What Fashion Week Actually Looks Like

Fashion Week arrives in your feed as about nine seconds of footage — a look, a corner of a room, a car door. The version I live is roughly ninety per cent logistics and ten per cent the part you can see, and honestly the logistics are the more interesting half.

The fittings nobody photographs

Long before anything is worth filming there are fittings, and a fitting is not glamorous. It is standing very still in a cold room while people you met ten minutes ago pin fabric around you and discuss you in the third person, which sounds rude and is not — it is simply how the work goes. You learn to hold a position without fidgeting, to say yes quickly and no clearly, and to understand that the garment is the client, not you. The best thing a model can be in that room is uncomplicated.

Milan and Paris are not the same city

I have modelled at Paris and Milan Fashion Week, and the two weeks run at completely different temperatures. Milan is hot and fast and social; the days press up against each other and there is a directness to everything that I genuinely like. Paris is cooler and more ceremonial. Rooms go quiet in a way that makes you sit up straighter. Neither is better than the other. But you pack differently, you pace yourself differently, and if you arrive expecting one and get the other you spend the first two days recalibrating instead of working.

The walk itself

And then, after all of it, you walk. It lasts seconds. Every hour of the week compresses into a short straight line with a turn at the end, and there is no opportunity to do it again. This is where the pageant years earn their keep for me — a stage is a stage, and whatever taught me to keep my face composed while my heart rate is somewhere around three hundred works exactly the same in Milan as it did in a national final. You are not performing the nerves. You are carrying the clothes.

What I pack, every single time

The bag barely changes season to season, because the problems barely change:

• ✦Flats, and then a second pair of flats. Nothing eats a day faster than the wrong shoes between appointments.
• ✦A travel steamer, or failing that a hotel bathroom and ten minutes of hot water.
• ✦Blotting papers and a cream blush — the two things that fix a face between a fitting and a dinner.
• ✦Snacks. Deeply unglamorous, completely non-negotiable.
• ✦A battery pack, because the content does not shoot itself and the entire day runs off my phone.
• ✦One outfit I already know works, held back for the day everything else goes wrong.

Filming it while living it

The other job running underneath all of this is the content. I am documenting the week while I am working the week, which means deciding in real time what is worth filming and what belongs to me. My rule is simple: if something would be interesting to a person who has never been backstage, it goes in the Stories. If it is a private moment with somebody who did not sign up to appear on my TikTok, it does not. That line is the reason the travel content still feels honest after this many trips.

Why I keep going back

Fashion Week is exhausting in a way that is hard to explain to anyone who has only seen the highlight reel, and I would not trade a single season of it. It is the room where the standard gets set. Every campaign I shoot afterwards in Manila is better for having stood in a cold fitting room in Milan being told, politely and precisely, to do it again.