Iman was the star guest at the opening party to celebrate last October’s Fashion Week. The venerable supermodel swanned through the kiss-kiss crowd. Cameras flashed and champagne flutes were hoisted. She smiled patiently—seemingly satisfied to be the only true celebrity in the room. It was the first of dozens of parties held over the next six days. Fourteen thousand people—media, buyers, pretty people and hangers-on—came to see the spring collections of such designers as David Dixon and Joeffer Caoc in a translucent white tent in Nathan Phillips Square that bore a not-coincidental resemblance to the big tents that go up in Bryant Park for New York’s fashion week. Ginch Gonch, an upstart underwear company, sent models out in jungle-themed Y-fronts. For the joint show of streetwear labels Damzels in This Dress and PlayDead Cult, models hoisted chainsaws and Japanese parasols.

The crowds and the parties were bigger than ever, but the chatter in the tent wasn’t about fashion. On October 16, six days before the shows had begun, a blistering, anonymous 2,900-word e-mail had been sent to Mayor David Miller and cc’d to scores of fashion execs, designers and writers. It was a grammatically eccentric missive, written more like a manifesto than a memo, condemning every aspect of the way fashion week is run. The target of the e-mail was Robin Kay, the head of fashion week and president of the Fashion Design Council of Canada, the non-profit that organizes the shows. Long a polarizing figure in the fashion world, she was branded a “tyrant.” The e-mail might have been ignored, dismissed as the mean-spirited outburst of some fashion industry insider with a chip on his shoulder, but the attack included a link to a petition demanding Kay’s termination. Sixty-five people signed it, though only 17 revealed their names. Among them were designer Kendra Francis, modelling agent Jenny Song, costume design guru Malcolm Pearcey and, significantly, Kay’s predecessor at the FDCC, Fred Peddie.

Fashion reporters were so distracted by the public denunciation they couldn’t resist mentioning it in their stories that week. The Toronto Star’s fashion editor, Bernadette Morra, wrote in her column that the e-mail was part of a “brutally ugly” smear campaign. Leanne Delap, the Globe and Mail’s style writer, dismissed it as “a personal attack on Kay and filled with misquotes and slander.” She sympathized with Kay, casting her as a courageous victim who suffered “a barrage of tiresome phone calls while simultaneously trying to smile through a Hello! Canada photo shoot.” The FDCC itself made no official response, and the mayor later told Kay he glanced at the e-mail and trashed it.

The letter effectively hijacked fashion week. Everyone in the tent and on the city’s fashion blogs had an opinion about whether Kay was fit for the job. Rumours had been trailing her for years. She’s renowned for tantrums, snubs and career thwarting. She can also be erratic: at the start of the week, Kay abruptly kicked people out of the media tent, livid because a photographer brought in a hot dog. Shinan Govani, who rarely has anything negative to say about anyone, wrote in his National Post column that a dark pall had fallen over Kay. She is “just one hair’s breadth away from screaming ‘No wire hangers,’ ” he said. Robin Kay had seen better days.

Since she took over the FDCC in 2000, Robin Kay has single-handedly boosted the profile of the once in-consequential fashion week, and in the process helped launch the careers of such young designers as Arthur Mendonça and Thien Le. Before Kay took over, the FDCC had a dysfunctional board, and fashion week was a small spring and fall event with little cachet. Today the FDCC’s members number 350 and range from Paul Hardy and Comrags to Zoran Dobric and Nada Yousif. The council’s main purpose is to promote Canadian fashion. It gives grants to Canadian designers and attempts to raise the country’s fashion profile abroad by coordinating events with Canadian embassies. Fashion week is its most prominent forum, sponsored by the likes of L’Oréal and Holt Renfrew.

The evolution of Toronto as an aspiring fashion capital is so intertwined with Kay’s own development that it’s easy to see why people feel there’s something almost sacrilegious about criticizing her—as if by insulting Kay, you insult the very reputation of Toronto fashion.

Kay was born in 1950 into a manufacturing family (her grandfather, Joseph Kay, started the Winnipeg Cooperage, a barrel company, which evolved into Kay Containers). Ambitious but restless, she dropped out of the University of North Dakota in 1969, then putzed around Europe, working in a jewellery shop in Trafalgar Square and as a cook on a boat in Spain. She came to Toronto in 1975 for a job in the display department of Eaton’s. A year later, she set up a shop which she called Robin, on Bellair, selling clothes, army surplus goods, toys and whatever else struck her fancy. Her destiny, however, was in sweaters. She joined forces with Judit Adam, a knitwear specialist, with Kay in charge of design and Adam overseeing production. Kay had no design training, but the beauty of the cotton knit idea was that she didn’t really need any. The concept, which took her through more than a decade of retail success into minor retail icon status, was a basic one-size-fits-all design, which is essentially how your grandmother made that sweater she gave you for Christmas when you were eight.