FashionTelevision's 'invisible woman in Paris' writes herself into the show's story
Nan Devitt Tremblay has reinvented herself as a filmmaker in her mid-60s
In the mid-1980s, Canadian fashion enthusiasts were given the ultimate gift in the form of FashionTelevision (FT), the pioneering reality TV program that brought the glitz and glamour of the global industry right into their homes. Within a decade, the show had exploded into a worldwide phenomenon and helped make household names of its regulars, from supermodels to designers to magazine editors.
Along for that ride was Nan Devitt Tremblay, a Canadian journalist living in Paris at the time, who played an undersung but vital role in the program's getting off the ground — and who has reinvented herself as a filmmaker in her mid-60s in order to finally tell her story.
Devitt Tremblay first got her break in her hometown of Toronto in the early 1980s, where she bounced between stations before ending up as a reporter-at-large for CBC. "There was a lot of excitement and energy about that time in Toronto," she tells me over the phone, pointing to the founding of MuchMusic as just one example. When an entertainment reporter colleague went on maternity leave, Devitt Tremblay says she "was just given the keys to the candy store," free to disappear with camera equipment as long as she came back with prepackaged arts and culture pieces.
It didn't take long for her to pick up several years' worth of dinner party stories on that beat. One day, Boy George jokingly suggested that she "get a new hairstyle" at a press conference. Another, The Jesus and Mary Chain swore live on the air. And, possibly most brag-worthy: while profiling Leonard Cohen, the singer asked if she wanted to hear a new song. He then pulled out a Walkman with two pairs of headphones, and together they listened to the as-yet-unreleased "Hallelujah."
Though Devitt Tremblay did one particularly memorable piece on the city's fashion scene, interviewing recent design grads of what's now Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), she says she had no real connection to fashion. But in 1986, she and her soon-to-be husband, Pierre, moved to Paris for a change of scenery. She thought she might publish a novel or two while there, but her new digs put her in the line of hire for a fledgling Citytv project.
Launched in 1985, FT — hosted throughout its run by national icon Jeanne Beker — began as a small production that put elite fashion-world happenings on Canadian TV screens. "Initially, it was kind of on the model of MuchMusic," Devitt Tremblay explains. "Oh, we could make really cheap TV if we could put videos from fashion shows on TV."
When she first started doing work for the program, she was mandated to call fashion houses and ask for footage to use. But even when they did have any on hand, it was rarely on offer — perhaps because the value of such exposure had not yet been proven.
In the meantime, FT would need to grab its own footage. Devitt Tremblay teamed up with a fellow Canadian expat, John Cressey, who already had some experience as an in-house show videographer. He brought a self-assuredness that would serve the pair well in the lion's dens of Paris Fashion Week. "The first times we started shooting, he just sailed backstage … nobody stopped us," Devitt Tremblay remembers.
In the early days of the program, there were only so many cameras backstage at shows, giving FT a unique chance to endear itself to insiders. Though her role wasn't forward-facing, viewers unknowingly spent lots of time with Devitt Tremblay's hand as it held microphones during interviews, and could even catch snippets of her voice if they were listening for them. Eventually credited as a field producer, this would be her new normal for the next dozen years.
During the same era that she was watching Diana Ross sneak late into Yves Saint Laurent shows and interviewing a young Sofia Coppola (then a Chanel intern), Devitt Tremblay had three kids — son Joseph in 1988, and daughters Maeve and Oonagh in 1991 and 1995. These two "adjacent realities," as she calls them, weren't always all that physically separate. Pierre and even Joseph sometimes accompanied her to work, and while her husband wasn't supposed to film things, he often did anyway.
By the mid-1990s, FT had garnered an international fanbase, in part due to its syndication on networks like VH1. Reality TV was at that point a more recognized genre, and the internet would soon provide its own kind of backstage pass. Devitt Tremblay said goodbye to both the show and Paris in 1998, returning to Toronto and beginning a second career as a high school teacher.
Fast-forward to 2020, when she and Cressey found themselves taking part in a Zoom panel about their days with the now-iconic program, which finally ceased production in 2012. It was around then that Oonagh suggested someone make a documentary about her mother. After turning the idea over for a bit, Devitt Tremblay declared that said someone should be herself.
By the next fall, she'd retired from teaching and begun a two-year graduate program in Documentary Media at TMU — an experience that culminated earlier this year in a feature-length film called Carton d'invitation, or "invitation card."
Her documentary tells the story of the years she spent bouncing between "maternal chaos" and the equally chaotic runway world, where she was FT's "invisible woman in Paris." As she writes in her accompanying thesis, "I claim a seat for myself in the metaphorical front row of a grand pageant that engendered social change and inspired so many people to pursue beauty in their lives." The film's title is meant to welcome everybody else into the front row, too.
"It just seemed like something I needed to do when I was 66 years old," she adds now.
The project took on a new dimension in the spring of 2022, when she turned to social media as a research tool. Quickly, she reconnected with old friends and was introduced to new allies, some of whom provided their own footage (one was even able to help her replace the subpar audio in a clip she was working with). The finished film weaves scenes from the show with other material Devitt Tremblay already had in her possession, including Pierre's guerrilla footage and home movies of her small children frolicking around Paris.
As much as the film is about the Tremblays and their adventures, it's also about FT bearing witness to what some consider fashion's Golden Age, plus the shifts (and in-fighting) that came with it. Pop stars were suddenly seated in the front row and walking the runways. Younger, more irreverent designers like Alexander McQueen helped turn shows into splashier, even controversial productions, stoking debates about gender, sexuality, and race. And of course, there was the takeover of the extravagantly paid supermodel — which the film argues was significantly helped along by FT, the "Instagram of the day."
One of the show's most important legacies was its queer representation — both charged and essential at the height of the AIDS crisis. "If something was there, we filmed it … and inadvertently, we were showing and representing," Devitt Tremblay says. She's encountered a number of people on her journey — often millennial-aged gay men who now work in fashion — for whom FT was a sort of "liberatory gateway" growing up: "People have talked to me with tears in their eyes about sharing moments of tacit understanding while watching the show with their mothers."
Things have been emotional for other reasons — not least that so many of the film's subjects are no longer with us. Throughout its runtime, now-deceased legends greet Devitt Tremblay as a familiar face. (She and Karl Lagerfeld once estimated that they'd spoken something like a hundred times.) They also provide some of its more memorable soundbites, like Vivienne Westwood proclaiming that "the genius of the human race lies in its freaks," or André Leon Talley playfully scolding Devitt Tremblay for asking whether he found a new collection ugly ("Honey, I don't want to be in that energy wave").
This past spring, she got to premiere Carton d'invitation at Toronto's Doc Now festival, where she was pleased to see several old friends, including FASHION editor-in-chief Bernadette Morra and photographer Ola Sirant. Since then, she's been accompanying the film to screenings all over, with a stop so far in Berlin and a few more planned for south of the border. She describes these events as emotional — drawing laughter and tears in equal measure — for both her and audiences.
The film is really just one piece of a bubbling portfolio, which she calls her "alternative media library." On Instagram, she posts archive footage and interviews she's conducted with a variety of industry players; full versions of those conversations are also available as podcasts. Her scope is always changing, but alongside the screening tour Devitt Tremblay has plans to share "all kinds of treasures" she's picked up from her online community.
"It's a funny project," she says, sounding almost disbelieving. "It's very moving and life-affirming and informative."
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