Description

In Chapter 7 of 13, fashion stylist Lulu Chen shares how collaborative test shoots create early career fashion portfolios. Chen highlights collaboration as a cornerstone component bringing together young industry talent - often assistant-level staff - to do test shoots. These shoots help all parties develop individual styles and tastes that over time gets refined into individual portfolios.

Transcript

How to Build a Fashion Stylist Portfolio Erik Michielsen: Base on your experience, what's the best approach to building a stylist to portfolio? Lulu Chen: Well as an assistant, you meet other assistants on photo shoots and you develop friendships and you figure out who has the same aesthetics as you or same style, and you do test shoots which contribute to building your portfolio. Building a test shoot is basically the same thing as a regular shoot but on a smaller scale. When young talents come together and contribute to a test shoot, they are exploring their style, they're developing their tastes and they're trying to develop a portfolio, so this is the time for them to be creative and to work together and really collaborate because everybody is putting in their time and money, and effort. It's not something that’s necessary they get hired to do, a commission to do. And so it really is about the collaboration.