Dressers

Dressers are the women who help you dress during fashion shows. The changes are quick. An experienced model chats with her dresser beforehand and discusses who will zip, button, ect. One does the upper half, the other the bottom. You always use a scarf to cover your face to prevent staining your clothes with your makeup. No modesty. You are pretty much naked - no bra - just a flesh-colored thong. Sometimes not even that. One designer, an illustrious aristocratic descendant of the Italian house of Torlonia once sent his models on the cat walk without underwear. I sat in the front row as one of his potential clients after retiring from the industry. The comments from the audience were highly amusing.

Furthermore, designers often showcase portions of their shows according to variations of the same outfit. In those circumstances, shoes in your size are hard to come by. It often happens that runway models have to make due with shoes that are one or two sizes smaller or larger than what they actually wear. In that case, you caution your dresser to never step away from your rack (the rack upon which your clothes are hung, along with the accessories), because models have been known to switch shoes.

Now, when that happens, you usually know who was the culprit. But by the time you realize what happened, it is usually too late to do anything about it, because you normally have from one minute to five max to make your changes before your next exit.

I had modeled in Tokyo for four years before finally arriving in Rome. There I had met a model (whom I have long since forgotten her name), who was the darling of the agency with whom I was contracted. She was also the lover of the man who was its president. When I finally made it to Rome a year after she did, we did quite a few shows together. During one of them, she managed to take my shoes right under the nose of my dresser. I walked in an evening gown with shoes two sizes too large. At one point one of them slipped off and I nodded to a photographer, hoping he would put it back on my foot. He didn't. I had to bend down and with as much aplomb as I was able, retrieve it, put it back on, and finish my exit.

It is all about style. Always. On the cat walk and off.

Note: All fashion pictures are of myself during the time I worked in the industry.