Tuesday was the last sunny day in the courtyard, and my last day street style sketching. As far as fashion weeks go, this one in London has been a bit adverse. I got food poisoning on the weekend and lost two days, missed a couple of the few shows I did get invitations for. Since then I’ve been operating on an empty stomach and Fear Of Missing Out.

Once I was sketching in the yard, I forgot how bad I felt. Tuesday was much busier – a lot more action. More people to draw, more people who came and said hey. It was non-stop until the sun disappeared around 3:30pm and I felt shivery.

At that point I was kindly handed an invitation to Aminaka Wilmont and got to go inside the big tent for the first and only time this season. As I sat down in my fourth row seat, I felt a veil of negative emotion settle over me. I don’t like to think of myself as much of a downer, but I think the effort I had asked of my shattered constitution had broken me down too far.

In that moment I understood that love is not the only intention you can channel into creativity. You can also use the negative. As I absorbed the show (it wasn’t like watching) I let my arm go like a limp automaton, not even trying to avoid spraying paint on my unlucky seat mates. The music and the beauty was appropriately dark, though I don’t remember much about the clothing.

The resulting sketches were wet and sticky, and without a doubt the best I had done all week. I put them on one of the big speakers at the end of the runway to dry as the audience was filing out. It was in this very conspicuous position, where the catwalk meets the doors backstage, where I felt as if all my years of hopes and dreams were dripping off of me like so much wet paint, and I burst into tears. I had been working all week, trying so hard to do good work, to get attention and appreciation, so I was both devastated and relieved to be completely alone and ignored in the blind eye of the hurricane.

I stuffed the sketches into my Sainsbury’s shopping bag, smudging and ruining most of them, and got on the bus to go home, disappearing into the crowd of London’s uncaring commuters.

On reflection, that must be how so many designers must feel in that very same physical position. Except they must feel it exponentially, because the stakes are so much higher. Imagine working so hard, season after season, long after your status as the hot new thing has cooled off. Any recognition you get stops feeling good, because no matter who says you’re great, you’re still struggling and any progress is so incremental. And no matter how much effort and money you spend, you could still experience a career-ending reversal of fortune on the fulcrum of fickle fashion.

An emotional hangover after fashion week isn’t uncommon, this one felt deeper and darker than usual.

Moda Uomo was my first fashion week this year. It was also my first time in Milan, and I thought that perhaps the menswear week would be a little bit calmer and easier to penetrate than Moda Donna. Milan intimidates me, to be honest. It seems very corporate and not as indie-blogger-friendly as other cities, and my Italian is non-existent. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that these fears were, if not unfounded, unnecessary, as I picked up five invitations in Milan just for the trouble of asking.

My first show was Corneliani – the morning was chilly and we got off at the wrong bus stop so we hustled through frosty streets to get to the venue – a design museum. The runway was one of the longest I’ve ever seen and curved, with watery blue projections along the curved wall. The clothing was very clean and careful, grey clusters of grown-up wool suits and handsome, substantial bags.

I have to admit that during Frankie Morello, I was so distracted by the show I forgot to draw it. I love seeing showmanship (literally) on the runway – it’s too rare. Morello sent out punky clubbers bristling with nails and fur and cool downtown boys in beanies, which gradually relaxed into hippie-dudes with bindis and sarongs. For the finale the model’s sarong hung dangerously low until it was dropped with a flourish. Morello literally had the entire crowd leaning forward in their seats and practically salivating. Now that’s runway.

The John Varvatos show was another highlight. Inside a shabby church with chipped plaster and a faded painted angels on the walls and ceiling, they reproduced a bit of Central Park and sent down a series of exquisite New-York-style imaginary boyfriends. I loved drawing this show. The other fun part of this show was getting to sit with the team from Holt Renfrew and for the first time having the opportunity to introduce myself to a Canadian fashion inspiration, Barb Atkin. I was not expecting to see a familiar face in Milan, so this made me smile.

Iceberg had a modern-times backdrop and a bit of Charlie Chaplin rumpled flair. Bowler hats tipped-back, big cardigans and hands in pleated pants-pockets. As a proposal for menswear it was charming – but somehow it didn’t inspire my best work. Perhaps because I switched to markers from watercolours at this point, I was still getting a handle on a new medium.

The final show, Gazzarrini, was the show that was perhaps the most peculiar. It doesn’t take much in menswear to cross over from interesting to implausible. If I met someone wearing these clothes in real life, I would find this person a somewhat strange character. Pin curl pompadours, funnel necks, very high-waisted trousers, and a pop-o-flouro palette.

As usual, you can see the development of sketching over the course of the week – stiffer at Corneliani and very loose and abstract by Gazzarrini.

I did find my first menswear week to be much more chilled out than any womenswear week I’ve attended – perhaps giving a taste of what fashion weeks were like in the pre-blogger days. I saw only a small handful of street style photographers and met only a couple other bloggers – though of course the shows I attended were not the hottest tickets. It did feel like there was space for everyone that wanted to be there. And of course, the people-watching was wonderful – folks were well-dressed and well-groomed, and there were very few show-ponies.

My whirlwind tour of Italy  is concluded, and I’m sifting through a pile of sketches at my desk now. To place-hold while I catch up, here is the most successful live sketch, completed while the show was in session. John Varvatos presented a lineup of New York rock-star crush objects which seemed to inspire some of my better work.

It always seems like the further I get into a fashion week, the more abstract the sketches get. In these two cases, I barely added anything to the original live version.

The Issey Miyake invitation was a truly pleasant surprise. It was a hot dusty Sunday in the Tuileries and I had been walking around carrying a heavy bag all morning, so I took an hour and a half nap in those heavy metal chairs they have under the trees outside the tent. When I woke up, a crowd was surrounding me waiting to get into the show. I had ended up in a cluster of lovely ladies who work in the Issey Miyake showrooms all over Europe, and as I did my warm-up sketches they took an interest in me and gave me a bit of inside track into the company and the backstage happenings. The show was running very late.

The scene was pretty hot – lots of dress-upwomanship going on under the sun. I was snapped while sketching by Bill Cunningham, which I tried to appear oblivious to, while being quite chuffed. I never get asked to pose for street style – could care less, really – but to merit even an offhand snap by the godfather of street style photography was a pleasant moment. I like to think it was because I was sketching, but it could have just as easily been because I was wearing a white shirt.

Going from the bright scene outside to the the pitch inside the tent couldn’t have been more dramatic transition. Over a thousand souls inside a hot black tent on a scorching day created an airless atmosphere that was less than ideal for absorbing a collection properly. I managed to squeeze into a back-bench seat and squeeze out almost a dozen sketches from my squeezy-brush.

The show was appropriately light for spring, both in the sense that lights were used in the staging and the looks themselves appeared light and literally botanical. As the first collection under the creative control of designer, Yoshiyuki Miyamae, the sense of renewal came across.

Thanks to Colin McDowell and the Design Museum, I had the lucky chance to sketch at the Fashion Fringe show. The live version is on the left – the more polished version is on the right. Click for big.

Fyodor Golan was the night’s award winner.

Heidi Leung, my personal favourite. (See a slide of the rough overlaid with the final here.)

Nabil El-Nayal, the crowd favourite.

Cristina Sabaiduc‘s audacious London debut. This is an image of the rehearsal. You can see the magnetic garments clinging to the back wall there. Cristina dressed her models in these modular effects as they walked around the block. Check out her full collection here.

The video is off the hook.

CRISTINA SABAIDUC SS12 Motion from Cristina Sabaiduc on Vimeo.

My sketches and notes from the show are here.

This wonderful candid was captured by Lynsie Roberts. See more of Lynsie’s shots at her site.  Emma and I were absorbed in sketching by Cristina’s runway. Emma Block does brilliant illustration with a delightful collage technique.

My Saturday, February the 19th morning started off at Georgia Hardinge (below left), an award winning designer with the designs to back it up. It was the emptiest show I went to all week, which was too bad because it was also one of the highlights. Getting the fashion crowd up after Friday night is a no-go… though on the other hand, those in attendance were attentive. Hardinge showed Geiger-esque digital prints, crisply aerodynamic shapes in jackets, body-conscious dresses with amazing cut details, and jackets with undulating cut edges and dimension suggesting topography, or dunes, or the patterns that waves make on sandy beaches. Truly incredible execution, confirmed when seen up close at the exhibition upstairs later.

It was a very dull, rainy, cold day in London. My next two shows were both from the PR company that scatters “e-vites” like confetti. I walked past insanely long lineups of people waiting in the rain with damp computer printouts and thought to myself: I don’t love fashion shows as much as these kids. Instead, I whiled away the afternoon in bookstores.

The last show of the day was Bryce Aime (above right), and the first time (out of three attempts) that I actually got to see the inside of the On|Off venue. Aime showed a series of sharply cut leathers and leggings, and over the course of the show the models got encased in acrylic crystals printed with satellite photos of snow-covered landscapes. It was the most successful gimmick I’ve seen in a long time, and not in a small way because the beauty was so subtly done – simple eyeliner and a softer version of the mohawk/quiff  created a lighter shade of punk. So many designers try and fail to do anything new with black leather and hard edges, it was great to see it done with a defter hand.

Two out of two shows that exemplified what I had hoped to find in London – designers that manage to be interesting and sophisticated, at the same time – not an easy thing to do by any means.

Skipped the after parties again!

After working Berlin fashion week, I dropped the ball a bit for London Fashion Week, with no freelance project obligations to encourage me. My application for accreditation was slow to go through and before I knew it, it was already February, and I hadn’t done any show requests or anything.

Then I kicked my own slack self in gear and made calls, dropped like a hundred cold emails. I’m only in London for a limited time, and I’m here to meet people – its not like I can let the first fashion week get away from me. Its true that fashion weeks can be a painfully vast amount of bureaucracy for a very limited amount of showtime. The truth of it is that the queuing, the emails, the invites, the rejections (silent or polite, rejections were the norm, I am nobody in London), is a sorting process, an extremely elaborate people-mixing machine. There really is no better way to meet a lot of fashion people than through the shared subhuman tedium punctuated with brief flashes of disappointment and awe that is a fashion week.

The week started off stillborn on February 18, with a long outdoor queue (where I met up with my euro-gig-buddy, Barb) for the Jena Theo show. I prophetically gave us a 50:50 chance of getting into what was rumoured to be a small venue at On|Off… and I was exactly right, as we got cut off by Health & Safety just as soon as we reached the door. Seemed like from then on, I should be putting pounds down on my bets.

The truth is, I had nothing to expect – I was familiar with none of the designers whose invitations I received. The first show I managed to actually attend was Prophetik. A sketch from the show is above. The show started with a really long powerpoint statement that I didn’t finish reading in time – this is obviously a brand that subscribes to Philosophy, as well as taking inspiration from historical costumes especially 18th century revolutionary styles. The effect was somewhat like a costumes for a cult. It was extremely well made, sturdily crafted stuff, but also heavily literal. The show succeeded, with live music and a total vision in styling, in transporting the audience to another time and place – however the clothes seemed to belong in that time and place, and not in fashion, here and now.

I was supposed to attend Jean-Pierre Braganza next, however, I made a rookie mistake about the venue. So instead, I saw the Ones to Watch show, a collection of promising designers sponsored by Vauxhall, a car company.

Kirsty Ward (above left) was one of my favourites of the week so far. She took a very standard material favoured by young designers – sheer sparkle organza – and made it interesting, shaping it into freeform loops with wired, bound edges that suggested discarded, airily inflated clothing, and paired it with extreme hardware in the form of necklaces made literally from hardware. Anja Mlakar (above right) did colour and texture, playing with oversized woven effects, laser-cut windowpane patterns, plush velveteen contrasted with moire and sheer, and padded rings around the body.

Tze Goh (above left) did a post-modern version of Jackie Kennedy – wools and neoprene that stood away from the body, careful seams and rounded forms. A fitted capelet created the suggestion of shoulderblades underneath. In a week where there was so much muchness, Goh’s designs were refreshing. Sara Bro-Jorgenson (above left) did gauzy, gothic knits that still managed to be modern – including intarsia trompe-l’œil effects that fooled some editors into thinking they were merely printed.

After a bit of a break, I went to line up for the only proper tent show I was invited to, Bora Aksu. Well, I use the term invited loosely – this particular PR company simply told me to show up with a printout of my emailed invitation… and of course, I wasn’t the only one who received these peculiar instructions. It was a mob scene. There is a man who does the difficult detail of herding cats into their separate holding pens – priority, seated, and standing. I don’t envy him his job – it seems very stressful and somehow he manages to be somewhat good humoured about it. The hordes of standing people with their printed invitations crushed and carried me along into the runway room, or I guess maybe the catwalk cave? I ended up in a high corner where I had a distant view of Bora Aksu, which from far away seemed like so many tubular leather corselets, chunky cable knits, and green lace bridesmaid’s dresses, all smashed together.

After that, I went to Brick Lane to take in a couple presentations, including one by Christopher Beales, whose sharply pointed, glamourous gowns had a linear sensibility to them that made them a pleasure to draw. This was my favourite, emphasizing and echoing hipbones and shoulder blades.

There were after parties that I didn’t go to. I am more of a daytime girl, at this stage in the game I think its OK to admit that big beats and open bars don’t really draw me.