I'm in my 10th season as a fashion PR and this season I am looking after five premium London fashion designers: organising and dressing their celebrity front rows, sending out invites, overseeing the building of the venue and taking it down after! The first thing I should explain is that it’s* really* not as glamorous as people think. There's such a misconception that it's all about swanning around, drinking champagne. It’s more like running around on the tube, trying to beat editors to the next show and so many all-nighters writing invites and eating takeout in the office. The whole team will cry at least once every fashion week!
Another thing people don't realise, is how expensive a catwalk show is. The cheapest you can possibly do a show for a decent designer is £25K and the most expensive we work with is £1 million. London is the cheapest in terms of catwalk show production, though. Paris is the most expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if designers with a Vuitton-esque budget spent £5 million on a show. A designer pays for their entire catwalk shop, unless they have sponsors. One designer said he once worked out how much it cost per second for him to put on a show and was almost sick.
The cheapest you can possibly do a show for a decent designer is £25K and the most expensive we work with is £1 million
A few weeks before the catwalk show is scheduled, we collate all the show requests that have come in from around the globe and create special inboxes for each designers. We can sit 350 people at show - but we get up to 10,000 ticket requests for each show! You wouldn't believe the kind of people that apply: lots of students, people who have literally just set up a blog that day, your mum even... I hate saying no to them, but there are so many randoms. Each year, we allocate more and more ticket to bloggers. The wheat is really separated from the chaff with the blogging community. Each season you have the old school crowd, who are super influential and every season more bloggers emerge with an impact on the digital landscape. There's a lot of emerging blogging talent.
In terms of the celerbity front row (FROW) we don't just send out tickets to celebs, willy nilly. No-one wants to risk an empty front row! We would talk to their 'people' (publicists and agents) for some weeks before the show as ideally we want to dress them in that designer. A lot of work actually goes into the celebrity part; lots of fittings and back and forwarding with agents. A lot of celebrities are pretty global, so it depends who is in town, but we tend to aim for ten celebrities front row. Ten is a good number because it gives you a high chance of getting a good pap shot. A designer never cares about a pap shot, but we do as it guarantees press. We never pay celebrities to sit front row, either. There are some brands that do but the designers we work with are vehement about not doing that, thankfully.
It can be awkward when some of the celebrities aren't sample size. Which is ridiculous really because sample size is tiny. We also get a lot of calls from celebrities who want to sit front row - and we have never even heard of them... We have to play it well because often it's the same PR as a celebrity we really do want. It’s balancing the girls they look after that we don't want on the front row of a show, with the girls we do! Each season there tends to be a running joke in terms of a pretty unknown celeb who will pop up and ask for lots of front row tickets.
We also get a lot of calls from celebrities who want to sit front row - and we have never even heard of them
We see the collection anything from three weeks beforehand to just the day before. It depends how private the designer is. The collection itself is never finished until the night before: there's always a seam that needs to be fixed, or a sequin that needs to be attached or a general tweak here and there. I've seen collections that I thought were dreaful, but you just button your lip - all that matters is what the reviewers say anyway. What a designer cares about the most, is a good review. We always wait with baited breath to hear what British Fashion Council's Sarah Mower and veteran Style.com writer Tim Blanks say. We have had some terrible reviews - you're either elated, or back to earth with a clunk. It can go both ways.
About 20 people build the catwalk show - they all happen in different places, though a lot happen in the courtyard of Somerset House - over 24 hours, normally the night before. About 100 people help make one designer's catwalk show happen (most whom aren't present on the day.) The designer pays for the whole thing unless they have sponsors who they have money back. The designers sometimes reach the conclusion that they can’t afford it, as it’s so expensive. The casting tends to come from in house, with hair and make-up often being covered under a sponsorship deal like MAC, for example. As PRs we would run those sponsorship deals.
I don't deal with any tricky designers, but they do exist. I know of one famous designer whose always moving PRs because he's very hard to work with. As a PR, you just want to keep things running smoothly. If a celebrity sits in the wrong seat you gloss over it and seat someone elsewhere. We’ve had show looks left at the studio, before. A jacket was once left behind across the other side of London, so we sent something in a cab and then they brought the wrong one back and had to go back again. That show started an hour late. A designer is so precious about their creation, it’s their baby, they would always choose for it to run late than start incomplete.
The designers are so stressed and exhausted by that point at which the show begins. The teams are amazing though, they really rally round the designer. They don’t always get enough credit, but they’re not always seeking it. It’s like the lead singer vs. the drummer in a band. No one would knows the name of the drummer in Coldplay but everyone knows the name of Chris Martin.
Afterwards, it’s very anti-climactic for the production team. It’s all taken down in just a few hours. Us PRs usually all feel quite exhilarated, waiting for the reviews to come in. We normally go to the pub with the designer and all their friends and family. And as for the designers? Well they normally get very drunk, very quickly!
Like this? Then you might be interested in...
Here Are The Best Fake Tans To Ease Your Sad Skin Into Autumn
Follow These Fashion Folk, They Won't Give You Blurry Catwalk Pics Over Fashion Month
Follow Pandora on Twitter @pinsykes
Illustration: Hisashi Okawa
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.