His world is all gleam and shimmer. He lives in a land of smiles, a land where the day begins at cocktail hour and ends when you and I have long been witless in our ordinary beds. It is a land where the people are unfailingly pretty and witty, a land where even what qualifies as food is not only pretty, witty and gay but somehow manages to appear miraculously at your elbow just as you simply must have something, darling, or you’ll die, and it’s brought to you by pretty, slim young people through the ebb and swell of parties where the value of the footwear alone, the shoes on all those pretty, witty feet, might easily cover your grocery bill for the year. Meet your tour guide to the land of smiles, where the air is awash and bright with kisses: National Post society columnist Shinan Govani, who is pretty (if you like ’em small—he’s 5’ 5”, Tom Cruise size, he claims, though Mr. Top Gun apparently tops out at 5’ 7”), with a pokable Pillsbury tummy and lively subcontinental eyes framed with come-hither lashes. And witty (with a Taco Bell chihuahua of a laugh to underscore every bon mot). And gay? Well, he says, “I don’t want to talk about that.” Anyway, only the piano knows for sure.

But back to the land of smiles! First stop: Breakfast Television, which he does about once a week and which you’ll cherish for that extra Govani hit if five columns a week in the Post and one every month in enRoute aren’t quite enough to satisfy your deep need to know, right now, who is lunching with whom, and where, and how you were totally au moment in coveting that scarf in that chic little store because Shirley Mac­Laine was just in that store admiring that scarf (a news flash that is messaged to Shinan Govani’s cell while we’re walking Queen West, his phone being the GPS of social life in this city).

When we arrive, the Citytv studios are cluttered with the usual friendly, slightly-too-happy lacquered ladies, and while waiting for his less than 15 minutes, Shinan burbles on about wine gums, one of his culinary addictions. He’s mildly dismissive of the medium (“you don’t exist if you don’t do TV, but it’s about as deep as a birdbath”), but when he’s perched on the set facing the face of Breakfast Television, he is quick and funny about the Time 100 party he’d just been at in New York, hanging with, as he put it, “the 100 most Google-able people in the world,” and bringing us up to the minute on the moment when Martha Stewart met Malcolm Gladwell. Then a segue to some party on the Bridle Path where Michael Bublé sang. And then we’re outta there, for a quick coffee (which he takes with cream, honey and a sprinkle of nutmeg) at the Starbucks across the street, which seems to be a drift-in centre for people who know Shinan, and the air there suddenly brightens with kisses and sotto voce asides to help fill me in on who these people are, the juiciest ones being about a particularly leggy blonde who really shouldn’t, given those low-slung jeans, be bending quite so deeply over the sweets display counter. But it’s not over yet. There’s a raucous run-in with two lovelies from Startv, but we really, really have to go. We have a suit to buy.

Next stop: Queen and Spadina for Hoax Couture, tailor to teens of all ages and sexes, where Shinan gets deftly measured and provides a running commentary on the fabric sample book (“brown fabric on brown me? No, I’d disappear… This one would be good for attending the Gillers… This grey is too Prince of Wales—I’d have to find me a Camilla…”) till the perfect choice is made and Hoax’s Jim Searle has sketched out a look that Govani approves, that will carry him for months to come from party to dinner to launch to film festival; from New York to Los Angeles to Cannes to Sundance to San Francisco and whatever beyonds might seductively beckon. Oh, the man has a thousand lives, all of them as slick and smooth and paragraphed as the pages of People.

The question, I suppose, is does he have a life?