How to dress for fashion week

From last-minute panic buying to how to sprint in heels, Jess Cartner-Morley on what she has learned about style from 15 years of attending fashion weeks

Imagine if you had to go to a super glamorous party full of incredibly well-dressed people with sky-high taste and really thin legs. And while you were there you had to have various impromptu high-level meetings with the 10 people in the world who are probably most important to your career. This party would start at 9am and go on till around midnight. It would involve some fairly lengthy hikes and a few high-speed sprints, between which you would stand around for hours, occasionally getting to squeeze your arse on to four inches of bench space among the aforementioned skinny people, for 20 minutes if youre lucky. Some of the party would take place outside at the mercy of the weather, some in ridiculously posh venues full of expensive flowers and twinkly candles, and some of it in underground car parks. In order to travel between these venues you would be up against a black-belt elite of taxi hailers (hence the lengthy hikes.) There would be no cloakroom facilities.

Then imagine you had to do exactly the same thing the next day, and the day after that, for four whole weeks.