Tears, tantrums and the cheese sweats
The highs and lows and histrioniocs of surviving the international fashion shows
This photo always makes me laugh. Look at me, bottom right of the frame, being intent on looking as bored as possible about Kim and Kanye sitting right there. This was my very last show in Paris, in March 2015, and I had a two-day conference to stay on for and I was dreaming, relentlessly, of the moment I would get to go home again after a long fashion month.
This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about my days of attending the international fashion shows. Possibly because I was glued to the Instagram account of the world’s current favourite handsome, V of BTS, whilst he was the It Boy of Paris at the recent menswear collections.
People often ask me if I miss going to the shows. Not really. I’m glad I did it. I saw some incredible things and had an absolute blast with Team Glamour for around 16 years. But it definitely had a sort of Groundhog Day element to it. I don’t think if I was still going it would be much different to what it was five years ago.
When I think about it, in all serious, what I really miss are the meals: the palm hearts salad at Bice in Milan, the cheeseburger at Cafe Ruc. As soon as we had our flights booked, the team and I would start planning our dinners with the same, almost scientific concern we applied to assembling our outfits. In August, I would start getting excited about the mountains of puffy little bread cakes I was going to shovel into my face here
I was possibly not prioritising the right reasons for being there.
Sometimes I would comfort eat the puffy bread after a day at the shows because I felt like I’d survived an assault course. Not that I’m being overly dramatic or anything. But on top of the physical challenges of the long hours, snatched five minute lunches of half a pack of Pringles washed down with a Diet Coke, the concentrating on not peeing yourself because you’re still hours away from an actual loo break, there’s all the mind games.
Every single time, a true madness would descend over me once I landed in that environment. And like every other editor of every glossy magazine, I grew to become very precious about how my magazine and I were being perceived by the fashion designers, their PRs and our rivals.
In many ways, the clothes being modelled on the catwalk are beside the point of going to the shows. Of course it’s important. It’s news. The success or failure of a fashion house’s work is a business success or failure which directly impacts that country’s economy. So for my friends like Anna Murphy at the Times or Lisa Armstrong at The Telegraph, they’re there to assess a designer’s work instantly, dash off 800 brilliant words on it whilst they’re in the car heading to the next show to do it again.
My job was to be more of a figurehead. As the editor of a long lead magazine, I had the luxury of letting it wash over me to a certain extent; percolate and slowly form the ideas of what might make great trend stories, which pieces I wanted for cover shoots over the coming months and weeks. I was there for relationship building at appointments with key designers and PRs between the shows. Shake hands, smile, tell everyone how great Glamour is for your clothes.
This whole exercise, what the Glamour team dubbed ‘the tits and teeth show’ was - and the more cynical amongst you will be ahead of me here - about making advertising money. No one actually talks money at this time. That’s the grubby business for the money people, not we creatives, darling. But my company was not paying for my flights, hotels, chauffeurs and dinners because they wanted me to have fun. I was there to further the health of the magazine’s bottom line.
In short, it’s all business. Yes, the sort of business where people wear sequined cocktail dresses to a fashion show in an old monastery at 9am on a Sunday morning. The kind of business where I really am enjoying myself, strutting around Milan in some new Prada wedges I simply had to buy and sweating pure cheese, but a business nonetheless.
When you understand that, suddenly every single hint at how your magazine is being judged becomes a very big deal.
It creates an eco-system reminiscent of your worst days in high school. This is a modern day gladiatorial arena and the weapons are image and vicious clique-y-ness. Colleagues from rival publications will tilt their head and smirk when they ask you why they didn’t see you at that important fashion brand’s dinner last night, when they already know it’s because you weren’t invited.
You hate yourself for being upset when you notice all your peers are suddenly brandishing the same box-fresh designer handbag. I’m not so shallow as to really care that much about handbags, but you can’t help but feel slighted when you realise a brand’s made a point of doling them out to practically everyone on the front row except you. That’s the sort of thing that’s used to very clearly communicate whether or not your magazine is in favour.
Nothing, however, communicates that more than the hierarchy of the seating plan at every fashion show. It’s why, despite your better, more rational instincts, it becomes your whole damn world at this time.
If your magazine is not being offered front row seats for a show and your competitors are, then that is terrible for business. It’s basically a fashion brand saying, ‘We don’t think your magazine is as good or as important as these ones we’ve seated in front of you’. And if you accept that second row seat, you’re saying, ‘I agree with your judgement of my magazine and I am OK with that.’ You just can’t do it - no matter how, frankly, twat-ish you feel about digging in your already-killing-you heels.
I’ve written before about how I constantly reminded myself that it wasn’t Jo being invited to parties or fashion shows, but ‘the editor of Glamour’. Well it cuts both ways. Sometimes, when Jo would rather just quietly, obediently sit in an assigned second or even - gasp! - third row seat and avoid any conflict, The Editor of Glamour had to be a hard-arse about that front row.
Some of you might be surprised that this was ever a battle for a market-leading magazine. But when every fashion venue has a finite amount of seats to accommodate the designer-clad buttocks of the whole world’s magazine editors, important buyers, celebrities, influencers and rich customers, the competition for those seats is a bloodbath.
The teams of fashion PRs who must draw up the seating plans are thus resigned to the reality that they will be pissing off a lot of people and getting shouted at - a lot - in the run-up to show time. But they have their job to do, so they start to justify palming you off with ‘second best’ seats for a variety of reasons, valid or not. In that situation, often Glamour’s ‘biggest selling women’s magazine’ boast was used against us. In the rarefied world of fashion, sometimes a magazine with big numbers was considered ‘common’, too ‘mass’, too ‘commercial’. On occasion, a fashion PR would openly sneer at me about the magazine, telling me my readers couldn’t possibly afford expensive brands, despite the concrete evidence I could produce to the contrary. A good old chestnut was ‘So sorry Jo, but the venue is tiny this year, we just can’t squeeze Glamour in this time’, which was all fine and dandy until you opened Instagram to see the venue was a city-sized football stadium. Some fashion houses simply didn’t think we were cool enough because we were a broader lifestyle mag, rather than purely, forensically all about fashion. Some fashion designers truly only care about the coolest style mags, the nicher the better, and would deliberately hold a fashion show in a venue that could only accommodate a handful of people.
Sometimes fashion PRs, bless them one and all, would try to soothe our fragile egos by cramming as many of us into the front row as they could. I have practically snogged most fellow editors-in-chief over the years, so close and up personal have I been - not a pretty place when everyone sitting there has hangover and coffee breath. I have been sat with one bum cheek falling off the end of a bench, the other literally on my seat companion’s leg, when a PR will skulk up, profusely apologetic but explain that - natural laws of physics be damned - two more people will soon be arriving to also squeeze into that space.
Some of the behaviour I’ve witnessed in the fight for show seats has been nothing short of disgraceful. I watched a grown man brazenly, unashamedly sit in a front row seat that was not his and point blank refuse to move when the editor who had been given the seat turned up. And because he was a respected stylist, the editor in question simply stood there, helpless and looking embarrassed until the PRs apologised to the guy and found him a front row seat somewhere else.
I sat in silence once, at a Versace show, as the important editor next to me was asked by a young intern if he could just see her ticket to check her seat number - who knows why, I think he was trying to navigate the room, roadmap style. She took it as a sign he doubted she should be there. She produced her ticket, which showed she was in the right seat. Five minutes later when that intern wandered back into view, the editor called him over and shouted, ‘DON’T YOU EVER FUCKING ASK ME TO SEE MY TICKET AGAIN.’ While he stammered apologies in broken English, I just fixed my eyes on the ground, squirming. I had considered telling her to calm down and not be so rude, but I too was terrified. And no one has ever calmed down by being asked to calm down, so I watched the tears bubble in this young man’s eyes and just willed the whole thing to be over as soon as possible, rather than risk escalating the situation. Besides, I’d no doubt have to sit next to her again at several different shows over the next few days.
Once, in a particularly squished and squashed front row, where my spine was now less backbone and more pretzel, I noticed the editor next to me welling up with tears. You’d be amazed how much crying goes on in general to be honest. I asked her if she was OK. Another exasperated, contorted front-rower had apparently told her that she was really ‘too fat’ for the front row.
Bear in mind too, that fashion shows never start anywhere near the time it says on the invitation. You’d often be sitting like that for an hour or more before the show started. Once, I was straight off the plane in New York, quick change at the hotel and out the door again to a Marc Jacobs show. It was supposed to start at 8pm, but by 9pm, the venue was still half empty. By 9.45pm, I was so tired I thought I might pass out - and laughed to myself as I thought, if I do, no one will help me, someone will just sit on me to get my seat.
Then there was the time when I had been assigned a front row seat at another New York fashion show. It was right there on my ticket: Row A, seat 16. When I arrived at the venue, there was no such seat 16. Seat 15 and seat 17, yes. To make matters worse, every seat had a guest name written on it. I walked the length of the row. Not a ‘seat 16’, or ‘Jo Elvin’ to be found. I asked a woman with a clipboard to help me. Bored looking, she pointed at a seat and said, ‘Sit there.’ But that seat had the name Patricia Field on it, ie the celebrated stylist of Sex and the City fame. I pointed this out, but the PR said it was fine. I knew it wasn’t and sure enough, my bum had barely grazed Patricia’s name when another PR appeared and fully yelled at me, Mean Girls-style, ‘YOU CAN’T SIT THERE!’ I tried to explain my predicament. She said she did not care. She pointed to another seat that I sat in, and then a minute later I was thrown out of that again by another screeching clipboard, wearing stilettos.
I couldn’t find any familiar British PR faces who might be able to help me. I was just about to leave the venue, angry and embarrassed, when the house lights dimmed and Pharrel Williams was on stage at the end of the catwalk and the first models starting to strut down the runway. And with little alternative, I was still standing on the bloody runway, watching in horror as the first glamazon got closer and closer to me, her every strut turning on more house lights. Panic-stricken, I started looking for a way out. Out of nowhere, a PR I knew yanked my hand and I fell into a seat that finally, now, they had managed to clear.
All of this probably explains why the fashion shows have cost me a fortune over the years at the osteopath. I only had to say, ‘I’ve just got back from the shows’ and he’d nod and start de-pretzel-ing my spine.
I’ve been witness to some incredible spectacles - and not all of them from bratty editors but genuinely amazing, unforgettable moments at fashion shows, like this:
I tried to upload my very own video of this but it kept crashing my computer.
One time, in Paris, I was asked to please get out of the way because everyone needed to interview this dog:
I even quite like that I once got smashed to the ground by a paparazzi photographer because he was rushing to get a shot of Katy Perry - hey, it’s another story I get to tell.
If I miss anything it’s the camaraderie with the team. Over the years we laughed, cried, ate, drank, shopped, gossiped and bitched our way around the world’s fashion capitals, trying to keep each other’s energy up during 16-hour days in crippling heels. Big shout out to Vanessa, Emer, Charlotte-Anne, Natalie, Sophie, Claudia, Julia, Karen, Sarah, Lucy, Shelly, Sophie and so many more who kept me entertained and sane and patiently assured me a million times a day that my outfit wasn’t the worst on the front row.
Yeah, I’d definitely do it all again.
No one talks enough about the levels of grown women crying at fashion week!
Superb. And fascinating!