On any given night in Hollywood, the spray tanned and stilettoed waft across red carpets, clad in Jay Godfrey cocktail dresses. At just 28, the Toronto designer has become the go-to frock star for the freshman sybarite. His dresses are fluid, saucy and available in a happy delirium of centre-of-attention, made-for-paparazzi colours. While Hollywood A-listers (Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kid­man, Gwyneth Paltrow and their rarefied ilk) don custom dresses from the kings of couture for awards ceremonies, Godfrey’s flirty creations are better tailored to today’s party-happy tabloid princesses (think Us magazine, not Vogue). They’re foxy (but not trashy), flashy (but not arresting enough to upstage their wearer) and risk-free (safe from any worst-dressed lists).

Godfrey has loved fashion since he was a kid growing up in the Bridle Path area. While his friends spent summers at Camp Waha­nowin, the son of Blue Jays president Paul Godfrey opted to work at the Hugo Boss showrooms in Downsview. To please his parents, after graduating from Crescent School, he majored in finance at McGill, then later landed a job on Wall Street as an investment banker at Solomon Smith Barney.

It was the colourlessness of the corporate world that was hardest to bear. He’d show up at work wearing outlandish hues, and his boss would pull him aside and tell him to tone it down. After 14 months, he quit and went to Parsons, the New School for Design, followed by a six-month internship at Oscar de la Renta. But he wanted to launch his own line. When he showed his first collection at Toronto Fashion Week in 2004, he didn’t sell a single garment. The clothes were too brazenly sexy, he decided. With a remarkable talent for schmoozing (he’s in no way the hermetic and vulnerable artiste) and a wealth of family support, he forged ahead.

The following season, Godfrey had his first showing at New York Fashion Week, in February 2005. That same year, he married NYU grad student Dara Rakowski (a fellow Torontonian he met on a blind date in New York) at the opulent Mandarin Oriental in Miami Beach. Godfrey, of course, designed the gown (it had 27,000 Swarov­ski crystals and gold beads, hand-embroidered by a seamstress in Switzerland). Godfrey also designed dresses for his wife to wear whenever they went to museum or fashion parties in New York. And after about 20 parties and 20 different dresses, Khajak Keledjian, CEO of high-end retailer Intermix, took notice and asked Godfrey to design a collection for his stores.

“Jay’s dresses are highly designed, with a young feeling,” Keledjian says. “They’re sexy without being cheesy, and his techniques hail from high-fashion couture houses, which is very rare for an upcoming designer.” Until then, Godfrey had been fashioning $5,000 couture gowns for Holt Renfrew. On Keled­jian’s urging, he retooled his approach for the sassier Intermix customer with a line of casual ­cocktail-ready frocks at less forbidding prices—$400 to $600, a price point that balances wallet friendliness with exclusivity.