Alan Perrott: Oh goody bags, it's Fashion Week

Alan Perrott

So what do you reckon will be the most talked about part of Air New Zealand Fashion Week?

Two words: free stuff.

Sure there's lovely ladies and a handful of chiselled blokes wondering up and down in expensively cobbled together frocks and such, but they don't get much of a look-in until the punters have finished rifling through the bag of treats under their seats.

As a rule of thumb, the better the designer's reputation for quality free stuff, the higher the demand for seats at their show. Horse trading for spots at the Trelise Cooper shows probably started months ago.

As this suggests, Fashion Week is anything but an event for the people. It's about clothes no one really wears. It's about shows almost no one can get into. It's about the serious business of trying to make the rest of the world forget about sheep jokes for a few days, at least.

For the chosen few who have managed to secure tickets and bragging rights, this would be a good time to stock up on a goodly pile of esteem-boosting self-improvement books, because they are about to have their personal value weighed up against the seating plan.

There is no more accurate measure of coolness and connections than where you'll be told to park your bum.

Forget the clothes, it's more fun watching D-list celebrities filled with their glamour visibly shrivel when they realise they've been condemned to the cattle class seats closest to the dunnies. Without bothering to look, they know they'll be lucky to find a crusty chocolate fish rattling about in their goodie bag while the clearly more beautiful and deserving front-rowers opposite roll about in trailorloads of unguents, balms and miscellaneous knick-knackery.

Once internal tantrums have subsided and freebies have been assessed and stashed, there is one last act to perform before the cheesy techno, hip hop or whalesong soundtrack kicks off proceedings. You have to check out who's there and what they're wearing while hoping to catch someone else checking you out.

The models have nothing on the peacockery going on among the audience. If it's murder on the dancefloor, it's war in the bleachers. Last year's man of the match had to be the popinjay with the electric tan who spent each day enthusiastically vogueing about in ridiculous shorts and what looked like a pair of sleeves. Not a bad look if you like a bad look.

But at least he had John Travolta's Saturday Night Fever strut totally sussed. Most of the blokes working the runways sullenly blunder along like mum's just dragged them from the PlayStation to get her a packet of smokes from the dairy.

They should be smiling, the women have far more perilous perils to contend with. Maybe it's the crash dieting, but they make walking look like a second language. You almost want to applaud when they make it to the end without suffering a groin strain or tripping over the mountains of free stuff. Even so, what a wonderful world it would be if we all walked like that every day.

Adding to their trauma are the inevitable wardrobe malfunctions, fashion's equivalent to a motorway accident. When a silky top comes a cropper there is suddenly nothing else in the world that is more interesting. For whatever reason it seems scientists can crash tiny rockets into distant comets, but they just can't figure out how to make decent double-sided tape.

Good on yer fullas.