Every show has a perimeter, and standing on it are people wearing the most rigorously function-tested clothing at the entire event. They will be on their feet for eleven hours in one position, outdoors, in whatever the weather does. Nobody photographs them. It is, on any objective measure, the most interesting clothing problem in the building.
Eleven hours in one position
The requirements are brutal and specific: warmth without bulk, because you must be able to move fast from a standing start; a sole with real cushioning, because standing is harder on a body than walking; pockets that close, because you will be jostled; and sleeves that let you raise both arms without the hem lifting. Almost no fashion outerwear meets more than two of those.
What they arrive at, independently, is remarkably consistent. Almost everyone we spoke to had abandoned the issued footwear within a month for something with a thick, soft midsole. Several had bought their own base layers. One had modified a company jacket by having the cuffs taken in, at his own expense, because the wind came up the sleeves.
“Everyone in there is dressed for the photograph. I'm dressed for the eleventh hour.”
Denise Okoro, event steward
What the industry could learn
There is a long tradition of fashion borrowing the look of workwear while discarding everything that made it work. The pocket goes decorative, the fabric goes light, the sole goes flat. What is unusual about this particular workforce is that they are solving the same problems designers claim to be solving, on a fraction of the budget, and arriving at better answers.
There is a hierarchy inside the uniform that is invisible from outside. Long-serving staff have accumulated small modifications — a different base layer, a personal pair of gloves, a folded cloth inside a collar — and newer staff copy them within weeks. It is a genuine oral tradition of garment engineering, running in parallel to the industry it is standing next to.
Who pays for the kit
The uniform is issued; almost everything that makes it work is not. Of the eleven people we spoke to, nine had bought their own footwear, six their own base layers, and four had paid for alterations to a company garment. None of it was reimbursed and nobody expected it to be. The total personal outlay people described ranged from about eighty pounds to just over three hundred, spent to make an eleven-hour shift survivable.
That is a straightforward transfer of a business cost onto the lowest-paid people at the event, and it is invisible because the modifications are deliberately subtle. Nobody is going to notice a different insole. Two of the agencies represented on those doors publish supplier-conduct policies that run to several pages; neither mentions footwear. It would be a cheap thing to fix and it would immediately improve the one piece of clothing at fashion week that has to actually perform.
We offered to photograph the eleven people we interviewed properly, in their own clothes, on their own time, and eight said yes. Those pictures are the reason this piece exists. What was immediately obvious once they were out of uniform is that several of them dress with considerably more precision than the guests they had spent the week holding back, which is not an ironic observation so much as an entirely predictable one.
We asked eleven people on the door whether anyone from inside had ever asked them about their clothes. None of them had been asked. Two of them laughed at the question, which is a fair enough response to a magazine turning up with a camera at hour nine.
