high fashion?
Those who care may be aware that this is London Fashion Week, those that know me will realise that fashion and I are no friends, although according to todays' Womans Hour; black is back.Yesterdays' strange job was to facilitate a fashion show, in my infinite ignorance I thought that you put a show on, and people came, or not, as the case may be. How wrong I was, in London Fashion Week there are shows all over the place and the great and the good are bussed around from one show to another, these are plotted to a tight schedule, with certain key shows immutable in the timeframe.
Our show was on a building site in (fashionable) Clerkenwell, we were using a shop under construction and the idea was that the models were seen through the windows from the street, partially through sheets of plastic, and then perambulated about through piles of building materials and out into the street where they all lined up across the shop front.
We got there about 1.30 with four hours to set up and rehearse, and a scheduled show time at 5.45. Our creatives were a couple of very nice french boys with big woolly cardigans and the compulsory descending trouser. They were very accommodating and undemanding, and the show was lit, soundchecked and rehearsed in record time, the actual fashion designer was very happy and all we had to do was wait for the buses. This was where it all went wrong; Clerkenwell on a Sunday is not the fizzing latte-fuelled creative maelstrom that loft dwellers would have us believe it is the rest of the time, in fact, on its day off, it subsides back into the sort of morose light industrial griminess that characterised it before it got trendy, and there is nothing whatever to do. If ever we had an excuse to slope off to the pub then this was it, and whilst there were three reasonably attractive looking pubs within 5 minutes of our venue, shut they were, and shut they stayed.
About 100 people turned up about 15 minutes after we should have done the show, and joined us in our wait. Every now and again a message would come through from fashion central; ' the buses have left such and such, and will be coming on to you next', so we waited, and waited, and waited, eventually, at 7.45 it was decided that, wherever the buses had gone, it wasn't Clerkenwell and we did the show. Cameras flashed, models stalked uncertainly over piles of sand in four inch heels, and before you knew it it was all over and done with and the designer was taking her bows. That was that, and we pulled it all down.
My next mission was to get over to Heathrow, where we have another show on, and take some bits and pieces that were forgotten (it is a feature of this company that something is always forgotten). In this case, the Heathrow show had forgotten to leave us any keys to the storage units, which gave us access only to the one store which has a combination lock, we were able (just) to shove everything away and I had to try to get to Heathrow from Bow before the pub shut.
When I got to the hotel (I missed the pub), I found my colleagues, quite drunk and in fits of hysterical laughter. Without ceremony I was forced into the gents toilet and was entranced to read this exhortation posted on the tiles above the urinals: please do not eat the urinal cakes. What were they thinking of? I know that the articles in question are often referred to as pineapple chunks, but there the resemblance ends. I think we need to know.
posted by Lampy @ 9/19/2005 10:41:00 am
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