Model philosophy: All in a day's work

Penny Pickard has a cold. She's had it, she says, as she offers tea and coffee, for a week. Sniff, sniff, she goes, as I follow her into the tiny, startlingly bare kitchen of her North Shore home. With the door open to the still chilly morning, it's not warm in what is usually the warmest room. In the dimly lit lounge, in a jar on a low coffee table, a couple of sweet joss sticks burn but can't quite disguise the smell of mid-winter damp.

We decide to sit outside on the stoop, in a couple of ageing cane chairs. Hers is bathed in a watery sunlight but she still curls herself up with her legs tucked under her bum and warms her hands with her tea cup.

She's dressed in jeans and a baby blue argyle sweater. Her blond hair, which belongs to a waif, looks like it might still be in bed. There is what looks like a small cold sore on her top lip. She's wearing no makeup.

Now you may think, given what I've just told you that, that there is not a hell of lot that's glamorous about Penny Pickard, one of New Zealand most successful models. At least, not this day. But you'd be wrong.

She manages to project - and perhaps this ability goes as far back as her grunge-styled début shoot in the 1990s - a low-key allure and a casual grace, even when slouched in a chair with mussed hair and a cold sore.

She has, even when she's not trying, a model's magnetism.

It is this Pickard has brought to photo shoots in New York, London, Milan and Auckland for more than a decade and half. It is this she will once again show when she walks the runways of New Zealand Fashion Week the week after next. It is this she's brought to recent shoots for Salasai and Stolen Girlfriends Club, the cover of last month's Good Health magazine and to TV's New Zealand's Next Top Model, where she's been seen handing out advice to the latest crop of wannabes.

But then Pickard, in the small and no doubt perfectly formed world of modelling, is as near to a star as it is possible to be in New Zealand. According to local fashion blogger Isaac Hinden-Miller, Pickard has graced the cover of the country's premier fashion magazine Fashion Quarterly more times than any other model. Indeed, he wrote recently on his popular Isaac Likes blog, Pickard is "probably the closest thing we've ever had to a modern-day Kiwi supermodel, besides Emily Baker".

So really it should come as no surprise, given her reputation, given her experience, they she might be able to pull off poise even when slouched in a chair. For her, that comes off-the-peg. It's her views on the business of modelling which are, well, a little more bespoke.

Of course it happened on High St. If Auckland fashion has a heart, it probably beats on poncy Ponsonby Rd. But I'd wager its soul is to be found in that narrow central city street that's so brief it almost ends before it begins.

It was in High St that Pickard was "discovered", though of course she'd been in existence for sometime. She was at the end of her 4th form year and was shopping with her sister when Glenn Hunt, from the now-defunct style bible Pavement, spotted her. Hunt sent his girlfriend over with a proposition: was Pickard interested in modelling for a Pavement fashion spread? As it happened, she was. What the 14-year-old from Papakura wasn't quite ready for was the speed of what happened next.

The Pavement shoot - which became the cover - took place in January 1994. By early May she'd had modelled in Sydney, and by the end of May she was in New York.

"[Famed New York model agent] Eileen Ford saw the Pavement pictures and said 'she's got that look of the moment'," Pickard recalls. "It was 1994, the whole grunge movement thing was big, know what I mean - it was all greasy hair and no makeup. That was the thing. I definitely embodied that and loved that style. [Ford] said 'bring her over'.

"I was definitely aware of the modelling world. I was obsessed with Kate Moss, loved Face magazine and definitely thought that life would be really, really cool. And I loved it, I loved the attention that I was getting in New Zealand but as soon as I got to New York, I kind of freaked out because I was away from my family. I was super-sheltered. I think Glenn was a little bit shocked to have this hysterically crying 14-year-old that he had to drag around the city. But I think after two weeks I was really starting to enjoy myself."