A Model Day: New York Fashion Week Day Four

It's an amazing thing to watch a woman transform, from a long-legged lady with odd facial features and insanely chiseled cheekbones into a model. Their posture changes. Their stature changes. The musculature in their faces pull taut. I shot a lot of models today, waiting in the cold outside Victoria Beckham, Derek Lam, DKNY, Thakoon, Band of Outsiders, and Diane Von Furstenberg. They come out after the end of shows, sometimes running to the next one, sometimes posing for photographers for a while before moving on. Many of them can be incredibly generous with their time, and I'm very appreciative of how much several of them gave me today, especially the ones featured here. It can't be easy to have to be on for so long in a given day. I can wear cool face for approximately five seconds before it cracks. They can wear theirs indefinitely. 

I wanted to stay away from the big shows today, to shoot no-name cool kids at smaller venues. But then I found myself in a gang of photographers, including Driely S. from Racked, Keith Morrison from Stylelist, Emmy from Nylon and Vogue Japan, and Kamel Lahmadi from Style and the City, among others, and well,I got swept along to Derek Lam and then I just gave in to the inevitable from there. I shot alongside all the name-brand photographers: Lee Oliveira, Adam Katz Sinding, Diego Zuko, Michael Dumler, Youjoung Koo, Bob Shimosatu, Bill Cunningham, Vanessa Jackman. Not that I mind. Those are good photographers. But I didn't carve my own path in the way I might have hoped. In the constant motion of fashion week that can be difficult to do. Nonetheless, it made for good ethnographic fieldnotes. You'll have to wait for the book to read those.