Fashion editorial shoots in fashion magazine are always so beautiful and inspiring. Everything seems so perfect: the model, the location, the clothes, everything comes together so harmoniously. They are like pieces of art. It’s not a surprise to know that behind fashion photoshoots there is so much work and lots of people involved. To explain better what it takes to realize a fashion photoshoot, I interviewed the responsible for the photoshoots at a famous fashion magazine. For the policy of the magazine, this person had to keep the identity anonymous but he/she is a big fish and puts together all of the shoots that you see on a fashion magazine. She/he has released some very great insights that will let you know how the process works, how everything starts, the people involved, the location and so on.
Tell us about your role:
I’m responsible for putting together all of the shoots that you see on our pages. The shoots are really important and we want to be creating shoots that are aspirational so that our readers want to buy into the product, so it’s a challenging role. I’m working on so many different shoots at once, I might be speaking to a photographer about a location for one and negotiating a budget on the other, sending a call sheet for another one. It’s very varied.
What’s the most challenging part of your role?
We have to be very level-headed and patient. We work with lots of difficult people. It’s very fast-paced — we might be working on like ten different productions at the same time, so you kind of have to, have to keep your cool. And we have set budgets that are given to us at the beginning of the year by our managing editor and I have to make sure that we’re hitting those targets throughout the year.
Tell us about the process of organizing a photoshoot. How does it work?
How it normally works, at the beginning of the season, we will meet with the fashion department and the BC department. They will have just come back from the fashion shows in London, Paris, Milan and New York. They put together these trends books that we go through together as a team and then we look at all the trends they’ve seen, and we decide which ones are suitable for our pages, which ones kind of would work with different photographers we work with. And from there, I have to go and basically build the team. So photographer, stylist, work with their agents to to get dates on the calendar, which is very challenging because we work with very high tier people, who are really busy working with us but also with other magazines. So we have to kind of fight tooth and nail to get the dates on the books. But when we do, it’s amazing cause industry-wide I think people do look at the fashion magazine to see which photographers and stylists we’re working with. Once we’ve booked the team, then if I can’t attend the shoot, which quite often I can’t because we’re just so busy, you have to be in the office then, we get like a local production team, who we work really closely with, and they’ll help us with local, with finding locations, getting the team from A to B, sometimes they might have to drive everyone from London to, like, the countryside, and they’ll help get everyone, move everyone around, the logistics. And they will help with being on set, on set assistants in case like the photographer or stylist need anything.
What are the skills you need for this job?
Organizational skills, ability to manage stress and be productive in these situations, choose the right team and trust their ideas because the photoshoot is successful if everyone does their job. Knowing as many people as possible is useful during shooting: photographers, stylists, designers, assistants, production. You will be grateful for the connection you have that comes to your mind when needed and can help you deal with a situation. It is never nice
