We shot at seven in the morning to beat the crowds, which in Warsaw's old town in June means you beat approximately none of the crowds. By the third setup I had an audience: a walking tour from Spain, two nuns, and a man with a dachshund who sat down and watched the entire thing like it was television.
The outfit was the point of the whole story - polka-dot shorts and a boxy black jacket, a silhouette straight out of 1962, the kind of thing my grandmother wore in photographs where she looks impossibly glamorous next to a Syrena. That's the brief I gave the stylist, actually: "my grandmother, but she can hear the bass". She understood immediately. Polish stylists always do.
There's a particular kind of confidence you borrow when you wear sixty-year-old tailoring against three-hundred-year-old columns. The buildings have seen everything; the clothes have survived everything; you are, briefly, the newest and least important thing in the frame, and it's completely freeing. I leaned on a column that has outlasted empires. It did not mind.
The dachshund man stayed until the end. As we packed up he told me, very seriously, that the second look was better than the first. He was right, too. Everyone's a critic in this city - it's my favourite thing about it.