The 27 years that Fashion Television was on the air were the “golden age of fashion,” says Beker, and she has so many precious memories from that time. There was her close friendship with the late Alexander McQueen (“He always asked me about my love life”), whom she calls “a great truth-seeker” in a world where facades are the norm. Then, from a perch overlooking Westminster Abbey during Prince William and Kate Middleton’s 2011 wedding, she was the first journalist—thanks to an inside scoop—to report that Middleton was wearing the Scottish designer. She cherishes the black-and-white boxy-cut dress with gold and pearl buttons that Karl Lagerfeld gifted her in July 1989 during an interview before a Chanel couture show. (“I was seven months pregnant, and the dress helped me feel beautiful.”) Beker even remembers some of the fashion faux pas with fondness, like the time she showed up to an interview with Madonna wearing the exact same statement-making Anna Sui black-velvet bell-bottom pants. (“Madonna was not amused.”)
There was something very special about that pre-social-media fashion period. “Today, all you have to do is pick up your phone to get ‘fashion television,’ because all the runway shows are livestreamed,” she says. “But back in those days, we had special access. We had backstage passes. We were the ones who could really take you by the hand behind the curtain, blow away some of the smoke and mirrors and show you what the scene was all about.”
Life after Fashion Television has been just as full. Beker not only received the Order of Canada in 2013 but was also inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2016. The year before that, she met the man of her dreams, Iain MacInnes. Then, suddenly, her life changed when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in the spring of 2022. Doctors discovered a three-centimetre mass in her left breast after a routine mammogram, and it turned out to be stage-two breast cancer. Now in remission, Beker underwent chemotherapy, a lumpectomy and radiation and has been very vocal in sharing her experience as a survivor both in the media and on her Instagram account.
Next year will mark the 40th anniversary of the premiere of Fashion Television, and Beker hasn’t thought about what she might do to commemorate it yet. “It’s such a part of me that it never leaves me,” she says. But she does share some news that she plans to announce this October when the book comes out: The Glenbow Museum, an art museum in downtown Calgary, will have a retrospective of her career when it reopens after renovations in 2026. The exhibition will feature symbolic sartorial items—mainly pieces gifted by designers, but there will also be other memorabilia, including invitations and backstage passes as well as many videos from Bell Media and The NewMusic archives—and even a film of her performing mime. Beker is co-curating the exhibition with a dear friend, designer Paul Hardy. “It’s going to be a show about following—and realizing—your dreams,” she says. “Because that’s what my life has been.”