Filling in the Blanks

By FIONA HAWTIN

Tim Blanks last lived in Auckland when the height of global fashion was an Yves Saint Laurent tie.

"When Smith & Caughey's got a shipment of [them] it was a red-letter day. Haute couture hits Auckland. People would stampede off to look at the ties," recalls the fashion guru from his London home as he packs to fly here to be part of Fashion Week.

When his friend Amanda brought a Kenzo dress back from London it was positively revered, so rare were international labels. Well, it was the 70s.

"People would often come up with something more interesting than what they thought was going on in London. A lot of creative people doing great things. There was a lot of vintage - it just wasn't called vintage in those days.

"Of course there was the Cook St market, people buying fox furs. It was quite glam in that respect."

Blanks, who will be filming a fashion television show for a Canadian company at Fashion Week, was finishing a degree in English literature and working part-time when he was living in Auckland in the mid-80s. Pre-Telecom, someone had to manually connect toll calls.

"Somebody in Picton would call somebody in Kerikeri and you had to connect them. It was like something out of a 1940s movie. When I was at Auckland University, students either went to work in an abattoir or tolls.

"It just full of transvestites. It was the most fabulous breeding ground of human exotica. Auckland at that time was incredibly decadent. It was almost Warholian. Everybody was bisexual, it seemed. And the amazing parties."

Twenty years on and Blanks, now 49, who came to fashion via film animation and a career as a magazine writer in Toronto and London, is returning to Auckland during Air New Zealand-sponsored Fashion Week as the face of television's Fashion File to see how far the local fashion scene has come.

This is some of what he knows about it: "I walked into Selfridges in Birmingham and there was a whole wall of Zambesi.

"Karen [Walker's] clothes have a real personality. I'm amazed at how much press she gets here [in Britain]. She has real followers in the fashion media."

He'll be in full Fashion File mode when he's here. The Toronto-produced fashion show came about when, having edited a fashion magazine, Blanks pitched his version of what he thought the British programme The Clothes Show was to the 24-hour news channel CBC Newsworld. He did a pilot in 1989 and he's still doing it 15 years later "like a limpet on a landmine" even though his idea was nothing like the "ghastly" British show.

"If you wanted to be bitchy, you'd say I was the male Elsa Klensch. She doesn't do it anymore. When I first started there was also Jeanne Beker with her show Fashion Tv from Toronto. There used to be three crews backstage at a fashion show. Then the supermodel thing happened and there were 300 crews backstage. Now it's dropped back."

Beamed to 500 million homes in 75 countries, Blanks has the "sad inconvenience" of being recognisable in Mexico, Malaysia or Morocco where they watch his programme religiously.

"I'm in this really weird position of people having grown up with the show which makes me feel like Methuselah, but you get these models from Russia. Like Karolina Kurkova, who said to me, 'The Fashion Files are the reason why I'm a model'. Television makes you familiar to people but it's not like I've got incredible rewards. You don't get any money."

Back when Fashion File was starting out, and as the thinking person's fashion writer for publications such as Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, the Telegraph and the New York Times, Blanks wanted to report fashion in the same respectful way other creative mediums were reported, and not just as the fluff many perceived it to be.

"I did feel an obligation to not treat fashion as a camp joke - all screaming queens and anorexic little girls. There is a whole lot more going on. I think TV has killed fashion on one level because fashion started playing to the gallery and you've got careers like John Galliano, which is very much a circus style of career.

"But I think TV also makes stars of people like Karl Lagerfeld and Jean Paul Gaultier and those models. I think, ultimately, it has elevated fashion and made it just as interesting and relevant or entertaining as music or movies. It's just as personality packed. It's just as volatile."

His life goes like this: menswear in Milan in January, then menswear and couture in Paris, then New York, maybe London, then Milan womenswear.

The fashion route is repeated in September and October with a trip to Brazil or some other part of the world during the year.

He estimates he's seen 6000 fashion shows. After all his time on the circuit, he's not even a definite front-rower for every show.

"I might be front row, I might be second or third and then there are the PR people who ... put me in some crappy seat because they think of Fashion File as Canadian. It's all done by country at some fashion houses. Canadian media rates somewhere with Poland on the cool-o-meter for PR people."

Not that this amiable man of fashion cares where he's put - unlike some of the fashion commentators who absolutely must be front row or it's a no-show.

"As someone once said, 'If you're eating at Le Circe and you're at the table by the kitchen, you're still eating the same food as Jackie Onassis'.

"I don't look like a fashion person. I'm not particularly clothes-conscious. I'm definitely weight-conscious. I kind of look like the old paterfamilias rolling in one more time."

But that hasn't dampened the veteran show-goer's ardour for fashion. He may have seen the mini return again and again since the 80s and witnessed transparent clothing come and go and come and go but every so often, something moves him.

There was Gaultier's mid-90s breathtaking show with tattooed body stockings, Hindu jewellery and models with bits of armour on.

"Another of my favourite shows was the Alexander McQueen show where it rained on the catwalk and the models makeup was running and their clothes were clinging to them.

"And anything by Galliano. I can think of his amazing early shows before he went ga-ga with Bernard Arnault's [LVMH head who owns Christian Dior for whom Galliano designs] bottomless pockets. He did a sort of kimono show all in black in the early 90s. There was lots of dry ice. You almost couldn't see your hand in front of your face and Kate Moss and Johnny Depp emerged from the dry ice ... like Adam and Eve."

The most spectacular was Galliano's show at the Paris Opera House.

"The show happened on the stairs and at the end the heavens opened and this rain of butterflies came down. You couldn't believe you were at a fashion show. It was over in like 20 minutes and that was it. It was only done once.

"It's like one of those insects that comes out of its chrysalis to flap around for about five seconds and die but in that five seconds it's the most beautiful thing you've seen."

Sadly, butterflies are in short supply in Auckland at the moment.


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