A ‘first-time’ view of NYFW

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Our Guest Blogger today is Geraldine Nichols, she’s from Cardiff and has just finished her MA in Fashion History and Culture at the London College of Fashion.  She’s been a follower of our blog since we launched and sent us this post about her experience of New York Fashion Week.

In September last year I was lucky enough to be invited by my friend and colleague at the London College of Fashion, Susana Patiňo, to be her assistant stylist at New York Fashion Week.  We would be working for the Spanish designer Joaquin Trias, who was showing his debut collection Lineal Study on the S/S 2010 runway.

What an experience!  I’d never been to New York before and here I was working at Fashion Week.  As a new company, we found our way together – on the first day we arranged and rearranged the running order: the collection was architecturally inspired and had to have a strong start and finish.  Also the colour palette of the garments was carefully considered to reinforce the impact.  The studio, in New York’s Garment District – a place full of history and with a shop reflecting every aspect of fashion design and construction – was buzzing with the TRIAS team, the pattern cutters (from Spanish design team Nihil Obstat), the feisty and amazing New York seamstresses and the show production guys –organised chaos ruled!

Then the models came for go-sees and to fit the collection.  Now my work really took off – I noted everything about each model’s look – styling notes for the dressers (for example all the sleeved garments had to have the sleeves pushed up to the elbows and flounced at the shoulder), any alterations for particular models to wear the looks, whether they would wear one or more looks, shoe size, fit of the shoes…and finally the Polaroid photo to go on the board as the looks and models were confirmed.  And………… I got to go shopping!  We’d taken a styling kit of everything we thought we could possibly need, and more – but (fortunately for me!) trips to Macy’s, fabric stores and shoe stores were par for the course for those extra bits and pieces you can’t know you need till you try the clothes on real, if gazelle-like, women.

Joaquin Trias makes an alteration to a look from the Vertical Strength collection (A/W 2010-11) while Javier and Armiche from Nihil Obstat advise

Polaroids of the models for Lineal Study S/S 2010

The night before the show Susana and I were sorting out the shoes – unfortunately, contrary to popular belief, some models have small feet and we had lots of large sized shoes!  We arranged a complicated swapping system, but were at our wits’ end.  Thank God for Nelson from the US production team – he converted nine shoe swaps down to three and taught us how to damn well make those shoes fit!  I’ll never forget his words, ‘you have to have a shoe strategy’!!

The day of the show arrived: to my horror, I was sent with the collection in the truck to Bryant Park by myself!  However, that had its advantages – I got to brief the Head Dresser and all the wonderfully professional dressers backstage where the collection was made ready for each model.  From the silence and emptiness of our backstage area when we first arrived………then within an hour, models were being made up, getting their hair and nails done and being zipped and tucked into their first looks.  Make-up artists and hair stylists were still working on their perfect final appearance while the models queued up to walk the runway ; press and guests took photos, Joaquin was interviewed – such excitement and anticipation!

Models wait backstage before taking to the runway

And so the show begins, is amazing, and is quickly over – take a bow, as Madonna would say.  Those of us backstage don’t get to see the show of course, as there is still work to do, and an hour after the show began the clothes are packed, in the truck and heading back to the showroom, and I was sitting outside the tents at Bryant Park wondering how it could all be over so quickly.

We worked so hard – regular 10 and 12 hour days – and learned so much.  It’s such a short time to get everything ready, but also, it’s the perfect amount of time.  Given any more, and people would collapse with hysteria!

In January Susana asked me would I come to the A/W show in February and work…would I?  You bet your front row I would!

Geraldine Nichols worked for TRIAS www.joaquintrias.com at Mercedes Benz Fashion Week in New York in September 2009 and February 2010.  Talk to her on twitter @MissClevaness

TRIAS S/S 2010 collection is named Lineal Study

TRIAS A/W 2010-11 collection is named Vertical Strength

Videos of the catwalk shows are available on the TRIAS website