Fashion Week founder whirring up a fashion storm

Pieter Stewart is decidedly unfrivolous in a world seen by many as the height of frivolity. Picture / Dean Purcell

There was a dilemma about what to wear to interview the woman who invented New Zealand Fashion Week. But Pieter Stewart said she'd be wearing her tracksuit. I said I bet it would be flash and she said "it isn't."

The fashion girls said: "She won't be wearing a track suit."

She was. "Well, I told you I would be. Look at all the stuff I've got to do today, getting tickets out and running down to the venue ... High heels don't work."

It looked like a perfectly nice sort of tracksuit to me. "Glassons, is it?" "Bits and pieces. I don't know what that is," she says peering at her hoodie as though she's never seen it before. "I actually live in things like this a lot of the time."

The shoes are silver adidas runners. She doesn't like frills or flounces. She likes being comfortable. Because she's having her picture taken, she has put on some "fluff" - her word for make-up - but the older she gets, the less she bothers.

I ask what, if clothes reveal anything about personality, hers might say about her. "Boring, eh?" she said. "Plain."

This is quite a relief because I'd been looking at a picture in the Herald's canvas magazine taken two years ago in which she is wearing an intimidating get-up: black lace trousers and a black lurexy top with a big frou-frou thing on one shoulder.

"Yes, I know," she says, sounding a bit embarrassed, "but that was to go for a dinner."

She is not a silly sort and I wonder whether she ever looks at some of that stuff on the catwalk and thinks: "God, that's awful. I wouldn't let my daughter's dog wear that."

Her daughter's dog, Kura, a chocolate lab, is at this moment on a blanket in the office slobbering over a bone, spitting out bits of blood and marrow. This is not very fashion worldy. It is, I suspect, very Stewart. To a point. Of course she doesn't think any of the fashion is dotty. She loves it all.

She is a Canterbury farmer's wife: she and husband Peter have lived on their deer farm for 35 years although he is now concentrating on his yacht charter business. Still, "I wasn't an outdoor sort of feeding-out person." This is not because she was worried about breaking a nail. "You can't take four children in a truck."

She used to be a model, "in the deep, dark ages", and "I modelled when I was first married mainly because it was a good way of getting a bit of pocket money." We'll get to the money in a bit, but, really, was her husband too mean to give it to her? She shrieks, "No, no, no! Not at all."

Anyway, she pretty soon got sick of taking clothes on and off. "I couldn't be bothered changing." She still hates this, so she gets a stylist to buy clothes for her. "I love lovely clothes but I just don't find it exciting to go out shopping. I'm not a clothes horse."

She says she is naturally pretty calm - which you imagine you'd have to be dealing with fashion folk's egos. But she works at it. "I'm a great sort of whirrer. I have things whirring around in my brain."

She keeps an amethyst in her bag. "It just feels good. It's an in-touch sort of thing that I like. I've got quite a few crystals and bits and pieces at home." She meditates every morning, "particularly at the moment". I ask if she's a New Ager. "No, I'm not. But I have done quite a bit of personal growth courses and things over the years and I do have somebody that I work with regularly in Christchurch."

Which is a good thing for everyone because after five years of Fashion Week, "if I go haywire, which of course I could, I can expect 400 people to do the same."

Her business philosophy is simple: "You get what you give, don't you? If you get up in the morning and kick the cat, you can expect the cat to turn around and scratch you. Whereas if you're nice to the cat it'll be quite nice to you."

I think she could be pretty strict, though. She likes energetic people. In other words, people like her. She likes everything to be organised just so. She says, sounding quite pleased, that "on boards that I've chaired, I've had a couple of my male counterparts from time to time say that I rule with an iron hand. Maybe I do."

She's done voluntary work for years: Plunket, PTA, a child cancer trust in Christchurch, was chairwoman of a independent girls' school board for 10 years. "Now is the first time I'm not doing anything charitable."

She'd rather not do interviews but promoting things is what she's good at. She is bad at talking about herself so when she lets slip something that's not, in fact, very personal at all, she says I can't use it. "It's just not necessary to be written about. You can say I had a time when I wasn't able to work at which stage I did some Massey papers." How bossy.

She does tell me her parents were publicans in Christchurch and that growing up in hotels wasn't much fun but she won't tell her age. "I'm in my late 50s." How late? "Late enough." This makes her sound coy. "No, not really. But, you know, I just try to keep personal stuff out of what I do as much as possible."

When I said I was interviewing Pieter Stewart, one of the fashion mavens at the office said: "She has model good looks, she was accepted for medical school and she married a stinking rich bloke. What's not to hate about her? And she's nice."

A way to find out how nice she is - given her dislike of anything personal - is to put this to her.

I've already asked her about becoming a doctor and she says, "Oh, yeah. How did you know that? I would have liked to have been. I started at university but then I went off and started doing other things. I don't really have regrets but it was something I would have liked to have done that I didn't do."

She hoots at the idea of her rolling-in-it husband, son of the very rich businessman, Sir Robertson Stewart.

"Ooh, he'd love to know that he's stinking rich, and I'd love to know that he's stinking rich as well. Unfortunately. I mean, the sort of perception that I've never gone into, and won't now ... You know, my husband, his father was a very successful manufacturer. But that doesn't make him stinking rich."

At a guess, though, she doesn't need to worry too much, which is possibly why she's bemused over the Fashion Week obsession with the cargo cult of the goody bag. Without ever having been to a Fashion Week, I know that it is not done to look in your goody bag at the show. "Oh," she says, "I didn't know about that. If I've got a bag, I'm going through it." But it's all very competitive: about who got what and which designers are tight. "In fact, sometimes I think I wish they didn't do them at all."

Really, she is - but for the crystal stroking and so on - the most unfrivolous woman imaginable in a business many think of as being the ultimate in frivolity. Except, of course, it is a business, and a tough one. She says it just happens to be fashion, it could have been anything.

She drops me back at work and on the way a journalist calls complaining about not being able to register. "Oh, how in the world would I know what's going on?" she complains after she's hung up.

This is for show. She knows exactly what's going on. She doesn't wear "frou-frou" because "you put me in it and I look stupid". It is what she doesn't wear that reveals more than what she does.