How Not To Blag Your Way Into London Fashion Week

We’ve teamed up with Contiki to explore the fashionable side of their European base, London.

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I have been a dedicated follower of fashion for most of my life, if “follower” can be taken to mean “one who sits on the sidelines seething with scorn and envy in equal measures”. I love fashion but am deeply ambivalent about Fashion; the bells, whistles and charlatanry that makes up the commodification of the creativity involved in getting dressed in the morning. I loathe the exclusivity, the stratification, the blatant classism inherent in the Fash-world structure. As much as I love fashion, I could never truly be a fashion insider.

Which is why, armed only with my smartphone, a long history of acting classes and a finely-honed talent for bullshit, I decided to try and blag my way into London Fashion Week.

“Blagging”, for the uninitiated, is defined as “obtaining something through persuasion or guile”, or “to make up as you go along”. It’s a spectacularly British idea, blagging. In a culture so steeped in inherited notions of worth and social stratification, it’s not surprising that they’ve evolved a whole word and stratagem of behaviour for attempting to acquire things which the status quo would deny them access. Being an Aussie expat in London, my adopted home of one year and counting, I embraced the concept in the hope that it would get me into one of the world’s most prestigious fashion events without getting booted out, arrested, or having some elegant swanlike creature with impossible taste throw a drink on me.

Here’s how it went down.

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The Game Plan

London Fashion Week headquarters is Somerset House, a huge Neoclassical stone courtyard of buildings which was originally the residence of Edward Seymour (Jane’s brother, if my memory of Bring Up the Bodies is good for anything). It’s been bandied about the aristocracy ever since and the prestigious King’s College London lives in the East Wing.

For one week in summer (okay, September), it is occupied by an enormous mirrored dome, which houses several runway spaces, dressing rooms and a photographers’ centre. The rooms in the buildings – and there is a veritable maze of them – face directly onto the courtyard. For the week, they are given over to designer showrooms, multibrand collections of millinery, lingerie and other sartorial auxiliaries. There’s an exhibition space and a room dedicated to showing full footage of the runway shows, live-streamed or at a later time.

All this I learn from the official LFW website, which makes the whole Somerset House set-up look downright democratic. This is Fashion Week for the plebs, like a nice big fashion festival where the relatively uninitiated can pop in, ogle some million-quid knickers, tweet about it and be home in time for Hollyoaks. Perfect.

My game plan, therefore, is to keep it simple: just trot off to Somerset House, poke my head in on some emerging designer talent, make best friends with the attendant and get invited to a party in some un-Googleable Shoreditch warehouse by sundown. Boom. Easy.

When I arrive, Somerset House is overflowing with impossibly beautiful women and men wearing outfits of such inventiveness they defy even my hysterically enthusiastic vocabulary. I suddenly realise why the place has felt vaguely familiar on all prior visits: it’s the background to a thousand snaps from The Sartorialist. Once that penny drops, I begin to have the sneaking suspicion that I’ve fallen into some kind of blog-based multiverse, like that episode of The Simpsons where Homer falls through the fourth dimension and winds up in real-world New York. I want to stare at and photograph everything, but don’t want to betray myself as an outsider by seeming too impressed.

The atmosphere is redolent of what I imagine a Victorian zoo or circus must have been like. The explicit, unabashed delight in the visually different is palpable. Everywhere I look, people are snapping photos of “street-style”, then posing for them, then turning around and snapping some more. I am uncertain whether this is a giant circle-jerk or a celebration of innovation, an expression of the clique or evidence that the clique is dead.

I’m standing there pondering this when a middle-aged man with a tweed jacket, a bowler hat and a very large camera approaches me. “Can I take your photo?” He’s not Scott Schuman but I graciously acquiesce anyway. Apparently my latte can’t be in the photo (Scott would have left it in, I’m pretty sure), he gets me to prominently position my clutch “so we can see the buckle detailing” and takes a close-up of my shoes. He doesn’t ask for the story behind any of these items, which is a shame because that’s the best bit about clothes, but it’s a good first step. I’m blending in seamlessly! The stylish Englishman thought so and everything!

Clearly I am a blagging goddess, but there’s no time for any more faffing about. Time to do this.

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“Who Do You Work For?”

My ego buoyed and my latte binned, I approach one of the showrooms with confidence. There are security officers out the front, but they can’t possibly be there to stop people like me, can they? They’re probably just there to stop people taking lattes and like, bombs, into a room with shoes that cost more than my yearly wage. Seems fair. I’m two steps away from a room full of ethical fashion when a burly arm is thrust in front of me.

“Your pass?” the bouncer says.

“My pass?”

“Yeah, like this?” He motions to the plastic pass on a lanyard around his neck and on the necks and wrists of the leggy blondes streaming sedately past me into the room.

“Oh, my pass! Sorry, it’s in here,” I lie baldly and begin to fumble through my purse. I can feel him looking at me pityingly. “I took it off because I think it’s ugly and obnoxious,” I tell him in my very best Sloaney-girl voice. “I just popped it in here…” There’s a blonde leaning over me now too.

“Well, we can’t let you in without a pass,” she says.

“I’m press,” I reply, haughtily.

“That’s fine. Go back to the press desk and they can reissue it.”

“Of course!” I chirrup. Of course they fucking can. I can feel their eyes boring into me as I stride purposefully away, determined to return.

I figure “Press” is my best bet, but I can’t say I work for Junkee – awesome as they are, they haven’t quite cracked the UK market yet. Vogue is too obvious. I want something in between, and something I won’t regret acting like a total dick in the name of.

“Yeah, Rebecca Saffir, Vice Australia?” I drawl in my best Eastern Suburbs twang.

One of the assistants at the press desk has never heard of Vice – she gets a truly degrading eyeroll from me – and the other helpfully informs her “it’s a magazine”. I smile indulgently. “Glad to see one of you is doing your job”. I am far too good at this being-a-snooty-fashion-reporter thing. She starts typing my name into her database. “Nothing’s coming up. Did you register?”

“Yeah… Well my editor did it for me, said it would be all sorted, hey”. I’m not entirely sure how between the doormen and here I’ve decided that upping my bogan quotient is the way to go, but I am never one to argue with an artist at work.

“Well, nothing’s coming up from them at all. Do you have a business card or anything?”

“Um… Nah I’ve had the shittest couple of days, hey. I was meant to be here like two days ago but my flight was delayed in Dubai? And then all my shit got stolen the first night in my hostel, like my wallet and everything? I’ve only got my passport and a bankcard because I sleep with them in my pillowcase.” Words are tumbling out of my mouth more or less voluntarily. I’m great at this! The spectre of every improv teacher I’ve ever had cheers me on! The press assistant’s face is sympathetic! She nods and turns her laptop towards me.

“Here, just pull up something you’ve written for them before.”

Fuck.

“Ah, well, actually this is the first time I’ve written for them, I’m kind of freelancing and was going to be here anyway, so I asked if they’d be interested in me covering Fashion Week and they said they’d organise the passes?” She’s already typed in my name into Google and I’m trying to distract her for long enough to navigate away from the first few results, which might rather give the game up. “I’ve done heaps with Time Out before, like about art and stuff, but this is my first fashion gig.” (The first rule of lying – tell as much of the truth as possible.)

“Sorry, but we really do need something linking you with Vice. Can you pull up the email thread with you and your editor?”

FUCK.

I fumble around with the keypad, deliberately misspelling my Gmail password repeatedly.

“Oh fuck’s sake, now it won’t let me log in because I’m trying to access it from a different country,” I stammer.

“That’s never happened to me before,” says the one who has never heard of Vice. I’m beginning to feel she may be on to me.

“It’s happened to me!” pipes up the other one. I want to kiss her. Number One stands firm, though. “I can’t let you in without any proof that you are who you say you are,” she says.

I almost do it. I look at her; I draw myself up to my full (metaphorical) height; I’m totally prepared to go absolute stroppy apeshit on her. The words “don’t you know who I am?!” are forming in my mouth – just to see what would happen. I’m an Actor; this is what I was born for.

But I catch a look in her eye which I recognise all too well: sheer exhaustion. Poor thing. She’s probably some beleaguered intern who’s been on this desk every day for a week, facing down people behaving much worse than I am, but without the sense of irony. In the whirling, shimmering circus that is Fashion Week, someone still has to shovel shit and I’m not sure I can bring myself to make their day even worse. I breathe out heavily.

“It’s okay. It’s not your fault. Thanks for your time.” She is so visibly shocked at being spoken to like a human being that I know I’ve done the right thing. My commitment to Fashion may suffer, but my conscience won’t – and that’s worth holding onto in this city.

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Smile For The Camera

I walk out of the building, defeated, and straight into possibly the most beautiful woman on the planet. I am certain I’ve fallen through another gap in the space/time continuum and landed next to Kim Novak in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Blonde, finger-waved hair, sapphire eyes, ruby lips, a figure-hugging tuxedo dress, speaking on the phone in French. She cannot possibly be real. I’m about to whip out my iPhone to try and take a super-subtle shot when the army begins to advance.

First one person asks to take her photo, and as she’s posing for him more begin to appear. Some are just tourists with Crocs and smartphones but there’s a gaggle of blokes with professional SDLRs positioned like bayonets aimed squarely at her. They’re shouting instructions – “Turn this way! Bag out front! Smile!” — and as I perch on a balustrade, directly in the line of fire but not worth shooting, I observe that it wouldn’t take Sigmund Freud to vibe on the distinctly phallic resonance here.

I fumble for my phone to see if I can get them all in frame – I’m already captioning the Instagram post Laura Mulvey Woz Rite – but as soon as I have it to hand they seem to have dispersed, distracted by someone newer and shinier. I feel strangely hollowed out by the whole day. As I walk away from Somerset House, I hear cameras clicking in my ears.

I’m meeting mates for dinner and as we walk from the Strand to Tottenham Court Road, through Covent Garden and into Soho I remember something — you don’t need to be at Fashion Week to feel like you’re in the middle of a fashion shoot in London. Well-dressed citizens of every aesthetic persuasion mark every street corner. They’re pouring your beer and making your coffee and having a fag outside Stage Door five minutes before they go on for Les Miserables.

Pop into the V&A or the National Portrait Gallery or the Tate Britain for an insight into how Londoners have frocked up in the past. By the time you’re done with that, everyone’s favourite designs from the Stella McCartney show will be available for £50 from Topshop and H&M and Zara (and they’ll have been released in the right season and at dirtier-cheap prices than in Oz.) Or if you’re not keen on treading the line between “homage” and “knockoff” so precariously, you’ll wait for the real thing to drop at Browns or Liberty or Dover Street Market.

If the idea of Bangladeshi factory fires or the water wastage on a cotton shirt haunts your nightmares, that’s fine: your eco-stylings will be satiated at famed second-hand haunts like Portobello or Brick Lane or Columbia Rd markets. If you’re a wizened treasure-hunter you’ll take yourself to one of London’s postcodes populated with ladies who lunch (Highgate, Kensington, Wimbledon, Paddington, anything green or blue on the Monopoly board) and dig around in the charitable cast-offs of the minor aristocracy.

Too skint for that? Fill a bag for ten quid at the East End Thrift Store or – and this really is for die-hards only – line up for one of their amazing biannual pound sales, (there’s one this weekend, catch me in the line with a thermos of coffee and my battle-face on) where every item in a desolate carpark in Stepney Green is literally just one single quid.

“Street-style” has become kind of co-opted by the commercial fashion mainstream as a way of getting the public to do their hard creative work for them, but that would never have happened if people around here weren’t so damn good at it to start with. Not a Tube ride in this city goes by where I don’t catch myself ogling over someone’s genuinely original assemblage of fabric on their body. From sixteen-year-olds discovering ripped jeans and safety pins for the first time wandering through Camden Lock, to the octogenarian in my favourite café who wears the same trench coat and flat cap every day, to my classmates who have managed to convince me that colourful trainers are, in fact, a necessity, you can see very immediately the way style “trickles up” here. Of course there are people wandering around in colours that don’t suit their skin tone because Bazaar tipped it as a must-have, or hats that makes them look like X Factor rejects, but that’s part of the fun, the swirling, heaving mass of people and identities and tribes that make up this place.

Like so much of London, the Fash Pack on patrol at Fashion Week are only the hyper-visible tip of the iceberg of the community they’re meant to represent. It’s easy, in the midst of the Beautiful People, to get swept up in feeling like they really do control entry to a super-secret special club of which you’ll never be a part, thereby rendering your entire existence a rather poor showing. But step away from the self-perpetuated spotlights and walk the alleys of London as dusk falls and you’ll see hundreds, thousands of people just like you and nothing like you, simply going about their daily business and managing to look effortlessly hip while doing it. Strike up a conversation with one of them and get invited to their East End art show, or watch their mini-marching band play If You’re Happy And You Know It to a crowd of picknickers in Soho Square Gardens. Envy the four-year-old on Hampstead Heath who probably already has a more extensive wardrobe than you. Put on an item of clothing you assume is impossibly outlandish and observe how few judgmental stares you receive. London’s seen it all.

My friends and I drink G&Ts from cans (love that supermarket alcohol and generally casual attitude to drinking in public places) and walk from Soho (showbiz types in black and drag queens in nothing) to Piccadilly Circus (tourists in socks and sandals, glamour girls spilling from clubs), down Pall Mall (stately homes and members clubs and women in twinsets and pearls) and through St James’ Park (cyclists, squirrels). The thing about London, I opine, is that the ceiling on what you can achieve here is just so much higher than what’s on offer at home right now. That the top is so much further away can seem intimidating and scary but ultimately it’s exhilarating and kind of addictive.

It’s dark now and my sense of direction is abysmal at the best of times, so I am genuinely surprised to look up and see an enormous gold statue in front of what looks like a very large house looming out of the blackness. Then I notice the Union Jack fluttering on top of the house. “Oh, the Queen’s in!” my friend exclaims. We have stumbled on Buckingham Palace, which is almost impossible to see without a thousand tourists pressed against the gates. I stare up at it, calm and assured of its place in the world.

“See?” I gesture with the enthusiasm of someone who has had a fair amount of gin. “Higher ceilings.”

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From London to Paris to Milan and everywhere in between, Contiki takes you to the fashion hotspots of Europe like no-one else. Experience the buzz of the major fashion districts with brands to break the bank and then find a bargain in the backstreets where street and vintage fashion rule. Start planning your European shopping adventure today.

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Rebecca Saffir is a London-based actor and writer.

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Feature image via Instagram/British Fashion Council.