Meg Williams, the chief executive of World of WearableArt – that flamboyant fashion and design spectacle that is part-theatre and part-circus– is valiantly making a not entirely successful effort to be a bit more WOW-y with her wardrobe.
She’s a Wellingtonian through and through, despite the West Sussex accent – the legacy of her upbringing in the oh-so-English village of Horsham. She took to an artsy Wellington life as though she’d actually been born there, so of course she wears a lot of black. It is obligatory.
If you live in Wellington, you wear black, although you can accessorise it with wacky jewellery. I’d seen a picture of her wearing tartan trousers. Tartan trousers, I say, hopefully, might be a bit flamboyant.
“Well, I wouldn’t call myself a flamboyant dresser,” says Williams. “I wouldn’t even say that I like fashion because that would suggest that I’m very knowledgeable in it, which I’m not. I love design. And actually, since I’ve had this job, I do feel a little bit more permission to wear some of the things that are hidden in the back of my wardrobe.”
She does a mental rummage through the back of her wardrobe for something flamboyant and, voilà, conjures a gold glitter jacket. This is a relief to both of us. In truth, she is more chief executive, appropriately given her job title, than ringmaster. She is calm and sensible and practical and efficient, which is what you’d expect from a juggler of budgets and people and expectations, which is what chief executives do, really.
She is talking to me from her office. It’s not flash, but it does have a nice view of Wellington Harbour. She began her career in event management in the UK, sticking up posters and volunteering.
She’s seen the insides of many offices. Some have been “completely mad”, she says. She’s worked out of portacabins and the crypt of a London church.
“I was really lucky I had a little office in the gate of Canterbury Cathedral.” How romantic. “I know. And the coolest thing about it was it had these stone stairs. They went a particular way. They went up in a spiral … so that you could carry a sword down but you couldn’t swing a sword up if you were defending yourself. But it was really absolutely inconvenient if you were carrying boxes of brochures up, which I was doing most of the time.
“When they closed the gates at the end of the night, there would be this huge clang. It was an extraordinary place to work. If you had a really bad day, you could go to Evensong and there would just be the choristers singing.”
The gate was finished circa 1520. Working from the gate would be like having an office in Hogwarts – as wow-y as WOW.
Her Wellington office is in the Shed Five complex on Queens Wharf. It is just a production office and just a production office is all she requires. “I don’t have high needs.”
It is a stretch, but not too much of a stretch, to say she got into event management because she had lanyard envy and she really, really wanted one of her own. I assume she has by now got a collection of lanyards. That is one definition of achieving your ambitions.
Owl vs peacock
She has written on her LinkedIn page, in two posts, that since she gave up drinking five years ago, “the effect has been that at times I’m more serious, rather earnest and probably not as much fun”.
Have other people intimated that she’s not as much fun, or is that her own observation? The latter, she thinks. “You know, there’s lots of other ways to find that fun. I think I really found it through music and other things.”
She doesn’t want to examine this, despite having done so herself on those posts. She wrote: “You’re ‘boring as fuck down the pub’.” She says now, “It’s not something I want to be defined by, Michele.”
That might sound as though she regrets writing those posts. “I don’t think so. I mean, I wouldn’t say I regret that.”
Okay, let’s settle for she regrets being asked about them. But given that she has written about it on a public forum, it seemed reasonable to ask. And it was a bit of a shame because her posts are erudite and funny and clever and colloquial. All of which are obviously engaging aspects of her character.
I said: “How’s your inner owl?” She said: “What do you mean my inner owl?”
It does sound like a peculiar question, but I got it from her. This is from one of her posts: “Someone told me that they did a personality test at work that rated you as different types of birds (I know, it’s gone too far). Anyway, on this fowl metric, the person reckoned I was part-owl, part-peacock … The studious owl looks down unblinking at my peacock, hooting dismissively at the insufferable show-off prancing about on the lawn.
“So, under its sober glare, the peacock has slunk behind a bit of topiaried hedge, ashamed … I need to coax it out and ruffle those feathers every once in a while. A bit vulgar perhaps, but still me, and the owl will drop a bit of half-eaten mouse on its head if it gets out of hand.” See, erudite, funny, etc.
This is what she does for fun: sings in the shower, plays her ukulele. Not at the same time, obviously. She likes folk music. She founded a “slow-reading” club where you join other people at the library, and read your book in blessed, companionable silence. Turn your phone off at the door.
I think she likes to be in charge of her narrative. Which is quite possibly another characteristic of the chief executive. If she doesn’t want to answer a question, she swerves it. Or just doesn’t answer. As in Not A Word. Most people can’t hold their nerve.
I asked – because in my experience the majority of artists, with whom she has spent her working life, tend to be left-wingers – if she was a leftie. She replied by saying, “I think that arts, culture and creativity is really important. And I think that … I don’t know. I’ve never been asked that question before.”
I don’t actually care what her politics are. Or whether whatever they are would in any way do the dreaded defining thing. I was simply trying to get a sense of who she is, beyond being the chief executive. She could have just told me to bugger off, or some variation of bugger off. That’s what most people do when you ask them about their politics.
If she was an actor, she would not be the sort of actor who is happy to go wildly off script. She would not be an improv artist. Well, she does have a background in marketing. She obviously regarded what I wanted to be a profile of her to be a profile of WOW. Again, fair enough, except for the fact that, for one thing, I don’t work in PR, and for another, it made, unfortunately, for a rather stop-starty interview.
Runway secrets
In 2002, then-prime minister Helen Clark made an appearance in a “Crest of a Wave” costume, topped by a fantastic headdress. Jacinda Ardern was the “surprise” model at the 2022 awards. She wore a modern-day interpretation of a korowai, and bare feet. Can Williams top that? She can’t say. And, “It doesn’t happen every year, it’s important to say.”
I say I can’t imagine the current prime minister doing something like that. It was a joke. Not the best joke ever, I admit. But the idea of Christopher Luxon walking the runway dressed as, say, a giant is kind of amusing. At least to me. I didn’t bother pushing that particular extension of my not very good joke. She was keeping mum. Not A Word. So, will he be making a surprise appearance? Patently, it wouldn’t be a secret if he is and she had told me. So don’t ask me. And, really, don’t ask her. Bad idea.
What makes a good boss
Williams’ husband, Olly Bisson, works in the high learning needs unit at Rongotai College. They have a daughter, Bess, aged 7, who is already an enthusiastic companion on artistic outings.
Both of Williams’ parents are biologists. Her mother is in research, her father a teacher. Her parents separated when she was about five and her father moved to New Zealand. She has a brother, Tom, who still lives in the UK. He is a carpenter and joiner who creates structures for exhibitions and galleries. She has two half-sisters, a stepbrother and stepsister who live here.
She was with the creative organisation Tāwhiri – which puts on the festival, the Wellington Jazz Festival, the Lexus Song Quest and Te Hui Ahurei Reo Māori, best known for its kapa haka competition – for 12 years. She began as the marketing manager for the arts festival and ended as Tāwhiri’s executive director.
I asked what made a good chief executive, a good boss, of an arts organisation. “I’m trying to think of what people have actually said to me. So, I would hope that I’m enthusiastic. I’d hope that I’m thoughtful.” You also need, she says, “a bit of grit”. A bit of grit? I’d hazard that she has a large dollop of grit. Especially when you ask her a question she has no intention of answering.
As a kid, she played the violin, volunteered behind the scenes for various productions in village halls and sang in choirs and later in bands. Her Welsh father is a good singer and she is learning the language so she can sing Welsh folk songs. I don’t know if she will play her ukulele to accompany the folk songs, but I’d pay to see that particular spectacle.
She says she always knew she wanted to do “something in the creative space … And then I think it kind of became obvious to me that if you wanted to be a professional artist, you really needed to specialise. You have to kind of go, ‘This is my thing and I’m going to commit to it’.”
And why settle for one thing when you could grow up and one day find you’re running the whole show? “You know, I loved the orchestra. I loved just being in the bigness of it. You’re sitting at your little desk, in second violins or whatever, and you’ve just ‘got’ that you’re part of this big moving thing. And similarly with choirs … I just love that moment when suddenly you’re just part of something much bigger than yourself.”
Which is a large part of the appeal of WOW because it’s hard to imagine anything that gets much bigger, at least in this country. It’s extraordinary, really, how big and successful it has become. Because if you put it down on paper – a bunch of people on a catwalk wearing wacky outfits – it would sound a hard sell.
Does she know what its appeal is? “I think it really feeds into people’s love of sheer imagination. You know, what the designers do is just unbridled imagination. And I think the other thing is that anyone can enter … You don’t have to be a fine arts-trained designer, although many of them are.”
She has plenty of time to shop for a suitably flamboyant outfit for this year’s event. Or she could just pull out that lurking-in-the-back-of-the-wardrobe gold glittery jacket. It would be suitably peacocky.
World of WearableArt is at Wellington’s TSB Arena from September 26-October 13. Tickets are now on sale online at worldofwearableart.com.
