Front-row seat for glitter of fashion world's parade

Tim Blanks was in Auckland to celebrate Fashion Week at a special lunch. Picture / Dean Purcell

The hugely successful fashion writer and presenter of television's The Fashion Files grips the rostrum, leans forward and eyeballs his sell-out audience of designers, models, media and fashion hangers-on.

"I'm always asked what supermodels are really like," he says.

"I remember the day Claudia Schiffer got engaged to that magician, David Copperfield. She was walking past and I said to her, 'Congratulations, Claudia'.

"She turned round and said, 'Is that a personal question?"'

Talking to New Zealand-born Tim Blanks, who is back to start the slow rollout to Air New Zealand Fashion Week 2005, is like that.

His clothes are black, his conversation studded with the glittering people of Europe, the United States and Canada. Mentioned in passing are Emma Soames (granddaughter of Winston Churchill and editor of Saga magazine), Elton John ("a wonderful, generous friend") and his partner David Furnish, our own Pieter Stewart ("I met her in London this year"), Tom Ford of Gucci ("I often wish they'd stop fantasising and address realities a bit more"), supermodel Linda Evangelista and Christian Lacroix ("the nicest man in the world").

As he explains, when you produce 52 shows a year, each with four segments sliced into four or five interviews each, you meet 1000 people a year. "I've probably interviewed Karl Lagerfeld 600 times."

Some people become friends, others acquaintances. He's been on Valentino's yacht and visited Armani's palazzo. Others, when you're as charming as Blanks, invite you to their summer house in Stromboli.

Yet the thousands of shows, the decades of passing fashions, "the shoes and the handbags and clothes can be numbing in a way". And against that backdrop, Blanks finds New Zealand fashion "intelligent".

"It's thoughtful," he says.

"The industry is controlled to an enormous degree by women ... and the aesthetic here is more sensitive to what women might want. There's more empathy in the clothes."

Empathy? By that Blanks means local designer clothes are less extreme, softer, more body-conscious than much of what comes out of Paris, Milan and Japan. And best of all, he says, "there's this little edge of darkness - like a shadow in the sunlight".

Blanks, who arrived in Auckland on Monday, is transfixed by the beauty of Auckland. He marvels at the mirror-like quality of the water, which takes him back to childhood summers on Kawau Island with his great aunt, who ran the school in School House Bay.

"Oh my God, it was idyllic," he says.

"The kind of thing you spend the rest of your life missing."

Unlike Lawrence Dallaglio at the next table, his broken ankle awkward in a blue surgical boot, Blanks is not booked at the Hilton where we meet.

"I'm staying with Mum in St Heliers," he says - attempting to make up, in a few days, for decades spent on the other side of the world.

Although a big part of his job is fronting The Fashion File, which is produced in Canada, Blanks lives in Maida Vale, London.

His favourite designers are Ralph Rucci in America and Miuccia Prada, "the most influential designer in the world", in Europe.

Why is she so important?

Because, says Blanks, her background includes a stint as the secretary of the Communist Party. "I like that tension, it makes for something gutsy and exciting. She's not scared of the vulgar."

And what will we be wearing next?

"Black is back," he says.

It will all be based on the tailored black clothing that Miuccia Prada showed with black hats and gloves.

"This season's iconic look is the Hitchcock blonde."

* Air New Zealand Fashion Week, of which the Herald is a sponsor, runs from October 18 to 21 this year.