Girly temple for fashion priestesses

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Nobody is paying the slightest bit of notice to the skinny blonde in faded jeans padding about in bare feet.

At Trelise Cooper's studio in Parnell, Charlotte Dawson, the girl who turns heads wherever she goes, is just part of the furniture.

The furniture is bolts of fabric tossed on the floor, droning sewing machines and racks of very small, very expensive clothes.

Three days out from Fashion Week the talk is of linings that bulge, of buttons where buttons ought not to be. There are urgent and arcane telephone calls involving bribes of g-strings and chocolates for car parks.

Dawson is comfortable here, in this girly fantasy land: the biggest dressing-up box in the world.

She is here for her private fitting - the other models will have a mass fitting the next day - for her guest appearance in Cooper's show on Wednesday. She's scooping up frothy, silky things - she takes her fee in freebies - but she's turned up for work in jeans low-slung enough to show off the "Eternity" tatt on the lower slope of her back.

"Have you got a tattoo?" Cooper asks me. God, no. Too much of a wimp.

"And I'm too much of a fashion victim not to have one," says Dawson. So she has three.

Never mind the fripperies. "Have you got clean undies on?" asks Cooper.

Dawson has beautifully turned-out toes. She brings her own Italian heels - dismissing them as "plastic disco shoes".

"She's really professional like that," says Cooper. "Her nails are always well groomed. A lot of them don't bother and so you get grotty toenails. It's ghastly."

How comforting to know that behind the scenes of the fashion world the grotty and ghastly co-exist with the glamour.

A reassuring scene: Cooper is peering in a mirror, examining her dark roots. Dawson is loudly pointing out a rather large zit on her back. And in this girls-school environment, modesty is in scant supply. Dawson's top falls open. So what the hell - she might as well flash the lot.

"That'll get them going in Matamata. See the bags of plastic for real."

In the fash biz breasts are "the shelf" and "boobies". Bodies, those toned, honed clothes racks that other women regard with equal measures of envy and contempt, are to be scoffed at. A jacket too large for Dawson will "look fine on a normal body", says Cooper.

Dawson, size eight except in the "boobies", is a weirdo. "Maybe I could have some reverse liposuction. I'll get a bike pump."

She shimmers into the room in a sequinned jacket and skirt. " I've always wanted to be a disco ball."

"It might be too much," frets Cooper. "Ooh, I love it," says Dawson. "It's one of those things that you'd wear if you go to Las Vegas for the night, to see Celine Dion. "

She is having a very good time. She has taken time out from "flogging" her autobiographical self-help book to play dress-ups. "It appeals to my princess mentality."

The princess has loped along a pretend catwalk looking elegant and mock-haughty. She turns, and what she bellows is absolutely unpublishable. She and Cooper shriek. Nobody takes the slightest bit of notice.

Herald Feature: New Zealand Fashion Week

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