Friends, frenemies and the front row

You won't believe the conversations from fashion week

Believe it or not, I really like chatting to Laura Weir, left, when she was editor of ES Magazine and Trish Halpin, of Marie Claire. This was 2016 when I wore the same outfit on the front row every day for an article in The Mail.

My friend Stacey showed me this Instagram account of a girl Jackie, who’s deaf and does videos where she lip reads conversations between celebrities. She’s terribly good at it - apparently she’s been lipreading since she was a child, and it’s so second nature to her she doesn’t really get how so many of us can’t do it. I found myself compelled to click on more and more and more of them. The most fascinating thing, though? The banality of it all. A conversation between Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt on the red carpet is a moan about the weather. Tom Holland and Zendaya sitting in the box at Wimbledon are absentmindedly blurting out song lyrics. And my favourite, Kylie Jenner talking to -  I think - Ivanka Trump on the front row of a fashion show and having exactly the same kind of inane chat I found myself having on the front row, for about 15 years. 

Ah those front row conversations between smiling magazine frenemies. What do the top brass from glossy mags talk about when they’re mashed together like that? And it really is a mash, which you can read about from me here. You take your allocated seat and you wait, and wait, for the show to start. It was not unusual to be waiting at least an hour. I have sat for close to two hours at certain shows, while the bored toddler inside my head kicks and screams and wants a juice box and a long overdue wee. So if you want to kill that time, it’s a lot easier if you can have a pleasant enough conversation with your Frow neighbours. For each show, I’d take my seat and pray that I was next to someone I liked. Failing that, please lord, at least not someone I really didn’t like. There was one male journalist whose constant, graphically sexual monologues had every woman demanding PRs to be seated nowhere near - a headache for them when we’ve all made that request.  

But on the whole, conversations on the front row tended to be a little guarded and routine. The usual opener - the ‘nice weather we’re having’ of the front row, if you will - was, ‘So when are you going home?’. As harmless and boring as this question seems, it had a rivalrous undercut. If you were heading back to the airport at a time that was deemed ‘early’ in the run of the week, people might conclude that your magazine’s budgets were not healthy enough to afford you lasting in Milan or Paris for the whole week. Or it might indicate that you were swerving the humiliating truth that you were not invited to the shows happening while you’re landing at Heathrow.

Which brings me to the second favourite topic of the front row: competitive tiredness. There was always a lot of one upmanship going on with regards to: who’d been dragged to the most shows and appointments; who’d had to squeeze in the most amount of work whilst sitting in the car between shows; who’d eaten the least or not been allowed so much as a glass of water for the last 28 hours; who was the champion of all champions who was so insufferably popular that they had to spread themselves between four very important dinners/parties the night before.

A most curious, but regular occurrence was when, at one show, you’d have an animated, friendly chat with the person next to you. But then, a few shows later you’d find yourself seated together again and completely ignore each other. Stony silence til that show began. I swear to you this happened a lot. It seemed to be some unspoken rule that you’d said everything you could possibly think to say and that was that. This kind of conversation fatigue was accepted as quite OK. 

Me with all my friends at Burberry, 2010

On the odd occasion, there’d be a temporary tear in the mundane fabric of this little universe. LIke the time one editor started a conversation with her seat mate that went something like this:

‘I’ve just hired (name of magazine person) to come work with us, what do you think of her?’

‘Well… we don’t really get on,’ came the cool reply.

‘Oh no, why?!’ said the puzzled editor.

*long pause*

‘I think it’s because I slept with her husband.’ 

You have to remember: for those short, but intense blocks of time, twice a year, our worlds got very small indeed. It’s a similar principle to when you’re in a plane and instead of shedding a mild tear at a sad film, the reduced oxygen is making you sob til you can’t breathe. In the fashion weeks, if anything vaguely interesting happens, it takes on the significance of a celebrity death.  

Which explains why the Glamour team and I found it amazing when we had been out to dinner with the PRs for Dolce and Gabbana and a woman at another table pulled her short dress up past her waist to reveal a bare bottom, and sat there like that for the whole meal, no questions asked. That was conversational gold dust on the front row - some new shit to talk about that kept us occupied for days.

Similarly, during one New York fashion week I nipped in to a hotel for a quick loo break between shows and realised there were two women in the cubicle next to me enjoying some very loud sex.

And as terrible as it was, and it is a huge relief that her injuries were not serious, we all got a lot of conversational mileage out of the time a light fell from the ceiling of a show and hit legendary writer Suzy Menkes on the head. To be fair, when I saw her two days later it turned out she quite enjoyed having that new shit to talk about too. 

Once, a senior-ish editor, who was taking her boss’s place in the front row, loudly asked one of her second row underlings if she wanted to swap places with her. A dramatic pause before she declared, ‘I’m just … not in the mood for the front row right now.’ 

Hearing that really freaked me out. All this time, I’d had no idea we were supposed to have a front row mood? What were the performance rules that no one had told me about? The anxiety over the scrutiny ratcheted up. In this high school playground for adults, I constantly felt self-conscious about my outfit. Or those awkward moments when you accidentally lock eyes across the runway with someone like Anna Wintour. I wondered, a lot, if my face was doing the correct thing whilst looking at runway looks, particularly if I didn’t like them. There was quite the urban myth about fashion PRs filming people in the front row and later berating them if they looked bored, or were too busy talking through the show to pay attention. Never happened to me but the rumour haunted me into trying to plaster affixed enthusiasm onto my face at all times. I used to feel like a useless spare part if everyone around me was scribbling frenzied notes about each outfit charging down the catwalk. But then one day I caught a glimpse of a very high profile editor’s notes - it was a shopping list for her next trip to the garden centre. 

With Harriet Walker (The Times) and Rebecca Lowthorpe (Elle) at Anya Hindmarch. I think this was 2017.

But the real conversations happened in the fashion car - each magazine team were driven around London, Paris and Milan by their own driver.

A couple of the old team have messaged me about this piece to say, ‘Oh god, what are you going to say?’ Because yes, we gossiped. A lot. Go ahead and cancel us if you want but if you weren’t there, you don’t know how many, many hours there were to fill. And so the conversations in that car ran the gamut from the shallow - had that American editor we saw earlier had a facelift or not? The car was divided - to outpourings about our personal relationships. We loved the diva behaviours we witnessed that we’d report back about in the car, like the fashion editor who’d been gifted an eye-wateringly expensive Prada bag but proudly told anyone who would listen that she sent it back telling them it was ‘hideous.’ We did talk a lot about what everyone was wearing, and I assume my outfits got critiqued in other cars too. (If ever my outfit was greeted in the morning by my team with silence I’d be paranoid that I must look stupid and feel down about it all day. Especially if the outfit was new. )

We wondered aloud how some people were affording the multiple changes of head to toe designer outfits they were sporting in a day. Much debate was had the day an editor from another magazine pulled me aside to point out the tiniest hole in the backside of my trousers. Was she genuinely being thoughtful, when clearly there would be nothing I could really do about it? Or had she actually intended to make me feel crap and self-conscious for the rest of the day? If so, mission accomplished.

Workwise, we rehearsed being convincing about loving collections we thought were terrible before we had to get out of the car and face the brand’s PR. I would smile knowingly and say, ‘You’ve done it again!’ which my team silently knew was not the compliment I’d sold it as. Actually, it took me years of sitting in that car with my fashion editor colleagues before I dared give my honest opinions about the shows we’d just seen. Coming from a writing background, I felt like such a pretender in this fashion world. So I’d find myself saying things like, ‘Wow, didn’t you love that?! Oh no… me either, yes, yes, you’re right I think it was ugly.’ *withdraw to silence*

In that car, thrown together sometimes for more than 12 hours at a stretch, we dissected each other’s relationships, counselled team members through everything life can throw at you - divorces, miscarriages, problems with the parents or overbearing in-laws. We bared our souls about missing our kids and feeling guilty about being away for these stretches. We heard each other’s embarrassing baby talk and in-jokes on the phone to our kids, not to mention the fights with our husbands, back home tearing their hair out over being fashion week widows for eight weeks a year. 

Our American editor-in-chief counterparts had the grand perk of having a chauffeur-driven car all to themselves at the shows. Every now and again I would ride with the American Glamour editor, my wonderful friend Cindi, in hers to some show or appointment. I’d have hated that solitude. I needed those chats and the camaraderie from Team Glamour: the laughing kept my spirits and my stamina up when my knees were buckling from the stupid heels I’d been wearing all day. 

Once in Paris I witnessed a fashion editor from a rival mag exit her car in the middle of traffic, slam the door and run off, crying. I heard later there’d been an epic argument in their car and I was just so grateful when I realised that had never happened in the Glamour car and probably wouldn’t ever. 

The only squabble I remember is one with Claudia, our retail exec, whose job was to organise our schedules and make sure we all had the right tickets for each show. The front row chat all day had been about a party being thrown by a major Parisian fashion house. It was becoming pretty clear to me that I was the only editor who hadn’t been invited so I asked Claudia to make some polite enquiries as to why. These things are indicators of how your magazine is perceived so it’s commercially important to be seen in the same room as your competitors.  Word came back that it was a terrible oversight and of course I was invited, see you there. ‘Oh Claud, I don’t want to go!’ I said. I’d already mentally opted for a room service cheeseburger. ‘I just wanted to know if I was invited. There’s a difference.’ 

She glared: ‘Jo! YOU, are GOING!’ 

There was an uncomfortable silence in the car for about ten of my sulky minutes while I got my head around it. I had nothing to say because of course she was right, I must go. And so then I started laughing and couldn’t stop about how immediately and brusquely she’d told me off. And you know what, I dragged myself to that party thinking wistfully of my room service cheeseburger, but then ended up having an excellent time.