I feel this term has been filled with me always saying sorry to you out there, and yet again I say sorry for keeping you all in the dark. BUT in my defense I have had very little free time in between working a ridiculous amount of time at my internship, classes, and schoolwork. So the last time I let you guys know I was getting an internship at Peter Pilotto, well a lot has happened since then!!!!! When I started it was about 2.5 weeks until their show, but weirdly (maybe I should say scarily) enough there wasn’t much to do and all the interns were fighting to do the simplest things. The fact that there was very little to do was very worrying! Well I should also tell you a little about the awesome people who work there! To start off, everyone is wonder and they are very nice, there are the pattern cutters Murat, Suzzane, Stephen, and Helen Shine. Murat is very funny but very meticulous, Suzzane is really quite and shy until you get a little wine in her, Stephen is amazing at draping and funny as well, and then there’s Helen Shine, she is super bubbly, funny, crazy and always fun! There are the assistant type people Yusuke, Katie, Jess, and Anna, the seamstresses, and of course quite a few interns. And of course there are the designers Peter and Christopher, who are hard working yet still very nice, which isn’t the norm in the fashion industry. Peter is the quite one, but funny and the backbone of the label, and Christopher has a flamboyant personality and quite the jokester, together they make a perfect ying and yang design team.
Ok, now back to my internship, at first the hours were decently, 3hrs here 6hrs there, but that all ended the week leading up to the show!!!! The week before the show the facilities hours were extended from nine to 24hrs, which meant we often left past midnight if not 3-5am!! You have to also see this was on top of school! Well that week I had found out that we were expected to stay the full 24hrs before the show on Tuesday the 23rd, and at first was all against staying, but inevitably I had to do it, and this was after doing an 18hrs day the day before!! Everyone was living off of chocolate and redbull, which definitely took it’s toll! People were crazed towards the wee hours of the morning, roaming around like drugged zombies, and the moment you stopped you were in extreme danger of falling asleep, so you just wandered around aimlessly to pass the time. When it came time to go to the actual show all of were exhausted, stressed, hyped-up, anxious, the whole gamut of emotions, this may have been from the number of redbulls we all consumed that night.
Once we got to the show, it strated to become very surreal for me. Seeing all the girls getting into hair and make-up was just like watching a behind the scenes runway show on youtube. The clothes racks were put out with the looks all carefully hung up according to whom was modeling it and surprisingly there were so many more clothes than I had realized. See at the studio was only one of the places putting the garments together, there were the manufactures sewing up samples as well as individual seamstresses around town and they were all making there way back the last few days before the show. Anyway I was assigned to dress Ming for the show and she wore a pair of snakeskin printed rust trousers, a sash button-up shirt, and printed tweed short coat and a huge “jeweled” belt. The show was amazing, and everything went together so beautifully, their inspiration was something about 70’s art and architecture, 70’s liberty/paisley prints, and liquid mercury among other things, and although I really dislike the color orange, they so elegantly made me love it in their show. While at the show I had a very starting realization, models are disgustingly skinny in really life! You could see every bone in their small little body, and while they look good in the clothes, the moment you take them off it’s pretty nasty. I thought I was playing into this ideal in fashion by using models who I believe are really skinny, but my models would have to drop a stone (approximately 14 lbs) before they would look like these models, I think the industry should use healthy looking models not dilapidated, skeletal models.
After the show I slept for two days straight, ha! I wish, I had to get back to working on schoolwork almost immediately! Till this day I still haven’t had what I consider a decent nights sleep, which would be 9hrs+. Since the show I have still been interning at Peter Pilotto, because they had to get their collection ready to take to Paris to show the buyers. In this stage of the collection more accessible pieces get made, so you have a range for buyers to put in their stores, everything from printed t-shirts, knitwear, jackets, skirts, and then all of the pieces from the actual runway show.
Well in all I have to say this was an amazing and insightful experience, which has not scared me away from the industry, but rather has made me even more excited for the future!
Here are a few of my favorites from the Peter Pilotto AW 2010/11 collection:
