Friday 26 February 2010

London Fashion Week Day: 0 - The Beginning of a Fashion Era




Day 0 - Thursday, 18 February - I had to be at Freemason’s Hall @ 11:00am for a Staff training/briefing.

I went a little bit earlier as I didn’t want to be late and found lots of grls waiting outside and having cigarettes, soon enough it was whole group of people outside and we start talking to each other and something that really impressed me what there were lots of people from all over the UK! There were some girls from Manchester, another girl from Devon and some others from New Castle. (I felt lucky that I was from London to be honest, as I didn’t have to travel that far, my trip was only 24min door-to-door.)

As soon as we all gather up together we enter the building and one of the Directors told us to go to one of the historical rooms of Freemason’s hall to make a start.

First things first we start with some ground rules, like NO EATING carbs during Fashion week and girls should wear high hills all the time… hahahha kidding of course… Fashion Week isn’t all about that……!

Well ok, the only thing that they told us was to wear black clothing, and they general talked about what we should expect during Fashion, Lots of stress and lots of fashion disasters might strike and don’t mind people that might be mean to us, as there will be lots of stress going around.

As soon as we finish with the briefing, it was time to split into groups and allocate our posts……

I had no idea which post I was going to have, some others new beforehand but I didn’t had a clue…. So the coordinator start calling names for the backstage team, then start calling names for front of the house, still not any sign of my name,
I started thinking geez what happened with me?
Anyways we carry on, the next department was Media Centre… and here it was me!!
I was part of the Media Centre team that consist of 5 people. I though great….! Wicked even if I had no idea what media centre responsibilities will be, I just did the connection in my mind that since I am doing PR the Media centre will be a great fit for me.

After all of us assign to groups they director of VFS gave us a tour to the building and show us all the rooms that Fashion Week will take place, from the Catwalk to the Exhibition room and from Presentation room to Media Centre.

Before I realise it was 4:30pm already and as we done the whole tour of Freemasons and we got ourselves familiar with the building and the rooms we start talking about responsibilities….

Basically the Media Centre would be the Press Lounge, where Journalists, bloggers, photographers, and general people from the press will visit in order to get all the press materials for the shows and the Designers as well as use the IT facilities to tweet/blog/e-mail etc.

Our responsibilities would be to assist them, provide information’s about the Designers, Shows, and general questions about the fashion schedule. Also we will have to do fashion research on a daily basis about any media coverage we got online and offline, as soon as we find something that involve us we should make a record of it and store it.

I thought to myself perfect I couldn’t had asked for something better :)


So yes, that was the Day: 0, (very easy) I left and all I couldn’t wait to come back tomorrow for the grant opening of London Fashion Week AW10…

Georgios.

Wednesday 24 February 2010

Working for London Fashion Week - AW10


So here we go, my name is Georgios Mavridis and I am a post-grad student at University of Westminster doing Public Relations with a big passion for Fashion!

A few weeks back we had a guest speaker, John Walford from Vauxhall Fashion Scout coming to Fashion PR class to talk about Fashion in the UK and International as well as to give us lots of tips and advices.

At the end of the class he told us that there were inter opportunities for London Fashion Week AW2010 and whoever wanted could apply.
So I did............

Next think I know, I receive an e-mail that I was in! I was trilled to work for London Fashion Week, in the past I had worked for a Fashion PR agency and for a Fashion magazine but never had the chance to work for London Fashion Week!!
The biggest event for FASHION….
I was so trilled and I didn’t know what to expect…..

So today, the last day of Fashion Week AW10, I decide to start this blog as I’d like to share the experience day by day!

Look out for my posts……..!

Georgios.