Access all areas: the Fashion Week insider

Jenna Sauers - Sunday Star Times

AT RICHIE Rich and Pamela Anderson's press conference for the launch of their eco-friendly swimwear label A*Muse, the legendary New York club kid-turned-designer had a question for the audience.

He and Anderson who was wearing a long, loose pink scarf as a dress had already entertained queries ranging from the mundane (a TVNZ reporter asked, "What's the next big revolution from Pamela Anderson?" The actress quipped, "Revolution? This revolution will not be televised") to the bizarre (the Woman's Weekly wanted to know if Pammie was planning to drop in on her co-star from 1996's Barb Wire, Temuera Morrison "He's from New Zealand, he's a Maori," the reporter explained), to the judgemental ("How would you like to see your daughter dressing? As little as you?").

Then Rich, in his high-pitched nasal voice, had one for the crowd: "What separates New Zealand Fashion Week from the rest of the world, of all the fashion shows?"

The roomful of opinion leaders and camera wielders was strangely silent. An Australian blogger ducked the query.

"Is that a bad question? I was just wondering," mused Rich.

A writer for Front Row Diary piped up with the generic soundbite on this country's style: "We're edgier, darker, we like lots of layering."

The TVNZ reporter stood to say the difference is "A larger proliferance [sic] of Maori." Then, silence.

So what to make of the national modifier? What separates New Zealand fashion from the rest of the world's, besides the 15,000km between Auckland and New York?

"Nothing," says a glum foreign model on the last day of shows. "It's the same as anywhere. The same fake people." She shrugs. (I found Kiwis employed in fashion more genuine than in some other markets, but perhaps I'm just parochial.)

"We are small," says Pieter Stewart, the founder and managing director of Air New Zealand Fashion Week. Which is true: New Zealand's fashion industry is small, and our show schedule is light by international standards.

"But that's how we can do it I want the delegates to have a good experience, and I think it's because we're small that we can give that experience. We can look after people better than any big city."

This year, ANZFW attracted 38 designers slightly fewer than last year who showed their wares for Winter 2010 in 26 runway shows held over four days. A further 15 companies pressed the buyers' flesh, or aimed to, in trade show booths in one gigantic shed; the delegates totalled, according to Stewart, over 700, comprising industry spectators, members of the press, and retailers or showroom representatives from New Zealand and overseas.

Fashion Week's value to the New Zealand economy, according to a 2006 study commissioned by Stewart's company, clocked in at just over $20 million (an updated study, in conjunction with the Auckland City Council, is in the works).

It's rare that you fully forget that the events take place inside a giant metal shed. "It's not the easiest venue," laughs Stewart. "Let's face it, we are sitting at the moment in a car park." Actually, a boat shed cunningly disguised with rugs, draperies, and lamps

You remember the building's original purpose, suddenly, when the rain thunders onto the corrugated iron roof, invisible above the stage lights and the tented fabric ceiling, while the hundreds of well-dressed guests are finally taking their seats at a runway show. Or when a wrong turn backstage back-ends into a clanging set of metal steps leading to the offices of Integrated Marine Group, superyacht specialists.

Some sectors of the sheds wear the disguise better than others. While the invitation-only Air New Zealand Lounge, located far above the madding crowd, is like a separate world of Le Corbusier chaise longues, Noguchi tables and free booze, the common backstage area is a remnant-carpeted rabbit warren of jerry-rigged partitions.

There is unlikely to be any food there, even though many of the models, makeup artists and dressers work all day without breaks from call-time to call-time, although someone is certain to try and interest you in a sponsored Red Bull if you linger.

This kind of mixed use is true of Auckland's Viaduct in general: the industrial near-past of warehouses and tank farms co-mingles at the water's edge with the still-dawning future of private boats and "luxury" apartments. And as with the case of industrial-turned-creative suburbs the world over, such a history of obvious usefulness tends to leave certain indelible marks on a neighbourhood. Especially when the thing you're transitioning to escapes easy definition.

ON THE morning of her fashion show, Kate Sylvester rose at 5.30 to begin her last preparations for the 15-minute event that would represent the culmination of five months' work. But first came something more pressing: "I have three sons," said the designer, "and the nutty thing was that I found myself having to make their goddamn school sandwiches and things." She laughed, exasperated, as dressers, stylists, hair and makeup artists and models scrambled to get ready. "Oh, my God, that nearly killed me. Two worlds colliding."

A certain fluidity of roles seems to set New Zealand fashion apart whether because the smaller market precludes too much specialisation, or because of cultural inclinations that entitle New Zealanders to do, or at least attempt, pretty much everything that crosses our minds.

This isn't a fashion scene that's edgy so much as out on the very edges of things. There's the liminal space of the Viaduct and the sheds, but there's also the fact that Sylvester's stylist, the photographer Karen Inderbitzen-Waller, put together not only Sylvester's trim, androgynous collection (the signature moment was when male model PCBlaas walked in a silk nightgown, leather boots and a skinny wool scarf), but also Annah Stretton's Freda Stark-inspired 1940s-themed collection, and Nom*D's lovingly, intensely deconstructed Sky City theatre show, which made the young models look like characters from a much more dark and convincing The Tribe.

Nicky Harmison, who runs the Fashion Week office, started off at the sheds as a volunteer dresser, before working for a fashion designer, and then becoming a show producer. Editors here who work for one magazine, freelance plentifully for others. Part-time retailers on buying trips phone in to report Fashion Week updates for Radio Active. Juliette Hogan and Twentysevennames, two very different labels, showed together.

Hair stylists are also makeup artists are also photographers. Models write fiction in their spare time (or at least, one charming 19-year-old I met does). Producers handle a bit of PR. And some of those uniformed flight attendant show ushers really work for Air New Zealand. This is a fashion week where everything bleeds through.

Another of the many shows Inderbitzen-Waller styled, Stolen Girlfriends Club, took place at a Masonic Temple above a sports pub in Newton. In the small front bar where the fashion crowd mostly dressed, indeed, in edgy, dark layers amassed to avoid the rain, a pub quiz was in progress, and regulars shouted their answers over the din while the bartender pulled pints in front of a framed 1995 Warriors jersey.

The place smelled faintly of mildew, and the show full of 1970s western regalia and beautiful jerseys started 90 minutes late, either because of a bad spill backstage, or because of the organisers' patience in awaiting Rich and Anderson's promised front-row appearance. (The duo never showed. Perhaps they were bedazzling their wares. "I'm putting her to work," said Rich. "It's like, hello!")

Ruby Higgins, the New Zealand's Next Top Model contestant who reported on Fashion Week for C4, asked the pair the most apposite question of the whole press conference. Given Anderson's love of both animals and the environment, Higgins wanted to know what she thought of a country like ours, where non-native pests wreak havoc on the ecosystem.

"I know you guys have a possum problem here, and people are making collars out of possums, which is crazy," said Anderson, who related an anecdote about her and her sons' volunteer work for a wildlife centre in California where, on occasion, the family Anderson feeds orphaned baby possums with eyedroppers.

"I think anything with a heartbeat should be respected. I don't think they should be made into clothing."

Perhaps that, in a nutshell, is New Zealand fashion: a nation where wearing fur can actually help the environment and generate a lot of overlaps that would, in another context, be contradictory. Maybe that's also why we're so into layering.

In a country where a pub quiz can tolerably merge with a showcase for a label worn by Ashlee Simpson, perhaps we're already past Richie Rich's signature message, "be yourself and be fun and be who you are".

Kiwi Jenna Sauers modelled on catwalks around the world and for magazines including Marie Claire and Harper's Bazaar. But away from the cameras she was Tatiana Anymodel, behind-the-scenes blogger on the fashion world. She is now retired from the runway and blogged during New Zealand Fashion Week for stuff.co.nz.