Monday wasn’t too eventful. The author, who I had arranged an interview with for Wafa, came into the shop at 3pm for the talk. Other than that I spent most of the day in Starbucks, sending out a BCC’d email to all th people in the industry, fashion bloggers and additional speakers, guests and subscribers to the shop and magazine about the launch of the new issue.
I also wrote up some press day visits from last week but wasn’t able to post them on to the blog as of yet due to lack of images. In the morning before work I went to Covent Garden to visit the Gucci Pop Up Shop as Wafa wants me to write it up. It’s a traveling store with limited edition sneakers designed by DJ Mark Ronson and Freida… The shop was very pretencious and not at all fun to walk in to, other than they are the first and only place to have an ipad for scrolling through their special website dedicated to the shop. They also have an iMac and iPod for doing the same and from all three you can also place orders for the sneakers. The trainers, by the way, are disgusting and a lot of people seem to be in agreement. I feel a bit lazy at the moment as I really should have written up all these press days I’ve been to over the past week and written the Gucci shop one up today – but Im just so tired and inspiration/ motivation is hard to come by when you barely get to think about something other than work. The weekends fly by!
On Tuesday I went to work at Dia Boutique. Busy day, I’m pretty much doing the majority of the editing for the blog and magazine. Again, this involves subediting and finding new images for the pieces because people seem incapable of delivering decent images. I also wrote a piece for the blog over the weekend on some arts education, debate platform that happens in Beirut, Lebanon every other year. This was a really difficult thing for me to write about, since I’d never heard of it before, barely know Lebanon and I could barely make sense of what the website was on about. To make it harder, Wafa wanted me to write it in a personal way as though I had been along. Anyway, I clearly did a good enough job – so much that I earned myself a high five and an “Oh my god! Wow, it’s like you were actually there…!” which is quite an achievement considering the limitations! Anyway, that’s this week’s feature blog for the website, which is going up tomorrow.
I went for a walk with Wafa at lunch to grab some Lebanese food, a mission that ended in disappointment (we couldn’t find the restaurant). But we did manage to talk about some interesting things. Firstly, I had to break it to her that I wouldn’t be able to come back after my placement with The Times because it’s just too expensive for me to keep traveling up. She must be desperate to keep me on because she asked how much it cost me to travel up and then quickly followed that by offering to let me stay with her at her appartment. Quite crazy, and if I didn’t have to go back to Falmouth the sort things out for next year and do some favours for friends I would stay on. My only thing is, it’s quite working so hard like this for no financial gain. I guess I am sort of her No.2 at the moment and I pick up all the slack and sort out a lot of the work people send. I’m definitely not a PA though, the other girl who start the same time I did sits and sorts Wafa’s emails all day – at least I get to write all time.
She also asked me what I’d be doing at The Times, something I wish I knew too, but we both agreed we don’t think it’ll be anything like this placement. She then started telling me about all her internships for On/ Off and Vogue, amongst others. It was really something to have someone give me a personal experience of what it’s like to go through all that and come out the other side with a blossoming business at her fingure tips. She gave me some great tips and was very honest, but helpfully so – not so as to dishearten me. I have realised that she has worked hard all her early 20s and even had a horrific month where she work 9am-6pm at On/Off before going straight to Vogue, where she worked until about 12am-1am. That seems insane to me, but it’s clearly something a lot of people are willing to put themselves through to get the recognition.
I’m going to pose the idea of an interview with Wafa on Friday. Luckily, I do often get Wafa talking about what she has in store for the magazine. The shop, by the way, has become very quite since we haven’t got anything on the timetable. I wonder how this has affected the magazine. I heard her mention on Monday that some publishers will print 100 copies of Sketchbook for us to give out to free. This is a step in the direction I think a lot of independent magazines have take in the early days and it will help to get the word out a bit more about Sketchbook, although 100 copies won’t make an impact at all.
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