Jeanne Beker, the legendary Canadian television host of programs such as Fashion Television and The New Music, has long understood that clothes carry meaning. “From the very beginning, going back to my days as a young girl playing with dolls, I always knew that what we wore was important,” Beker tells Vogue. “I understood that the way we presented ourselves told the world who we were—and sometimes told ourselves who we were.” Her awareness of style, both as a marker of identity and a kind of art form, is precisely why she spent years profiling and documenting the world of high fashion on FT. And now, with a new memoir, Beker is turning the spotlight on her own relationship to clothes.

Heart on My Sleeve: Stories from a Life Well Worn, out today, surveys Beker’s life and career through the pieces in her one-of-a-kind closet. Approaching them rather like artifacts—“They hold memories,” Beker says—the esteemed journalist was eager to examine the connective threads between clothing, experience, and memory. “Fashion can dictate certain adventures in your life and certainly has the potential to transform you,” says Beker. Also not to be missed? The book’s touching foreword by supermodel (and fellow Canadian) Linda Evangelista.

Here, Vogue chats with Beker about her new release.

Vogue: How did the concept for this book come to be?

Jeanne Beker: I was contacted by the publisher, Simon & Schuster, asking if I would be interested in writing a book. I had just announced my cancer diagnosis in 2022 and was undergoing chemo at the time. At first, I thought they wanted me to write about my cancer journey, and I didn’t know how I felt about that. But they wanted me to reminisce about some of the amazing people I’ve met [throughout my career], so I started thinking about an interesting way to do that.

How did you come up with the idea of using clothing and jewlery as a means to do that?

When I was a kid, my mom and big sister had these jewelry boxes on their dressers filled with the most fascinating little trinkets. I spent hours going through them, wondering: Who gave them that? Where did they go? The most precious things, next to memories, are those little tokens. So I pitched that as the idea for the book—writing about my life through the lens of my own jewelry box. But then I decided I had to open it up to my whole wardrobe.