The Hewitson Profile: The quiet flamboyance of WOW’s Meg Williams
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.