Frock star: The woman who wears the pants for Fashion Week

By JAN CORBETT

Pieter Stewart looks a lot like Liza Minnelli, but with softer features. She's tall and lean enough to have been on the catwalk when her four children were small, but claims to not photograph well. The New Zealand Fashion Week organiser gets asked to judge small-town fashion shows, but has trouble visualising what a dress looks like when it's on a hanger. For that reason she hates shopping for her wardrobe, and instead asks designers to select outfits for her. She always wears New Zealand-made so she cannot be accused of not supporting the industry she promotes.

Today she is dressed head to toe in an elegant black ensemble from her friend Paula Ryan's range. As she says, black is like a uniform in the fashion industry. The way she tells it Ryan said something like "You'd better grab something from the collection". If she hadn't been meeting sponsors in the morning, she would have been wearing jeans instead, she says. Had it been summer, she would be wearing white. She doesn't go in for frills or flounces.

She has a background in the promotional side of public relations, but shies away from talking about herself, which means Pieter Stewart has a reputation as a tough interview subject. But that's not a reputation she wants, especially for a business dependent on sponsors who are dependent on publicity.

All-up, in an industry where you expect everyone to be sipping their mini-Moet champagne through straws or the new but unlikely plastic funnels, kissing the air next to each other's cheeks and calling each other "Dahling!", Stewart is surprisingly reserved and grounded. She almost transcends fashion, yet there's no doubt Fashion Week is her baby, one she says fits well in the window in her mid-50s life between motherhood and becoming a grandmother.

For Stewart, Fashion Week grew out of her long association with the sector from her early days in Christchurch as a model, modelling agent, associate editor of Fashion Quarterly magazine when Paula Ryan and Don Hope ran it from Christchurch.

When Ryan and Hope brought FQ to Auckland, Stewart took over Ryan's modelling agency, changing its name from Paula's to Pieter's. The agency boasted international covergirls of the day Kirsty Lay and Kirsten Price.

Stewart became director of the Corban's fashion show and then television's Wella Fashion Reports, but when that was pulled from air, she sat down with people in the fashion industry to discuss what they wanted. A fashion week modelled on Sydney's was the answer. The idea sounded simple enough - bring together your local designers, provide a venue, invite international buyers and fashion writers, give them a razzle-dazzle show and wait for the orders to follow.

At the time, New Zealand fashion was imbued with a new confidence. Zambesi, World, Moontide and Wallace Rose had been invited to show in Sydney in 1997, winning critical acclaim for providing a creative edge that the Australian show otherwise lacked. Australian Vogue editor Marion Hulme came here and said memorably that she thought New Zealand was the new Belgium - a reference to the group of Belgian designers who had reinvigorated European fashion in the 1980s.

But when Stewart approached Trade New Zealand with the idea of it supporting an indigenous fashion week, its creative sector events manager Glen Candy could see there would be problems. Candy had been involved in both the London and Sydney fashion weeks, supporting New Zealand designers who had been invited to show their range at both. Although he had no doubt about her organisational ability, he warned Stewart she would be committing herself to a full-time job. With a crowded international fashion schedule, it was going to be difficult to motivate international buyers and writers to leave their offices after returning from the rigorous schedules of the London, New York, Milan and Paris shows, and fly all the way to New Zealand. Candy knew they wouldn't want to be paying for those business class fares themselves.

He also worried that it would be difficult to find enough New Zealand designers with a business large enough to sustain a show and an export order, and enough sponsorship dollars in a small country where competition for sponsors is intense.

It took Stewart two years and an export potential report from Ernst and Young to get Fashion Week off the ground in 2001 and convince Trade New Zealand there would be a $50 export return for every dollar it put in.

The idea that you could interest overseas buyers in New Zealand fashion didn't ever seem absurd to Pieter Stewart, even in the face of scepticism from local media. She is married to a Canterbury deer farmer-turned-yacht charterer, Peter Stewart, (it's particularly important to emphasise the 'i' in Pieter to distinguish husband from wife) son of millionaire businessman Sir Robertson Stewart, who founded international electrical goods company PDL. So she is surrounded by people who've been driven all their working lives by the desire to export. It's what this country does, she points out. And if local fashion designers are serious, they have to export or die. The national inferiority complex is something you have to actually explain to Stewart.

That labels such as Zambesi, Nom D, World and Karen Walker had already gone international on their own, made it easier for Stewart to get traction for a New Zealand fashion week when she first went around the world drumming up interest among buyers and fashion writers. After all, Madonna was already wearing Karen Walker's pants (although this is the first year Walker is showing at Fashion Week). Stewart's biggest score for the inaugural show was getting Hilary Alexander, fashion writer for London's Daily Telegraph, to come here. Last year her star was Sex and the City stylist Rebecca Weinberg.

An informal telephone survey by New Zealand Trade and Enterprise suggested Fashion Week 2002 generated an extra $10 million in export orders.

Stewart's aim is to interest fashionistas not just in New Zealand fashion, but in New Zealand. Now with Fashion Week three years old, it's getting easier, although Trade and Enterprise is still paying many of the airfares.

When he was editor of Apparel magazine, Paul Blomfield was one of those who publicly asked Stewart to justify Fashion Week, while privately believing the time had indeed come. He believes it would never have happened had it been run by someone less stoic. He certainly admires her ability to be "calm in the face of fury".

"She has a wonderful, affectionate and calm side," he goes on. "But on the business level you see a deliberate, organised and sometimes emotionless businessperson."

It may run for only a week in October, but as Glen Candy predicted, for Stewart Fashion Week is a full-time job. The year began with a trade stand at the World Boutique Expo in Hong Kong. In March it was important for her to be at Melbourne's Fashion Festival to maintain contacts with the players in the Australian industry. By April daughter Myken Stewart, whose job is sponsorship liaison manager, was working the American market with a stand at the Los Angeles Designers and Agents show. New Zealand supermodel Kylie Bax was brought in to add her endorsement. By May Stewart was in London armed with garments from 14 New Zealand designers to wow British fashion writers and buyers. Then it was on to New York, and back to Australia.

She and her family travel with ease. The demands of Fashion Week, which has to be in Auckland, mean commuting regularly between Christchurch and her tastefully furnished Ponsonby apartment. Shopping for furniture and decor is the sort of shopping she does enjoy. Myken Stewart had just flown out to London to see a Rolling Stones concert when canvas called. She went with orders from mother to firm up interest from the British contingent while she was there.

For reasons no one quite understands, New Zealand is strong in fashion. Stewart boasts of being able to put together Fashion Week with 50 New Zealand designers, something she says the Australians can't match. She says the Sydney show would struggle without the New Zealand presence.

This year she is bringing Ernst and Young back in to measure Fashion Week's economic impact, not just in earnings and jobs in the fashion industry, but its benefit to the Auckland economy and tourism. While it's easy to assess the orders placed during Fashion Week, "you don't know which orders don't stick," says Stewart. "If you're doing a business, you need some business facts," especially when you're talking to government agencies you need to support you, and for luring and cementing sponsors.

She says even at the inaugural fashion week, the sceptics "realised we did have the critical mass to do it and that fashion is a viable export earner and important to the country - it's not just frivolous frocks."

New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE), which replaced Trade New Zealand this year and invests $175,000 in Fashion Week, estimates that designer fashion exports are earning this country $40 million a year. It is only an estimate, because trade statistics do not distinguish between a $10 shirt and a $200 one. But Glen Candy says what they can measure is the dollar value of each exported apparel item, and that is increasing, suggesting growth is at the designer end of the market. Our total apparel exports are worth $260 million a year, putting it just behind the wine industry in its importance to the nation's economy.

Australia has always been our chief clothing customer, and while that continues, the US, Britain, Hong Kong and Japan are becoming increasingly important markets for New Zealand-made clothing.

However, Trade and Enterprise measures the success of our fashion industry in more than just dollars. It sees it as an ambassador for the country's creativity, quality of workmanship and textile innovation - particularly our advances with merino and possum fibres.

Paul Blomfield is now a design-sector specialist with Trade and Enterprise and is the sceptical-journalist-turned-Fashion Week advocate. It not only gives New Zealand design international recognition but lets young designers test their ability, he says.

The one thing Stewart noticed about New Zealand designers when she started out is how many "don't know how good they are". Not only does Fashion Week build their confidence, but it gives them the chance to meet and talk to other designers and for the more experienced to mentor the newcomers. That there seems to be a healthy supply of newcomers allayed Glen Candy's final concern. What he calls a complex and challenging event "has more than proven itself in its first two years", he says.

* Fashion week runs from October 19 to 24 and is sponsored by the New Zealand Herald.

Herald Feature: New Zealand Fashion Week

L'Oreal New Zealand Fashion Week official site