Pear & Square: Sewing Substance Into Regional Fashion
Words & Imagery by Alice Armitage
From Brisbane boardrooms to Roma libraries, Michelle Blair has built a career out of reinvention. Now, with Pear & Square, she is returning to her first love of fashion — creating simple, well-made garments that honour real bodies, natural fibres, and the quiet strength of regional women. This is not fast fashion. It is a slow, deliberate practice of making the everyday beautiful, and making it fit.
Michelle Blair grew up in Brisbane, found love with a bloke from Mitchell, and followed the long arc westward to Toowoomba first, then Roma, shedding one skin after another and learning, with each move, how to start again without losing the thread of herself. The way regional life bends a career is rarely linear; it is seasonal, like rain that arrives late and changes everything.
Straight out of school she studied fashion design and slipped into the engine room of big brands, production management at places like Canterbury and Billabong, where she discovered a gift for keeping complex things on time. “Bossing people around,” she laughs, but what she really means is process: the choreography of makers, materials, deadlines. When a move to Toowoomba forced a pivot, she didn’t make a fuss about the lack of a runway; she rebuilt. Admin roles, then broader operational gigs. HR here, finance there, Michelle was always the one who could see the whole paddock and still spot the broken hinge on the back gate.
Roma arrived with two children and a FIFO roster that promised proximity and delivered distance. Seven years out there, she had promised him three, served as a practicum in resilience. Reinvention continued into local government, where she took charge of a team of eighteen across eight libraries spread through a western Queensland council area. Management, she learned, was its own craft: relaxed but clear, realistic about your sphere of influence, steady in the churn. It meant putting feelings aside when the job required it, and navigating the curious democratic chemistry of councils where popularity often outruns merit. It is still a challenge in many regional communities, an observation made from the thick of it rather than the cheap seats.
Her public sector years, state, local, and then arts, gave her something valuable: a helicopter view of how policy touches the ground, where strategies land and where they vaporise. That perspective sharpened again when the Empire Theatre in Toowoomba brought her home to run a Regional Arts Services Network contract. Three years, a million dollar budget, relationships to build across a wide catchment. She could have simply imported artists and called it delivery. Instead, she focused on capacity, teaching local people to run local projects so the work did not evaporate with the visiting talent. When the remit expanded to sixteen councils from one side of Queensland to the other, she added two part timers and kept driving, often literally, into communities where policy is a pamphlet until someone translates it to practice.
Half those councils, she notes, had no arts policy, no strategy, no officer to own it. Yet murals went up, touring shows rolled in, and grassroots projects proliferated because livability insisted on being served. It is an important distinction: art as a prestige noun, or creativity as the glue that holds a town together. She dealt with ministers on tarmacs and members in the main street; in the regions, decision makers are closer than city folk imagine. You might bump into your state member getting a sandwich; you might pitch a portfolio minister because it is easier for them to fly to Blackall than to come up the hill. In that environment, the thirty second ‘why’ becomes its own kind of currency.
All the while, a quieter story was tugging at her sleeve – fashion. She had walked away once. “I lost myself for a while,” she admits. Then she circled back to a feeling most women know in the fitting room: I cannot find anything that feels like me. The label that rose from that frustration is called Pear & Square, a nod to the bodies the market too easily forgets, and to the clean geometry of wardrobe staples that do the heavy lifting day after day.
Her principles are simple and exacting. Use deadstock and natural fibres wherever possible, fabric left over from someone else’s run, diverted from landfill into garments made to be lived in. Keep a 100 percent cotton knit for tees, sourced in Melbourne. Cut with technical care so the grading and sizing deliver a better chance at a proper fit. Nothing “floaty” as apology, nothing over engineered as penance. The first collection is spare and honest, the things you actually wear, not the things a lookbook tells you to aspire to. “Most of us dress pretty simply,” she says. “So let’s make simple excellent.”
Life continued to assert itself. Her father grew ill, the family home had to be packed up, and one daughter had a rough year. The brand’s launch did not get the airtime the product deserved. It is a common story in small business and one we prefer to hide: you are the CEO, the courier, the carer, and the late night problem solver, and success has to share a calendar with grief, school events, and real life. Even so, she is unsentimental about timeframes. Momentum in the regions is often a five year horizon, not a sprint to virality. Social media’s loudness is not the same as its truth.
Pear & Square is not chasing the trend wheel. It is building a system that feels human: fibre choices that breathe and biodegrade, patterns that respect bodies as they are, and an ambition that looks beyond the season. One dream sits quietly on the horizon: a traceable southern Queensland cotton, followed from bale to bolt, turned into garments with provenance you can name. It sounds fanciful until you remember where she has worked, between policy and paddock, with a habit of turning airy strategies into working kit.
In the end, this is a regional story in the best sense: a woman who can read a budget, run a team, write a policy, and still thread a needle; a label born from lived experience rather than trend forecasting; a belief that culture is what we practice together, not what gets hung on a wall. The pieces are modest, the kind you will wear ninety percent of the time, and that is the point. In a world obsessed with spectacle, there is something quietly radical about making the everyday beautiful, and making it fit.