Styling In The Rain

stylingfashion

6 May

“Photoshoots are normally done months prior to the collection coming out onto the market, but as we were doing swimwear, we had to wait for spring to arrive as a green/flourishing background would have made more sense.”

Oh yes, when it comes to British weather there is only one thing that comes to mind – rain! Ahaha! But as I always say: ‘If you are waiting for the sun to come out to do something, then you live in the wrong country!’

Unfortunately I have never had the opportunity to travel to an exotic location to do an editorial photoshoot, so here we are, under the rain, doing the best we can. As explained in my previous blog, editorial photoshoots are there to tell a story behind the collection, and on this occasion the collection was about spiritual/mystic beliefs with a touch of magic and the majority of pieces - as you can imagine being a summer collection, was made of swimwear, bikinis, kimonos, crop tops, shorts, miniskirt etc. of which was either see through or velvet material to give that mystic look.

Photoshoots are normally done months prior to the collection coming out onto the market, but as we were doing swimwear, we had to wait for spring to arrive as a green/flourishing background would have made more sense. So the location chosen was a beautiful park in the middle of nowhere and near a little river; we managed to do hair and make-up in a pub close by, which was the perfect location also for myself to select the clothing as where else am I going to do it? It is not like we are carrying a clothing rail with us haha! When it comes to location shoots, I am very organised as I know how things can get messy quickly, so on my side everything was labelled with the models' name and packed separately – as you can imagine it didn’t take up that much space anyway!

The day was good but quite chilly and we were all prepared with blankets to keep the model warm, erm… the frozen look is not really what we are going for, but who would have thought it would have changed so drastically during the day and started pouring down? At one point I had four people under my umbrella … oh god, it was a total nightmare and it was getting muddy too, but we stood our ground, waited for the weather to clear and here we are again shooting away and getting everything done for the campaign, with a little twist to it – we decided to go for the wet look, considering the surrounding, and that worked out really well in the end!

Do you see what I mean when I say that styling is not always as glam as it looks? And something I would add to it, is that you need to be flexible and adapt to situations by making the most of them. Clothing brands don’t have the time to wait around, they need the pictures done and that is the end of it! It is quite a lot of pressure to be honest and mixing the photoshoot styling with the personal styling is a good balance. Personal styling? That would be a good entry for my next blog if I haven’t already bored you to death .. ahahaha! See you next time!