Authors: Marisa Mackle
My head had been turned. The night of the fashion
show had definitely been one of my best nights out so far and it had been completely free. Even better, on our way out, my mother and myself were handed goodie bags containing mini-perfumes, a snipe of champagne, some chocolate and a scented candle. We were like two kids after Santa had arrived, giggling on the bus home as we rummaged excitedly through the bags. I had been due to start work in a laboratory the following week but I decided not to take the job. I was going to be a freelance stylist just like Emily. I too wanted to start living the dream.
Soon afterwards I started approaching magazines and
newspapers with ideas for shoots. The most important thing about being a stylist is that you have a contacts book because the shops, and especially the higher-end shops, are extremely strict about whom they lend their clothes to. But as Emily’s unpaid ‘assistant’ I already knew a lot of the shop staff by name at this stage. I remained on their good side by always returning the clothes in impeccable condition without so much as a lipstick stain or a thread pulled and more often than not I dropped a little thank-you present, such as a box of chocolates, in to the staff afterwards. I didn’t just sign the clothes in and out abruptly with no conversation either. Instead I took my time to chat to the staff and become friendly with them. That way I found out about all the upcoming style and fashion events. I started getting invited to more and more champagne events and I even got my photo taken at a few of them.
When I started appearing in the social columns in
society magazines I was chuffed with myself. Imagine! I could be spending all day in a lab wearing a white coat and goggles, but here I was being treated like some kind of celebrity.
But then one night I was out at a fashion show and I
bumped into Emily unexpectedly. “What are you doing here?” she asked suspiciously, not looking one bit pleased to see me. “I thought you were supposed to be going out with your mum tonight?”
“I
am
here with my mother,” I explained light-heartedly. “She’s just in the Ladies’ touching up her make-up in case we get our photo taken. It’s a good night, isn’t it? Did you enjoy the show? The clothes were fabulous.”
She made a face and then nudged her friend who had
pink hair and was wearing a fussy pussy-bow blouse, sequined hot pants and the highest pair of wedges I’d ever seen in my life. “This is Suzie,” she said.
Suzie nodded at me but as her eyes were quite bloodshot
I wasn’t even sure that she could see me properly. I wondered how she was able to stand, never mind walk, in those
ridiculous
sky-high shoes she was wearing. “She’s my flatmate,” Emily said to Suzie. “You know, the one I was telling you about,” she added cryptically.
Suzie said nothing. She seemed kind of out of it. Then
Emily linked her arm and led her away purposefully to the bar. The encounter made me feel very uncomfortable indeed. Emily had made me feel like an annoying gate crasher. I didn’t really understand it. I mean, she had always been happy for me to carry the heavy bags of clothes back to the shops where I sometimes had to wait around for an age to get a staff member to check all the garments meticulously before signing them off. She was happy to ask me to take that brand-new designer shirt that had got make-up on the collar during a photo shoot to a specialist dry cleaner while she lay on the couch with a hangover, eating crisps and watching Jeremy Kyle, but she had never once invited me to any fashion shows, and now that I had managed to get invited to some myself, she seemed furious. I realised then that she had just been using me to do her dirty work. She wanted the name and the fame of being a stylist but she didn’t want to do the horrible part which was carrying the bags around all day until you felt like your arms were going to come out of their sockets.
I began hiding my invitations as soon as I got them
from the postman. It was ridiculous but I knew Emily was annoyed that I’d started going to glamorous events. As far as she was concerned
she
was supposed to be the one with the exciting job in the apartment and I was supposed to be the boring nerdy one.
After some soul-searching I plucked up the courage to
approach a well-known women’s magazine and offered to work as an assistant stylist. I didn’t hear anything back for a week or so and then I phoned the editor to see if she had got my CV. I was afraid it might have got lost or something.
“Who is this?” The woman sounded harried on the
phone. “Are you a stylist?” she asked, or rather barked at me. “I’m up to my tonsils right now. Are you free tomorrow to give a hand?”
I was so stunned I said that yes, I was free. I didn’t have
time to tell the woman that I hadn’t had much experience and that I was just starting out as a freelance. Anyway, she didn’t seem a bit interested in anything other than the fact that I was available to start as soon as possible.
She admitted to me that the in-house stylist in the
magazine had just walked out unexpectedly, leaving chaos behind. Now there was nobody to organise that month’s fashion shoot and time was of the essence. The theme was student chic. Did I think I could do that? Was I capable and confident enough to turn everything around at the speed of lightning? She said that I had to book a model, but that their in-house photographer would do the shots in his city-centre studio. My head was spinning. Talk about being thrown into the deep end without a paddle! I found myself nodding in agreement to all her demands. Basically, I should arrive with a selection of at least eight different outfits. The shoot was to be a five-spread job. Think young and fun and preppy. Nothing too old or frumpy or stuffy. Think artistic yet slightly adventurous. Oh, and could I organise a makeup artist? Think minimum make-up. No false eyelashes or false anything. Forget anything that might be considered
trashy
. No orange whatsoever on any part of the skin. And could I also organise hair? Hair! At less than twenty-four hours’ notice? Oh sure, no problem. Just leave it to me.
As I put down the phone I was almost shaking with a
mixture of fear and excitement. I wasn’t a real stylist, not by any stretch of the imagination, but I had just secured myself a booking for a high-end glossy magazine. This was a chance in a lifetime for me. It was surreal! Of course I had helped Emily out on many occasions but could I do it myself? And get paid for it? How much money should I even invoice for? Did I have the confidence to ask for the going rate even as a rookie? But then I didn’t have much time to agonize over my new assignment. I had less than a full day to get organised. I needed to hit the ground running.
I rang round a few of the well-known hairdressers to
see if I could get a
hairstylist
to come out to the studio for free. The first three salons were too short-staffed to help out but the fourth hairdresser said they would send out a junior stylist for free in exchange for a credit. I nearly jumped for joy. I knew from Emily anyway that magazines rarely pay for anything and expect to get everything for free, and my budget for this job was just two hundred euro for a model so I literally would have had nothing left to pay for extras. After a few more anxious phone calls I got hold of the owner of a makeup school who was eagerly looking for business. She said she would send a member of her team along to the
shoot
, and could we make sure to publish the email address and phone number of the school in the credits?
“No problem,” I said, totally relieved.
I now began to feel guilty for having considered Emily lazy in the past. I had mistakenly thought that the tough part of the job was trudging around town with shopping bags pulling your arms out of their sockets. What I didn’t factor in was the stress involved in co-ordinating a fashion shoot. With only hours to go I had to find a suitable model. You would think in a city like Dublin I would have had no problem at all finding a suitable model. It would be easy, I thought. God, how wrong was I?
I went onto three different model websites and there
were literally thousands of photos of models of all shapes and sizes. I didn’t realise there were so many of them about. Like, hello? Did every second female in Ireland aspire to be a model or something? Looking through all the pictures I began to feel overwhelmed. Some of the photos seemed
quite
old and out of date or they were too blurred to see what the girl really looked like. It was very important that my model was under twenty-one as she was supposed to be a student.
I didn’t want somebody too young-looking
either. She had to look realistic and not a schoolgirl. I decided to hold a quick casting in town and bagged the use of a city-centre hotel for free for an hour. I then picked out a couple of girls from each website which wasn’t as easy as just going onto eBay and clicking the Buy It Now button. First of all, when I phoned my preferred agency the girl on the other end of the phone told me that the two models that
I had in mind
were unavailable because they were on holidays. I then asked about another girl on the website.
“Oh Carla?” the girl said with a sigh, sounding rather
bored. “Yeah, well, she lives in London now so she wouldn’t be available at such short notice.”
I found myself wondering why a model who lives in
London and isn’t available to work at short notice has a photo up on an Irish agency website. Then I asked for another girl that I liked the look of. She couldn’t attend the casting unfortunately because she was five months’ pregnant and was apparently only doing maternity fashion shoots at the moment.
At this stage I was practically pulling my hair out. It
was the same story at nearly all the agencies. Nearly everyone I wanted to see was unavailable. The girls were either on holidays or sick, or lived abroad or had already been booked for the following day. One girl, whose picture on the agency site was stunning, turned out to be thirty years old so she was also a non-runner.
Another
girl had a whole arm covered in tattoos that you couldn’t see in her agency shots. She wouldn’t be suitable either. Eventually I managed to get together a group of potential candidates that were available. I asked each agency to send the girls to the hotel for 4.00 p.m. so that I could make my choice. In all, twelve girls turned up for
the
one job. Now that might sound like I had a very tough time choosing one girl, but it wasn’t like I was Simon Cowell on th
e
X Facto
r
with a pool of incredible talent to choose from. Okay, so I knew I wasn’t going to have my pick of supermodels, and especially at such
short
notice, but some of the girls that turned up were so unprofessional that they beggared belief. A couple of them were chewing gum and looked like they hadn’t even bothered washing, one was about the same height as me and I’m just over five foot, one was distinctly hungover and there was a whiff of booze and stale cigarette smoke about her, one had black roots halfway down her otherwise blonde head and the others simply did not have the look I had in mind. It taught me a very good lesson on not judging a model by the agency photos. I mean, obviously professional photos are going to make the subject look pretty fantastic but some of these images must have been Photoshopped beyond all recognition to the point of making crooked teeth into straight white ones and making cellulite, wrinkles, skin blemishes and spots completely vanish.
I was dismayed by what had turned up, but just as I
was about to give up hope, one last girl arrived in through the studio door. She was a vision: tall, slim and fresh-looking with a megawatt natural smile. She was dressed simply in skinny jeans, a white T-shirt and a
black
blazer, and she was clean and healthy-looking with long wavy auburn hair cascading down her back. She was exactly what I wanted and I thanked heaven for sending her to me and saving the day. Reena, as her name turned out to be, was professional, polite and utterly delightful to work with. She was patient and easy-going but also gave her all to the camera. Myself and the photographer, a seasoned snapper in his sixties called Luke, were completely bowled over by the lovely Reena. She even impressed us when halfway through the shoot she offered to go out and buy us sandwiches and coffee!
All the clothes looked lovely on her. She was so slim
that everything we put on her fitted perfectly. She didn’t even have to hold in her tummy! We took eight shots in total and then viewed them on Luke’s laptop. It was pretty difficult to narrow the selection to just five. Reena really looked the part in all of the photos. But then she was a student herself so why wouldn’t she have? She was perfect!
At the end of the day I was completely exhausted, I
hadn’t eaten and I was struggling to keep my eyes open. It had been fun but a very tiring day. The hairdresser, make-up artist, the model and myself had all been in the large unheated studio since 7.30 a.m. It wasn’t at all as glamorous as you might think a fashion shoot would be. But it was still exciting to have been part of it all and I now felt like a real stylist rather than a mere pretender. I literally couldn’t wait to see the end result in a real magazine on the shop shelves.
The best thing of all was that the editor phoned me
later to say how pleased she was with the results of my photo shoot and immediately commissioned me to do another one for the following month’s edition. The relief was enormous. I had been so terrified she’d think I was crap! I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face for the whole day. It would be all systems go from now on. Yes, I was in business!