How To Overcome Press Loan Obstacles When Styling For A New Company
I was commissioned a few weeks back to style a Launch Fashion Shoot for a new fashion company. And not only am I coming onboard as a stylist for this project, I also have the responsibility of organising the creative team and deriving a concept for the shoot.
As excited as I was to have the above responsibilities, I knew one big hurdle I faced was getting loans from Press Offices. From a business point of view, I understand why Press Officers can be hesitant to lend their client’s designs to unknown fashion companies. It is in a Public Relations officer’s best interest to ensure that their clients designs are advertised through mediums that can best show the designer’s work to the ‘Public’ as their job role suggests.
So knowing that I did not have the statistics that was going to send Press Officers banging on my door like beaucoup de hits, traffic, readership et al, I had to think outside the box. As I said previously in another post, my theme for this shoot is, ‘The Glamorous African Woman of Today’.
Since that post, my idea has grown and expanded and when it comes to the ‘Glamour Aspect’ of the shoot, I want to reference the 70s as to me the cultural and social icons the decade sprung like Jerry Hall, Grace Jones, Studio 54 et al were Glamour personified.
Ideally I would have loved to borrow dresses like the below as I want long flowing hems that seductively part to reveal beacoup de legs-
Courtesy of Stephanie.blogspot.com
Courtesy of Stepahnie.blogspot.com
So what do you do when you need high-end designs and you don’t have a lot of Press Officers to loan from? For me, this is when you open up your Fashion Contacts book and give the designer you know personally a call.
This is what I did, I am very fortunate that in my time in Berlin, I’ve come to know designer Eric Farr and once I told him of my project and after we both went to a fabric shop to source some materials-he was eager to come on board and sketch some designs for the shoot based on the brief I gave him.
I have to add here that since he showed me his sketches which he calls, ‘Glam Nigerian’, there have been some changes to the designs, but I wanted to show you his great progress so far.
The first sketch will be with leopard print fabric with dark copper detailing-
The fabric for the second sketch will be a black and copper, sparkly number-
With the second design, I really think of Diana Ross as she is the Boss when it comes to slinky, sparkly evening dresses with sky-high splits, just have a look at this classic clip-
How much fun does it look like she and Michael Jackson are having?! And on a side note, I need the model on the day of the shoot to have this ‘Diana Ross energy and movement’…
Like I said, changes have been made with these designs and I will show the finalised versions of both sketches. In any event, the crux of my advice is when it comes to styling for a new company (especially)- a stylist really has to think outside the box.
