The Five Types Of People You Meet At Fashion Week

Kate Moffatt

Updated 16 May 2016 at 2:57 am

If you thought cramming the biggest fashion VIPs into a tiny space and letting them roam free was a good idea, let’s just say, there’s no shortage of feathers flying.

Here are the five most common types of people you meet in a typical day onsite:

THE MODELS
Yes, they actually do work hard during fashion week. I challenge you to get up at 4am to sit in hair and makeup for five hours until the first show kicks off at 9am, and then have your hair pulled out, your skin prodded and your body yanked at for the rest of the day. If you’re lucky, you might walk in your final show at 10:30pm. Then there’s the allure of the after party – and what model wants to say no to that? Most of them basically rinse and repeat this process until Friday, at which point it’s not uncommon to spot them passed out in the makeup chair.

THE STREET STYLE STARS
That ‘in-motion’ running shot you always see street style stars performing? Yeah, it’s not a happy coincidence. No-one is in that much of a rush to get to the next show. It’s not uncommon to overhear photographers telling street style stars to run up and down the street 20 times till they get the perfect gap between the left and right leg, or to jump up and down on the spot while also maintaining an nonchalant expression. More often than not, it takes about 20 minutes to nail the shot. And by then, whatever blogger it is will be late to the next show – which leads me to…

THE MAGAZINE EDITORS
There’s no greater political scrum in the world than that of the front row. Leading magazine editors cannot sit next to each other. Celebrities need to sit together. Bloggers must get a front row seat so they can actually, you know, blog about the show. But the number one rule of Front Row Club is to never steal another person’s seat. It inevitably happens every year when a newbie spots a vacant front row chair and mistakenly thinks an editor won’t sweep in at the last minute. It’s at this point that everyone sits back and breaks out the popcorn. Let the games begin!

THE CELEBRITIES
The reason you get so confused when you see shots of celebrities on the same day in different outfits is because they’re supplied different looks by the various designers. Yep, that celeb whose style you can’t get enough of is actually not theirs. Plus, after a while they become just another person to trip over on the way out of a show (except Bella Hadid, because, well, Bella Hadid).

PR PEOPLE
These are the people you want to be friends with: they get you backstage and into places you otherwise never could. They’re almost always attached to a phone and in a rush to get somewhere. Their job is the hardest of all: they have to placate the overbearing media and the even more overbearing celebrity publicists. At the end of the week you’ll find them camped out at the bar drowning their sorrows.