Anything can happen on Planet Fashion, as Claire Harvey discovered after spending a day with some of its inhabitants
KEY POINTS:
TOO short. Too tall. Too much cellulite. Too blonde. This is the revenge of the average. Tonight, a roomful of normal people with normal, soft bodies, normal, lank hair, normal frizz, normal overbites, normal wrinkles, even the odd pimple are judging the beautiful people, and finding them wanting.
This is a model-casting, where the designers come to choose clothes-horses for their runway shows. One six-foot gazelle after another strides past our chairs, stops, half-turns, places her hand on her hip, and stands still for the up-and-down glance, the quick dismissal, the subtly shaken head. Sometimes, one of the designers will scribble a tick next to a models name, or add her card to the pile of possibles in his or her lap. But more often, it's no, thanks.
The interesting thing about watching model after model totter past is how strangely they all walk. Being a good walker is half of what modelling is all about and that seems to mean simply being able to walk like a normal person striding down the street confidently. For some reason, it's a rare skill in the modelling world as if when God was handing out slender legs and self-supporting breasts, he compensated by taking away the ability to put one foot in front of the other and look natural.
Instead, the models spend a great deal of time and energy learning how to model-walk, which means lifting the legs high and plonking the feet down, resulting in a jerky hobble, reminiscent of nothing so much as a naughty pony at dressage practice. A pony in 10cm-high heels, that is. And the shoes dont always fit everyone seems to have a horror story of models trying to cope with cavernous or toe-pinching footwear.
It's 7.15pm on a Tuesday, and we're at the Queen St office of edgy young model agency Red11 to check out the bods.
It's basically shopping, says Canvas fashion editor Alice Rycroft. Thats right, shopping for humans. The designers are issued with playing card-style rundowns on each model, containing vital statistics of height, hips, breasts and other bits and studio shots showing them at their open-mouthed, glossy-lipped best. These are used mainly for scribbling "no" or "definitely" or "??". After the show, the fillies come out to mingle with the designers and then head out into the night, throwing coats and scarves over the tiny dresses and skimpy singlets they wore on the catwalk. What sort of reactions do stunningly beautiful people like this get when they walk down an average street? Do people stop and stare? Not really. For the most part, they seem to be largely ignored one knockout blonde looks pretty much like any other blonde when she's wearing a beanie and a parka.
ACROSS town, a makeup artist is loading suitcases of cosmetics into her car for an early fashion shoot. In fluorescent-bright studios, designers fret over crumpled patterns, while magazine production staff sweat over their lightboxes and outworkers sewing machines judder-hum through the darkness, stitching up next seasons highwaisted trousers and low-slung hotpants.
On any given day, hundreds of scenes like this are unfolding around New Zealand, fuelling a vast and often unseen clothing industry. Fashion Weeks organisers say the frock festival is worth $33 million to the economy each year, but thats just the glossy tip of the enormous fashion and textile business, producing $534.5 million in exports annually comparable with, as the industrys representatives like to point out, the wine trade.
For most labels, though, fashion is hard graft for little monetary reward and even hosting a Fashion Week show is a terrifyingly expensive undertaking.
"It's costing me about $1500 a minute," says designer Juliette Hogan, who is among those scrutinising the bums and breasts at the model-casting. While preparing her second Fashion Week show (a task which sends some less organised designers into a month of insomniacal body torture), Hogan has also been sanding floors and painting walls in her new shop, on Ponsonby Rd. "It's good to be busy," she says with glorious understatement. Indeed, most in the New Zealand rag trade seem to work two or three jobs; the designers who work in retail, the magazine editors who do PR, the models who work in TV. It makes for a soapie-set intimacy at times, with everyone knowing exactly what goes on behind the neighbours lace curtains, but there also seems a sense of tight-budget humility layered above the competitiveness and bitchery.
THE following morning, the same group of designers, plus a few extras, gather at another modelling agency to do it all again. The crowd, including Dan Buckley and Steven Dunstan from Huffer, the crew from Stolen Girlfriends Club and Marisa Findlay from Zambesi, sit in the courtyard of Newton cafe Benediction, shivering over their hot chocolates and bacon-and-egg panini while waiting for the show to start.
This is the showcase for established agency Nova Models, and the girls and boys stride down an elevated glass runway, all wearing identical denim shorts and black singlets. This is a slick operation the girls lipstick is all the same colour (an eye-popping orange/red), as is their matching toenail polish. Hair and fake tans are all perfect. The boys, meanwhile, have gelled their mullet-mohawks but thats about it male modelling seems a far lower-maintenance kind of gig. Interestingly, the boys walk like normal teenagers rather than gymkhana colts; slumped shoulders, concave chests, hands dangling awkardly by their sides.
Later, one model confides fashion shows are often more trouble than they're worth. "Why would I want to earn $200 a day for a catwalk show, which involves basically sitting around waiting for seven hours, when I can earn $250 an hour to do a catalogue?" And $200 is generous - most of the models at Fashion Week earn only $100 per show - although the trade-off is greater exposure for more lucrative magazine and campaign work.
BY 11am, it's time for model Tamati Williams to take off his clothes. We're on Waiheke Island, aboard a charmingly rickety white houseboat, and Williams, who has been serenely listening to his MP3 player for the last few hours while a frenzy of grooming blurred around him, is one of the stars of today's fashion shoot for a new glossy magazine.
Stylist Sonia Greenslade tells Williams it's time to work, and he starts shrugging out of his jacket. "You'll just be wearing pants, is that OK?" Greenslade asks, proffering a pair of pale blue trousers.
Williams hesitates. It's not the nudity itself thats bothering him he has already taken off his shoes and is starting to wriggle out of his jeans he's concerned that Greenslade might not be impressed with what she sees. "Ah, Ive got a graze on my chest from soccer," he says.
It's an occupational hazard; Williams is a New Zealand representative goalkeeper.
Greenslade isnt going to let a flesh-wound bother her. "Oh, we like the natural look," she says. "Do you want to go into the other room to change?"
The question is redundant, really. Williams is already pulling on the trousers. "Honestly, I really dont care who sees, he says. Ive had too many years of taking my clothes off in front of complete strangers."
Pants on, he walks into the bedroom, where his colleague Alysha Dawn is curled up languidly on the bed, wearing blue pyjama pants and a camisole. She has her eyes shut, as if dozing. Standing in the corner, photographer Monty Adams is holding up his light-meter while his assistant Juliette Ramshaw unfolds a light-reflecting screen to capture as much sunlight as possible. Williams stretches out on the bed behind Dawn, and puts one hand casually on her hip.
It's almost shockingly intimate; the look is post-coital ruffle, but the models dont make eye contact or chat to one another, just clinically obeying the photographers instructions. "Put your arm under her head, Tamati," says Adams; "shift your knee that way a bit. That crotch looks a bit strange," he says, leaning forward to adjust the trousers a little. "We need you to look like you're doing something wheres that Harry Potter book?" He hands a copy of the latest wizard doorstopper to Williams, who props it up on his chest.
"Now we just need the sun to behave itself," Adams says, as the sky becomes briefly gloomy under scuttling clouds. He glares through the window towards his unco-operative light-source. "Come out!" he commands. A minute or so later, the sun obeys, flooding the room with light.
All this began six hours earlier, when makeup artist Carolyn Haslett and stylist Sonia Greenslade rose to begin preparing the racks of clothing and cosmetics they need for a day on the fashion frontline. Between them, Haslett and Greenslade have enough gear to equip a very good-looking army for a year; hair straighteners, eyelash curlers, scores of shades of foundation, powder, eyeshadow; outfits ranging from bedroom dishevelment to high-street glamour and a selection of costume hats in various degrees of sparkle. As soon as the models arrived collected from the ferry wharf by Adams at 9.35am Haslett set to work transforming Dawn from merely beautiful to exquisite. Haslett also manicured Dawns nails and curled her hair for a how-to story on hair irons, for which Haslett also took the photographs, rushing back and forth across the room to rearrange the curls perfectly for each shot. "God, it's hot in here," Haslett said, pulling at the neck of her woollen jumper as the team left Adams home for the short drive to the houseboat. Dawn put on her sunglasses, prompting dismay from Haslett: "Oh please, no, you'll leave those little red marks on your nose, and theyll take forever to disappear."
THERE are only one or two customers browsing the racks at Britomart fashion store Made at 11am on a weekday morning; a moment of respite for owners Madeleine Richards and Margot Wilson. The two friends Richards is also the designer of Auckland label Maw set up shop together in an old Customs St warehouse in December, with an eye to broadening the range of international labels available in Auckland, as well as retailing top-shelf local designs. "The store was derelict for 20 years, and apart from rewiring and installing furniture and chandeliers, we tried not to change things too much," Richards laughs. Smart move the luxe/grit juxtaposition would have cost a fortune if it had come from an interior decorators imagination.
The two women are just back from an overseas buying trip and are arranging appointments in Australia the following week to source more garments, as well as stocktaking and contemplating what theyll pick up from this years local lineup at Fashion Week.
"Aucklands a small market and can be quite frustrating because a lot of people are very conservative in their tastes; we get a lot of people coming in and saying I love this but I could never wear it," Richards says. "We really try to buy more colourful and less predictable stuff and bring it to the market; and I think people are slowly getting more adventurous." Her own Maw garments are scattered throughout the shop amid the European, Asian and Australian labels, and Richards says she's always quietly thrilled when a shopper chooses a New Zealand garment. "I insist on all Maws production being done in New Zealand, and although that means the garment will be more expensive, I know itll be made so beautifully and it's important not to underestimate the international value of a 'made in New Zealand' label," Richards says. "But I worry that eventually therell be no one left in New Zealand who can do the work most of the production is done by women in their 40s and 50s. Whos going to take over that work when they retire?"
"WHAT I'd like to do," says model Joshua Skelton, all black ringlets and blue eyes, "is be a neuroscientist." Skelton, 19, is a Hot Young Thing with an unconventional look rather than chiselled jaw and manly brow, he's delicate and skinny, often photographed with his hair iron-straightened and hanging around his face, giving the effect of a younger and unlipsticked Marilyn Manson. This Saturday morning, he's just walked into a backstreet warehouse in Newton, the new studio of photographer Charles Howells. It's a fashion shoot for Black magazine, and while the publication's editor Rachael Churchward and her team confer studiously over a rack of clothes, Skelton walks in and sits down on a sofa next to a young woman of similar skinny delicacy. The two models dont chat with one another; both look either bored or terrified, it's not entirely clear which. Today's shoot, says Churchward, is "all about colour." She's tired this morning, having been up sub-editing until 2am with Blacks producer Sarah Haugh. "We started the magazine [in 2006] for people like ourselves; people interested in art and photography and good writing. We're not trying to appeal to the masses."
Hence the choice of model Skelton has, in the words of his agent, Lisa Williams of modelling agency Vanity Walk, a "distinctive" look. In 2005, aged 17, he was working as a technician at a bowling alley when a friend asked him to help with a hair show. "I was under the impression I was just going to get my hair cut but they wanted me to walk down a catwalk," he says. "I said 'no way,' but in the end I did it, and it wasnt so bad. The lady organising it said I could get some modelling work and told me to contact Vanity Walk." It was a year before he got around to picking up the phone, and Lisa Williams found him work immediately with the sort of clients who love delicate and skinny; now-defunct fashion magazine Pavement, Zambesi, Little Brother, Pulp. Now, Skelton is living near his parents in Te Atatu, west Auckland, and working for his dad's house-painting business between modelling gigs. He doesn't seem to actively dislike spending his Saturdays with the straightening irons and makeup brushes, but doesn't seem to get any particular kick out of it, either. "I'm fascinated by neuroscience, by the brain and the way it works but my real passion is writing, and I love philosophy so maybe this is my way to get overseas and study. Modelling's not something I pursue. I wouldnt consider it a hobby; I dont even consider myself a model it's interesting in some senses, meeting different people, and I guess it helps you to grow up a bit."
"EYEBROWS," says makeup artist Lisa Matson. "What are your thoughts?" It's a chilly Friday, and Matson is helping craft a Fashion Week look for the runway show of designer Alissa Serdoun. The women are meeting in Serdoun's inner-city shop with hairstylist Michelle Ogden, creative director of the Rodney Wayne salon group and Fashion Week ambassador for LOreal. Serdouns clothes are distinctively 80s-inspired, and she wants her models to stride down the catwalk with dark, dramatic eyes, dewy skin and hair slicked back in ponytails. "I think we'll go for a nice gelled brow," says Matson, pondering a magazine photograph Serdoun has brought for reference, featuring a model with black shadow and thick eyeliner. "That way we can keep the focus on the eyes. And nude lips, I think." Serdoun nods. The collection was inspired by the 1963 movie, Ieri, Oggi, Domani (Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow), starring Sophia Loren and a great deal of black eyeliner. "I loved the look. Everything except the big hair," says Serdoun. Hairstylist Ogden knows what to do; "very sleek, slick, long ponytails. Well organise hair extensions for any of the models with short hair." As they talk, Matsons son, Cole, 2, runs around the boutique, pausing occasionally in front of a wall mirror to gaze at his reflection.
WITH a firm twist, Paris' arm snaps off and falls to the department store floor. Scarlett is having a bit of trouble getting her trousers on, but once she lies flat on her back they slither up past her naked thighs. Audrey just stands there, her black bob supernaturally glossy. These are "the new girls" at Smith and Caughey's, mannequins newly purchased to give a fresh look to the Queen St store's collection of male and female dummies, some of which are 20 years old. "These girls are very lifelike, which makes them a lot of fun to work with," says visual merchandising manager Ryan Aldred, who will spend the afternoon dressing the mannequins in a new range of glittering spring-summer frocks, assisted by his team members Jasmin Dentice and Ngawai Chiu. Aldred and Dentice are both fine art graduates, while Chiu is training to be a fashion designer, and together they are the creativity behind Smith and Caugheys stores public face, including window displays and all in-store merchandising. It's only September, but they're about to get into the three-month onslaught of reindeer and baubles that is Christmas.
"People think you're a bit nutty when they ask what happened at work today and you say 'I did 80 Christmas trees,'" says Aldred, as Dentice slips a gown (price-tag $5050) over one of the models heads, and Chiu briskly flips another girl over her knee. "We get to put our creative flair across the whole store; it's great fun."
THERE are several ways to display a pair of bright pink hair-tongs, but fashion publicist Murray Bevan knows just which ones to avoid.
We're at the Karangahape Rd studios of indie broadcaster Alt TV at 8pm on a Thursday, where Bevan is doing his night job as producer of weekly fashion show The Seen, hosted by model Anna Fitzpatrick, who also happens to be Bevan's girlfriend.
Everyone at Alt is a volunteer, but in return for the long hours and slightly crumbly studio, they're all getting valuable experience or, in Bevan's case, great exposure for his clients. He's already tacked up a backdrop of posters featuring eyewear by Karen Walker, who also sponsors the show's wardrobe; tonights guest is another designer from his Showroom 22 stable, Juliette Hogan; and the giveaway of GHD hair-straighteners is also his handiwork.
The shows big asset is Fitzpatrick, a striking 21-year-old who's part-way through a broadcasting degree. She settles on a sofa in one corner of the warehouse, calmly waits for the camera to start rolling, and launches into tonights lineup of fashion news, music videos and her interview, as viewers send text-message bids to win the hair-tongs. I" was incredibly nervous when I started doing this," Fitzpatrick says just before tonights show, a soothing glass of white wine in one hand, "but I'm so used to it now it's almost easy. And I'm incredibly lucky to be coming out of my degree with several years of live hosting experience." She is fortunate also in the shape of the local fashion trade the industry is small enough for The Seen to be able to attract big-name designers as interviewees, and large enough to provide a varied lineup.
Bevan, who started as an assistant to Karen Walker before setting up his consultancy, lounges on a sofa off-set. Like nearly everyone in the industry, he plays multiple roles; producing photo shoots for international magazines like Elle UK edition and Time, running a showroom for commercial buyers to browse upcoming lines and doing straight public-relations. He's glad, he says quietly, mindful of the live microphones, to see the industry becoming broader and more professional even if that means more competition for the public-relations dollar. "It's not long ago that Karen Walker was the only designer in the local industry who knew how to use PR to her advantage," Bevan says, "but things are changing, and that's good for everyone."
