Today was the day that I was looking forward to the most as far as media visits go. We visited Hearst UK, which is a media publishing parent company that owns many very popular and well-circulated magazines in the UK such as Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, and Elle (which was the one I was the most excited for.) I have been thinking about a possible future for me in the world of fashion media and so this trip was very exciting for me because I was going to be able to talk to professionals in the field and think about some steps that I could take to get a job in this field if it turned out to be something I was interested in pursuing.
After a quick hotel breakfast, we walked over to the Hearst offices and met first with some staff from the fashion teams of Cosmopolitan and Elle. My group got a tour from Sophie Wilkinson, who took us to the fashion closet, video studio, and library. We then went to a panel with people from different magazines in the company. Included in the panel were Matt Hill, editor-in-chief of Digital Spy; Amy Lane, digital editor of Women’s Health; Kenya Hunt, deputy editor and fashion features director of Elle; Jess Edwards, editor of Cosmopolitan.com/uk; and Lena De Casparis, the moderator and associate editor and culture director of Elle. This panel was really interesting and a lot of the discussion centered around how to use social media and other ways of communicating with an audience in order to know what they are looking for from your publication.
Kenya and Amy discussed an initiative that they led at Elle called Elle Feminism. They discussed how they used that initiative that had a clear initiative and purpose, and how it was important to be authentic to your brand while using something to drive your content. They also talked about things like zines, analytics, and other things.
After the panel, we heard from someone about a program through Hearst called The Nest. The Nest is an incubation program where people both already employed and new to the company come together in a small team and work on a project brief from start to finish together in order to come up with new ideas for the company and possibly find new employment for the people that participate in the program. It was so interesting to hear about how they think it’s important to always be refreshing their business model and that they have the understanding that sometimes ideas don’t work past a certain time and it’s okay to let those ideas go and do something new.
Next, we talked to two people about fashion shoot planning and booking. The first person we heard from talked about the process of planning a fashion shoot. This includes things all the way from where you get the idea to the finished product. In the presentation example, she said that she was inspired by a runway show. She then found other examples of the same kind of look on other runways and made a mood board showing some of the themes of the shoot. She then made another board of specific attributes she would like in the models that were involved in the shoot and made a contact list based on this that would be the dream models for the shoot. This process was so interesting to me and definitely opened my eyes to a different side of fashion photography and fashion magazines that I didn’t really know about before.
The second person in this group talked about the process of booking a location, crew, models, etc. for a shoot. This process was also something that I had really never considered when it came to a fashion shoot, but it is an absolutely vital part of fashion shooting. Although it was less my style than the planning aspect of the shoot, it was still very interesting to hear about.
After we were finished up at Hearst, we took a walk over to the Good Housekeeping Institute. This is where Good Housekeeping does cooking classes, rents out their kitchen to other events and companies, tests recipes, tests products, and many more things that I’m probably forgetting. I thought the most interesting part of the test kitchen was how thorough they were when testing the products that they did. They even said that if a product didn’t perform well when it was tested, they wouldn’t write a review that said it was a bad product right away and they would contact the company it was from to tell them the results of the test to see if they could have received a faulty product or if they could work with the company to fix the problems they ran into. Initially I thought this was a little strange and thought that there are cases where companies should be “exposed” for lack of a better word if their product doesn’t perform. However, the more I think about it, the more I like this process. I think that it’s very interesting that a publication and a company could work together in order to actually make change in the products that consumers are getting instead of burning bridges because a product doesn’t perform the way they wanted it to.
We finished here and went back to Hearst to grab some goodie bags with some free magazines in them (thanks Hearst!) and then went to the hotel. At this point in the day I was feeling very worn out and so I told Maddy that I needed some time to do my own thing. I’m a huge introvert so sometimes when I spend too many days in a row without a lot of time to myself I can get a little burned out. I relaxed in our room for a while and then took a walk to a bookstore I had seen the previous day on our way to dinner.
Gay’s the Word bookstore in London is one of two LGBTQ+ bookstores in the UK and the only one in England. It was founded in 1979 by a gay socialist group that was inspired by the movement of stores like it in the US. Not only does it have amazing books, but it also has information on events, discussion groups, and other great resources for the community in London and beyond. Places like this are really special to me because I feel like it’s hard to find places that are truly focused on the LGBTQ+ community as the center of its business model. There were display cases on one of the walls that held a collection of pins owned by the late founder of the bookstore that were found in the attic of the store by someone when cleaning it. It was so amazing to see a piece of history from someone that was fighting so hard to make places for people like me in the world and actually succeeded.
After I left, feeling rejuvenated with Gay Energy, I went to McDonald’s. Now I know you must be thinking I’m such a boring American by going here for lunch/dinner, but they have so many items on their menu that we don’t have in the US. I got a spicy veggie wrap and it was extremely good and totally worth it.
I ended the night by going to Primark and buying things without trying them on and immediately regretting it when I got home because neither of the pants I bought fit or were cute and I didn’t have time to return them. I guess it really doesn’t matter if clothes are cheap if you waste your money on them. I packed my suitcase, leaving my new and never-worn pants behind, and prepared to leave London in the morning.