Call time was 5:40am at a diner in Greenpoint that the client rented for the morning light. If you've never watched a stylist steam eleven jackets in a diner booth at dawn, you're missing one of the city's great unlisted performances.
By nine we'd shot three looks and lost the light, so the whole caravan - two vans, fourteen people, a rack of denim worth more than my rent - moved to a rooftop in Bushwick. Location days in New York are less about photography than about parking. The producer who can find legal parking for two vans in Bushwick deserves the campaign credit more than I do.
The afternoon was the East River waterfront, wind at about twenty knots, which the photographer kept calling "free styling" while the actual stylist quietly died inside. Cold is part of the job description nobody reads aloud: you learn to relax your jaw so your face doesn't broadcast the temperature, and you learn that shivering ruins more frames than blinking.
We wrapped at 7:50pm back in Manhattan with a sunset look on a fire escape. Fourteen hours, three boroughs, sixty-something usable frames, of which the client will run maybe eight.
People ask if modelling is glamorous. It's the most glamorous logistics job in the world. I wouldn't trade it.