During London Fashion Week my best friend Blue (who is from Brighton) came to stay with me as I’m based in London. It sounds so stupid trying to explain it but even though Brighton is only 45 minutes away from London by train, the hours during fashion week are really unpredictable. You might get all your castings done by 6/7pm (approx. 10 of them a day). However call-backs – a ‘Fitting’ – will usually be in the evening. This is where you go back to the casting to try on looks in front of the designer to see how well their clothes fit you. If they like how the clothes look on you, they’ll option you for the show. Most fittings will be the night before the show (some around 1am) and the designer will have also tried your outfit on a lot of girls so there is no guarantee a fitting means you’re walking the show. The casting director and designer together decide who is in the show and the final group of girls chosen will depend on so many different things i.e. who the girls have already walked for last season/this season/recent work they’ve got themselves a name from/a casting director sees a lot of potential in them, or they simply just fit that show’s aesthetic perfectly!

Blue and I are at different agencies and look completely different too ( I am also a lil’ bit shorter haha ) and so tended to have different castings. Blue has also just walked for Dior and Channel in Paris and so although her 4th season in London now, she got these through new castings she had not done before. It is so nice to see that hard work pays off and can lead to new opportunities. Either way, Blue and I tried to arrange our castings so we did the ones each other didn’t have in the mornings, then do the ones we both had together in the evenings. That meant we could go home together. True friends come with you to your fitting at 11:30pm in Haggerston (an hour from my house) to keep your spirits up! (YES Blue is a truly fantastic friend!!). Also, when an option you have for a huge show may be dropped the night before – best thing is having your best friend around to make you realise other things in life are so much more important. You can laugh together about how stupid the whole thing can sometimes be. Our castings/fittings/shows were so different that we actually only had dinner together on the first night out of 7 together but even so it was so nice to have Blue to stay.

In Paris, I was living with two girls from the same agency as me, Harriet and Hannah. Although we may have more castings a day here, with PFW going on for 9 days, all the castings were SO MUCH easier to get to. In London most are about 50 minutes away from each other – including more than one bus/tube and usually a decent walk in the rain too. In Paris everything is always 15 minutes away – it’s amazing !