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Shopping for a living
Posted Dec 5, 2008
In order to get upstairs to see a preview of the new collections there are a number of hoops one must jump through - and inevitably it gets competitive as to who gets the first snippets of information about the collection's inspiration. By good fortune of my particular role (yippee!!) every season I get to take a very special "personal" guided tour with head of sales.
This morning I was booked in to "explore" the new AW10 menswear collection - "looking" is strictly for and to quote Liz Hurley (?!) "civilian" shoppers. Perhaps more important though - and my little secret is the need to check out what the buyers are wearing. Forget fashion magazine trend predictions - whatever the buyers wear is guaranteed to hit shops two seasons later - if you can befriend a buyer, believe me it will pay dividends for your fashion cred. They're not of course easy to befriend by nature of the fact they are always in Tokyo - Milan - somewhere Scandinavian - but I tend find feeding them works (overdrafts are unfortunately a drawback to their position- their training tends to involve excel sheets and not much else for approx. ten years).
Anyway, opening the door to the sales floor at 10am can be very unsettling at times due to the fact every season, depending on the collection's themes, the ambience is finely tuned to create a similar atmosphere, so what I actually entered was a softly-lit room complete with leather armchairs, male models in silk dressing gowns, candles, flowers - in fact everything I had been dreaming of only a few hours earlier. My knight in shining armour arrived to start my "tour" and off we went to spend the next couple of hours stroking cashmere. Life really is tough at the bottom.
Career guidance at behindtheseamsgirl@gmail.com
More career highlights at http://www.swide.com/luxury-magazine/en/History/Behind-The-Seams/
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