoulder) and pieces by Toronto label Chine Design (see profile, this page).
“People often try to make me look like a drag queen,” she says. “As a model, I don’t usually have a voice, but as a personality, I’m being myself. This is what Stacey McKenzie is about. I like my naturally curly hair. I like my cat eye [makeup] and big red lips. I like to be a little in your face.”
Some people might read the scene as a model having a diva meltdown, but that’s not the case at all. It’s just Stacey watching out for Stacey.
fashion@nowtoronto.com
