TEXT FAIRYING...

I've been the official "Text Fairy" (i.e. I write the press releases/bios etc) for Toujours Toi and Family Affairs for just over a year now. Since Nina blew into my life like a modern day Swiss Mary Poppins, working with her has been one of my absolutely favourite things to do. So I wanted to give you a bit of a window into The Process or rather, the super fun exchange of inspiration and information by electronic means. I think we can safely say it's Nina who is the magical fairy, since she's able to explain and transmit her feelings about her collections in a wonderfully creative way that I can just click into. It also helps that I love the clothes.

 
She will usually start off by sending me some inspiration images that she's pulled when thinking about the collection. There could also be songs, film clips - anything like that. We're usually on the same wavelength, so I'm more than happy when her references are anything from Roxy Music (ss10) to Annie Hall in the Hamptons and a Morrissey song (FW09) or a photo of the Marchesa Casati and a Roman Polanski film (FW10). SS11 is all dusty roads in the south of France, lavender, tomatoes and Brigitte Bardot shopping in Marseille. Just to name a few...It's also the way the disparate references work together that builds up a picture before I've even seen the clothes.

Apart from emailing, Twitter seems to have popped into this back and forth recently - ok, maybe it wasn't amazingly helpful of me to keep sending Nina ridiculous joke name suggestions for her new collection like Bananas in Pyjamas and Forest Gateau Plateau.

The other thing that really helps me to get a feel of the collection is Nina's crazy talent for naming each piece. The names are so evocative: for FW10 there is Modern Love, Siren Song, Le Mepris... I like to have a good look at all the names and then finally, I will look at the mood images and lookbook images over and over again, learning the names and where they fit.

Then I write away, just basically re-arranging what Nina's told me into a story - something hopefully coherent and neither too dry and dull nor whimsically nonsensical.

Here's the press text I wrote for the current fall/winter 10 collection: Moon River.