Our location fell through forty minutes before call time. This is the fashion industry. This is my glamorous life.
We were supposed to shoot in a studio in DUMBO, one of those brick-and-beam places under the Manhattan Bridge where every third startup films a founder video. The studio double-booked. The email arrived while I was on the F train with a garment bag pressed against my face like a very expensive pillow.
So we did what you do. We improvised. And by improvised I mean we shot the entire editorial inside the building's freight elevator.
Styling a shoot inside a freight elevator is not something they teach you at Parsons or anywhere. The thing groaned. It was industrial grey, scuffed, honest. The photographer looked at it and said, wait, this is better. And it was.
The light did this soft bounced thing off the metal. I hung a thrifted burgundy trench I found in Astoria against the quilted moving pads and it looked like it cost four thousand dollars. It cost eighteen.
Styling a shoot in real time, with limited space and a garment rack that kept rolling into the model, is basically a Bollywood chase sequence but slower and with more safety pins. There is a specific adrenaline to fixing a hem while an elevator hums beneath your feet.
We rode up and down between floors for three hours. Every time the doors opened, some poor delivery guy stared at a girl in couture and a stylist crouched on the floor with pins in her mouth. I waved. What can you do.
Here's what I love about styling under pressure. The plan dies and the instinct takes over. You stop overthinking. You grab the coat that feels right, you push the sleeves up, you trust your eye. My grandmother draped sarees like that. No plan. Just knowing.
The best frame of the whole day was an accident. Model half-turned, elevator light flickering, the trench catching air. Nobody posed it. It just happened while we were surviving.
Sustainable, secondhand, shot in a freight elevator in DUMBO. That's the moodboard I never made.
The fashion industry teaches you one thing above all. The location is wherever you decide to make it work.
More soon, once I get the pin marks off my knees.
Love,