VIVA MAC

With her extensive and illuminating research, Andrea Benoit tells the powerful story of a fearless company with heart. Harnessing the unbridled creativity that ran rampant in Toronto during M-A-C's formative years, 'the Franks' tapped into the pride and psyche of an entire society and inspired it to new artistic heights. Despite AIDS's dark shadow, Benoit paints a compelling portrait of an exhilarating fashion era, illustrating how courage and compassion can exist on a corporate level when hearts and minds are open and passionate. - Jeanne Beker, Journalist, Author, and Style Editor The book is highly original as there is no other socio-cultural or business history of M-A-C. Benoit fuses a detailed historical record of M-A-C, AIDs within a setting of entrepeneurship and the Toronto fashion scene in a readable and enjoyable style that is framed within relevant critical theories that support and explain these histories that have not previously been delineated. This is a work that should be much referenced. - Alexandra Palmer, Nora E. Vaughan Senior Curator, Textiles & Costume, Royal Ontario Museum This is a story that needs to be told. Todays' generation of fashion students have no history of the losses the industry faced in the 1980s-1990s as the AIDs epidemic was ravishing every level of the fashion and the arts industries. VIVA M-A-C gives them a thorough account of how we got to where we are today. - Susan Baxter, associate professor of Marketing and Dean of Graduate Studies, LIM College What happens when a company engages in 'cause marketing' long before that concept was widely known or practiced? Benoit's study of M-A-C and AIDS-related fundraising during the 1980s and 1990s tells this fascinating story with panache, analytical rigour, and far-ranging historical investigation. This crisply written, multi-disciplinary account will interest scholars in such fields as health and society, LGBTQ studies, critical consumer/marketing studies, fashion history, and media studies. - Daniel J. Robinson, Associate Professor, Media Studies, Western University