Adventure #023 - The Photo Shoot

You may not have noticed this information if you're not really interested by fashion, but in February, Alexander McQueen passed away. He was an amazing British designer, one of my favourites actually. The world of fashion just lost a great person.


I work for a fashion online magazine, and of course McQueen's death really touched us. So Caroline, the girl I'm working with, and I decided to do something. But what? Everybody was writing things about how amazing he was and showing videos of his last show, etc etc. We wanted to do something different.

We decided to organize a photo shoot. The idea was to wrap people in Britigh flags, so that it looks like they're naked and just wearing the flag. With McQueen gone, there's nothing left for us to wear. Why a British flag? Simply because the designer used it a lot in its creations (I remember a clutch that I would have loved to have...)

As McQueen was 40 years old when he died, we decided to publish 40 pictures, with 40 different people if possible. We just needed to find 40 people willing to have their picture taken and put online... Caroline contacted some people on Lookbook (a website on which you can show your outfits). I created a Facebook event and posted an ad on a Prague website for expats. We managed to have about 30 people coming to the photo shoot and since we did some group pictures, had no problem to find 40 of them (actually, all the pictures were so beautiful it was really hard to choose only 40!). The photographer was a really talented Russian girl, Yulya Bazzy.

The experience was great but exhausting! Organisation is my own of my skill so I took care of all of these while Yulya and Caroline were taking the pictures. I didn't have one minute to sit in the whole day as we always had new people arriving. It was actually a good things that only 30, and not 40, people showed up. Otherwise, it would have been really crazy. So I opened the door, explained the concept, asked for email addresses and names, .... and did the make-ups. The make-up artist was indeed sick and couldn't come. So I had to do make-ups. Which I hate and am really bad at it. But we wanted people to look like they had been crying so fortunately, make-ups didn't have to be perfect.

Even if Caroline and Yulya often works together, it is mostly to take pictures of Caroline's outfits or during interviews. Never with a lot people. So it was a first for both of us and we were a bit afraid that the result wouldn't be what we expected. What if the concept was a bad one? But everything went fine. We didn't have any major problems, the pictures were amazing, and all the people were really happy with the experience.

And I have to admit that it feels really good to have your name written at the end of fashion shoot. Here is the final selection: Tribute to Alexander McQueen and the backstage pictures: McQueen Photo Shoot Backstage