Obsessed With Jeanne Beker: Her new memoir and fashion exhibit will debut in Calgary 

By Danyael Halprin

(AJNews) – Let’s admit it, we all have a healthy obsession with Jeanne Beker. We kvelled as the nice Jewish girl from Toronto schmoozed with fashion royalty in her years as host of Fashion Television. 

Weekend nights from 1985 to 2012 viewers ran to their TVs the moment they heard the first beats of the show’s theme song “Obsession” by LA’s synth-pop band Animotion. When asked how Beker reacts whenever she hears that song now, say, in a store or on the radio, she says: “I definitely think they’re playing it in my honour!” 

Last month Beker released her sixth book/third memoir, Heart on My Sleeve: Stories from a Life Well Worn (Simon & Schuster Canada), with a foreword by Canadian model Linda Evangelista. If clothes could talk! Beker takes us on an endearing journey through her wardrobe, telling stories about some of her treasured pieces and the people they remind her of. Because don’t we all have sentimental attachments to certain pieces of clothing? Memories of friends and family members are woven into the fabric of Beker’s life and so too are people like Keith Richards, Oscar de la Renta, Karl Lagerfeld… 

“I’ve always found self-expression through wardrobe so fascinating, the statements we want to make to others and how we see ourselves,” says Beker, today the style editor of TSC, where she hosts her show Style Matters. 

Girl’s got chutzpah! It’s indeed this energy, her smarts, the gift of the gab, and her infectious enthusiasm for her subject matter that got her, and gave us, backstage access to the most coveted haute couture runway shows and rock star industry parties. She’s had so many big gets. Like interviewing guitarist Andy Summers of the Police in the bathtub, twice! 

“You’d think these designers had such big egos but honestly they were the kindest and always so generous of spirit with me,” says Beker, 72, on the phone from Toronto. She believes they opened up to her because they found her questions real and refreshing. Instead of asking the predictably cliché questions about silhouettes and colours, she was much more interested in discovering the humanity behind the artistry. It was their philosophies about life that gave her insight into what inspired them. 

Hot on the Manolo heels of her new book is a retrospective of Beker’s career with the exhibit Obsession: The Unscripted Life of Jeanne Beker debuting in Calgary, when the Glenbow reopens at the JR Shaw Centre for Arts & Culture in late 2026. Visitors will see pages from Beker’s diary, notes and invitations from designers, programs from fashion shows, and multiple gowns and pieces from her own wardrobe, all from designers she has interviewed. This multifaceted exhibit will also include clips from her work on Fashion Television and The NewMusic, the weekly music and culture newsmagazine show that ran from 1979 to 2008. 

Co-curators Beker and Calgary designer Paul Hardy will be in attendance for the opening. 

Beker and Hardy are close friends who first met in the early 2000s shortly before Hardy’s first fashion show at Toronto Fashion Week, after which Beker compared Hardy’s talent to Marc Jacobs and Stella McCartney. In 2015, Hardy was Glenbow’s artist in residence, culminating in his exhibition Kaleidoscopic Animalia which examined man’s relationship with animals in design. 

Beker’s exhibit will also include the wooden trunk that her parents Joseph and Bronia, Holocaust survivors born in Kozowa, Poland (now Ukraine), brought with them when they immigrated to Canada in 1948 from a displaced persons camp in Austria. After sitting in Bronia’s basement until she passed away in 2015 and then moving to Beker’s basement, the trunk was donated by Beker and her sister Marilyn to the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax. 

 She knows a lot of Holocaust survivors don’t talk about what happened but says her parents talked about it incessantly, perhaps as a form of therapy, and remembers hiding under the bed at the age of five because she didn’t want to hear any more war stories. “I understand now that those stories of toughness and tenacity, fearlessness and never giving up made me who I am.” Awareness is so important, she says, and all we can do is keep talking about it and teaching our children.

Beker thanks G-d her parents are not here to see the antisemitism in the world today. We must forge ahead with a positive attitude, she says. “I don’t ever want to turn bitter. My parents were great examples of that because despite the darkness in their lives they were determined to find light and live there.” To try and turn people’s opinions around and change people’s hearts and minds is not an easy thing to do. “We can only try to be the best examples of humanity that we can be.” 

How lucky is Calgary to be the city with whom Beker will first share her storied shmatas! 

Danyael Halprin is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter.