Yes, having a good eye, knowing the trends, knowing where to shop on any given budget, all of that counts. But if you’re in a fitting with an actor who won’t try things on, doesn’t like what you’ve brought, or seems uncomfortable and you don’t know why or how to move things forward, you’re fucked. And that’s rarely about what you bought. It’s about the conversation happening, or not happening, between you and the person putting the clothes on.

I should preface this with the fact that I grew up in a household where I had to stay hyper aware of people’s moods, so if someone’s demeanour shifted, or they seemed unsure about something, I noticed. The silver lining is that it’s turned into something genuinely useful in this work: I pick up quickly when someone isn’t sure. That said, I don’t think this is purely instinct. A lot of it has come from years of practice, from having done hundreds if not thousands of fittings over the span of my career.

And this isn’t only about actors or talent. It’s noticing when a director doesn’t think something looks right, or when a client or brand wants input, and knowing how to navigate those conversations too.

None of this means you need to be a master communicator. It means engaging. Asking questions. The point isn’t to fill silence, it’s to get the information you need to know what to action next.

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I think about this every time I see someone early in their career worrying that their portfolio doesn’t look impressive enough yet, comparing it to someone further along. It rarely occurs to anyone that the gap isn’t really about the images. It’s about a whole set of skills that were never designed to be visible in the first place.

The kind of order nobody ever takes a picture of.

A breakdown sheet that tracks every costume against every scene, cross-referenced against continuity, cross-referenced again against who’s double-booked for a fitting on Thursday. A rail built in the exact sequence the day actually needs it, not the order the pieces happened to arrive in. A kit packed so that the one thing you need in a crisis is the one thing you can find in four seconds, not four minutes of increasingly panicked digging. On a big quick-change show, that might mean a wall of labelled hooks and a colour-coded tag system that looks like nothing to anyone walking past it and is, in fact, the only reason eleven changes happen cleanly in ninety seconds each, night after night. Nobody has ever put a photo of a beautifully organised rail in a portfolio. And yet it’s often the single biggest difference between a day that runs and a day that quietly falls apart around everyone on it. That’s not admin. That’s the actual architecture the whole job stands on, and it’s a skill exactly like styling itself is a skill. You’re either good at building it or you’re not, and it shows immediately to anyone who’s ever had to work inside someone else’s system.

The invisible save.

I’m almost certain that every costume or wardrobe person has done this at some point. Caught a seam ora button about to go two minutes before someone’s meant to walk on, fixed it standing up, silently, with whatever happened to be in the kit, and said absolutely nothing afterwards because the entire point was that nobody needed to know. On a styling shoot it looks different but it’s the same instinct: a stain appearing on white fabric five minutes before the shot, handled with cold water and a hairdryer and total calm while the rest of the room carries on assuming everything’s fine, because it is, because you made sure of it. An actor who is feeling insecure in what they are wearing and they have been supported in a way that makes them feel genuinely more secure, supported and understood. The best save of the day is always, always the one nobody ever finds out happened. It will never be in a portfolio, because a portfolio only ever shows you the moment the outfit worked. It never shows you the person who quietly made sure it did, twice, before anyone else even noticed there’d been a problem at all.

Holding the entire day in your head at once.

This one’s harder to describe because it doesn’t look like anything from the outside. It’s knowing, at any given moment, what’s clean and what isn’t, what’s been altered and what hasn’t, what’s due back to a supplier by Friday, which actor’s allergic to wool, which look needs steaming before call time and which one can wait. It’s carrying the shape of the entire day, sometimes the entire shoot, sometimes the entire run of a show, as a kind of constant background process, while also doing the actual physical work in front of you. Nobody sees this. There’s nothing to point to. But ask anyone who’s genuinely excellent at this job what’s actually happening in their head during a long day, and it’s this: a running, silent, constantly updating map of everything that has to go right, held by one person, usually without a single note written down because there wasn’t time to write it. (Although I would recommend finding the time to write some things down if you can).

Making someone feel safe enough to actually stand still.

A huge amount of what makes a fitting go well has nothing to do with the clothes. It’s how someone’s spoken to when they’re half-dressed and feeling vulnerable about it. Whether they feel rushed or genuinely looked after. Whether the room feels like a place they can say “I don’t love this” without it becoming a whole thing, or whether they’ll just nod and wear something they hate all day because saying otherwise feels like too much. That skill, reading a person quickly, putting them at ease without making a performance of it, holding a room so it feels unhurried even when the clock absolutely isn’t, is as real and as learned as any technical skill in this job. It’s the reason certain people get requested by name years into their career, long after plenty of technically capable people have come and gone. None of it shows up anywhere except in who wants to work with you again.

The relationship that got you the impossible thing on no notice.

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Film and TV run on the same continuity rules. They just don’t run on the same clock.

You almost never shoot in order. Scene 47 might film in week one, scene 12 in week six, and the audience will never know the difference — unless wardrobe gets it wrong. That’s what continuity actually is on a film or TV set: making sure a costume matches itself across days, weeks, sometimes months, with a different crew, different weather, different everything, standing between the two shots.

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Here’s what actually gets left out.

Nobody teaches you that “stylist” isn’t one job, it’s about five, and they don’t work the same way.

Editorial, e-commerce, celebrity, commercials, personal, campaign — nobody sits you down and explains that these aren’t just different flavours of the same job, they’re different jobs wearing the same job title. The timelines are different. E-commerce might be forty looks in a day with no room to think and everything steamed and laid to perfection. Editorial gives you weeks to build a concept and theres so much play within it but pulling clothes from designers is largely dependant on your relationship with them. Celebrity styling runs on a relationship and a phone that never turns off, not a brief at all half the time. Commercials answer to an agency and a brand who don’t always agree with each other, on a schedule set by someone else’s budget. Different skills, different pace, different version of “good at this job” for each one — and most people find out which lane actually suits them by accident, years in, after wasting time trying to be good at all five at once.

Nobody teaches you how to read a brief, or survive the triangle underneath it.

A brief tells you what a shoot wants. It tells you what the agency wants, what the brand wants, but not how to manage your time or what production actually needs from you to keep the day moving — and those three things are all important, and you are the one standing in the middle of all of them when they disagree. Nobody explains that your job isn’t just interpreting clothes onto a body. Half of it is holding three different sets of expectations at once and not letting any of them see you sweat.

Nobody teaches you money. You find out what you’re “supposed” to charge only after you’ve already underpriced yourself a dozen times.

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I’ve had more people outside this industry bring up costume to me this year than in the five years before it combined. Wicked. The Met. Devil Wears Prada 2. Asking what I thought about them and the core of the conversation being about the costume. It should feel like vindication. Some days it does.

Yet, it’s been one of the quietest years this industry has had in a long time. I wrote about that a few weeks ago and nothing about it has changed since. Costume has never been talked about more, and it has rarely been harder to get booked. I know people who have been working in the industry for years who are shit hot at their jobs and are struggling to find work.

This isn’t new. It’s just visible right now.

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That’s the gap Costume: The Inside Guide was built to close. Six weekly sessions, built collectively with working costume professionals across theatre, TV and film, covering the things that never make it into formal training: how the industry is actually structured and how careers really take shape, how theatre, TV and film operate differently, how CVs, contracts and hiring actually work, and the parts of the job nobody prepares you for — on-set dynamics, difficult moments, keeping your head under pressure. We also cover building an inclusive practice, because that’s part of doing this job well too.

It starts next Wednesday, 5 August, and we’ve got a few days left before the doors close.

How it works. Live on Zoom, Wednesdays 7–8pm UK time, for six weeks. Can’t make it live? Every session is recorded and up within 24 hours, so you don’t lose anything by missing one. Each week comes with a workbook, and you’ll have access to a cohort community — a place to talk it through with other people going through the programme at the same time. Because part of the value here is being around others working through the same questions, not just the material itself.

Past participants on our workshops have told us things like this:

“The mix of teaching, discussion and practical exercises allowed me to apply things in real time. I left feeling much more confident and clear about my work.”

“Understanding job responsibilities and workflows helped me feel more confident professionally. I now feel clearer about how everything fits together.”

Who it’s for. The standby who wants to step up but doesn’t know what a Costume Supervisor actually does day to day. The graduate who’s done the creative training but has no idea how a real production runs. The theatre professional who keeps getting asked about TV and doesn’t know where to start. The person who’s been working two years and can’t work out how to get to the next level. Anyone in costume who’s tired of guessing.

£250, with Klarna available at checkout if you’d rather split it.

Secure your spot →

We start Wednesday 5th August. Would love to have you in the room.

There isn’t. I promise you it’s not you.

It feels like there’s more money floating around the industry than it sometimes feels like from the ground — but production companies are tightening the purse strings. Fewer green-lights, more budgets sat on rather than spent, more caution at the top of the chain. That’s structural, happening across the industry right now. It has nothing to do with anyone’s skill, reel, or work ethic.

I know a lot of people who are properly struggling with this, and a lot who are seriously weighing up leaving for another industry altogether. If that’s you, I’m not going to tell you that’s the wrong call — only you know what you can sustain. Will it pick up? Honestly, I don’t know. I’d like to think so. Nobody currently working in this industry can promise you a timeline, and anyone who does is guessing. But if you want to carry on, here’s where I’d actually put your energy.

Earn elsewhere while you wait — but start narrower than you think.

Social media is a genuine route here, and UGC in particular is more accessible than it looks. You don’t need 50k followers to get paid for content, because brands running UGC campaigns are often buying the content itself to use in their own paid ads, not your reach. A small, tightly niched account with genuinely good content can get picked up before a bigger, generic one does. Pick a lane close to what you already know — styling, costume, prep, behind-the-scenes of how a look comes together — rather than trying to become a general lifestyle creator from scratch. You’re not starting from zero; you’re pointing existing skill at a new platform.

Where to actually find the work: Billo, Trend, JoinBrands and Insense are UGC marketplaces where brands post briefs directly — no agent or following required, you submit a sample and a rate. It’s not glamorous and the pay per piece is modest at first, but it’s real, quick-turnaround money while things are quiet, and it compounds — a handful of good deliverables becomes a portfolio you can pitch with directly.

For actual brand deals rather than UGC-for-ads, the same rule applies as any pitch in this industry: specific beats broad. A brand making steamers, hangers, or kit for this profession will care more about a stylist with 3,000 highly relevant followers than a lifestyle account with 30,000 generic ones. Build a one-page media kit — who you are, what you make, who follows you and why — and pitch it directly to brands you’d actually want to be associated with. Cold, specific, and short outperforms a DM that just says “collab?” It comes with its own instability and works differently to the job you trained for, but it’s a legitimate route, not a lesser one. If you can do social media in that way, go get your coin!

A back-up plan is not giving up — but treat it as a real second track, not a stopgap.

It’s completely okay to explore something else entirely, or have a back-up ready if you need it. There’s no shame in that, and it’s not wasted time — it’s all learning, so take what you can from it. But a back-up done half-heartedly won’t pay the bills and will just eat time you could’ve spent on either route properly. Whether it’s freelancing in another area, teaching, or part-time work outside the industry, give it the same standard of professionalism you’d give a costume or styling job. The version of you that shows up quietly resentful and half-committed struggles at both. The version that treats it as legitimately worth doing well comes out of a quiet patch with more, not less, than they went in with.

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My first instinct wasn’t to say yes or no. It was to do the maths. I broke the buyout down into what it actually worked out to as a weekly rate — and once I did, it came out lower than what the Head of Wardrobe on the same production was being paid. I was going in a more senior role. More responsibility, more decisions, more of the department resting on me and they wanted to pay me less that the person I was managing.

So I went back with the breakdown. Not a vague “can you do better” — the actual numbers, laid out, showing the gap. I also flagged a long weekend that fell during rehearsals that I couldn’t work, and asked for it as a confirmed NA, not a “we’ll try.”

They came back with £9,000. And the weekend, confirmed.

Nothing about that conversation was difficult or dramatic. I asked a specific question, backed by a specific number, and got a specific answer. That’s most of what negotiating actually is in this industry — not a battle, a clarification.

The first number is where the conversation starts, not where it ends.

This is true whether you’re costume or styling (or doing any sort of freelance work), whether it’s a buyout, a day rate, or a weekly fee, whether it’s theatre, film, TV or commercials. Whoever sends the offer has usually built in some room they haven’t used, because most people don’t ask them to. The number arrives looking official — a fee, a contract, a line in an email — and that formatting does a lot of work convincing you it’s fixed. It rarely is.

And rate is only the most obvious thing on the table. It’s not even always the most useful thing to push on.

Time is negotiable, not just money.

A long weekend during rehearsals. A day you know you can’t work because of something already booked. Whether it needs to be a confirmed NA in writing, or something you’re just hoping doesn’t come up — that’s a term, and you can ask for it to be locked in rather than left loose.

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Sustainability is a word that gets used a lot. But within costume and styling specifically the conversation is quieter than it should be, and I think that’s because the honest version of it is more complicated than “just buy less.” So let’s talk about what it actually looks like from the inside.

In fashion broadly there’s been a real shift. Brands being held accountable on fabrics they use or how they get their products made, consumers making more considered choices, a growing awareness of what the industry is doing to the planet. The way we work makes sustainability genuinely complicated, not impossible, but complicated, and nobody’s really talking honestly about what that looks like in practice.

Before anything else, I want to be honest about something: I don’t think there’s a world in which any stylist or costume designer can be fully sustainable on every single job. Unless you’re in the rare position of being able to design and plan entirely around what already exists, and you have the prep time and the budget to do so, there will always be compromise. That’s not an excuse to not try. It’s just the reality of how this industry operates, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone. What we can do is make better choices where we have them, and push for the structures around us to make those choices easier.

So let’s do that.

The reality of how we shop

A large part of commercial styling and costume work involves buying contemporary clothing, shooting it, trying things on in fittings and returning bits. That’s just the nature of the job. You need options, you need multiples, you need to account for sizes that don’t match what’s on the brief, and you need to be able to pivot when the director changes their mind on the day. That inevitably means buying more than you keep and returning the rest.

What happens to those returns is something the industry doesn’t talk about nearly enough. Most people assume returned stock goes back on the shelf. And a lot of it does. But there are brands and retailers who don’t put returned items back into circulation. They write them off, they go to landfill, or they end up in bulk discount channels. When you’re processing significant volumes of returns across multiple jobs, the environmental cost of that is real and it’s worth being aware of.

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When an invoice is late, it doesn’t just sit there quietly. It creates a ripple. If you were counting on that payment to cover your rent, your bills, your expenses — all of which have their own due dates that don’t move just because your client hasn’t processed your invoice yet — then a late payment doesn’t just inconvenience you. It can genuinely destabilise you. And the frustrating part is that it has nothing to do with how well you did the job or how on top of things you are. You held up your end. The work is done. You just can’t pay your gas and electric bill because someone’s accounts department is backed up.

What reasonable actually looks like

I understand that from a production or business perspective, invoices don’t just get paid the moment they land. There are systems, there are approval processes, there are people who need to sign things off. That’s fine and that’s normal. But two weeks is the maximum that should ever be acceptable for a standard invoice to be processed and paid. Two weeks. Not 30 days. Not 60. And certainly not 90. Two weeks. And expenses — money that a freelancer has already spent out of their own pocket on behalf of a production — should be turned around within a week (at most). That money was never theirs to hold in the first place.

When you compare this to almost any other service industry, the contrast is stark. A plumber who comes to fix your boiler doesn’t wait 60 days to be paid. A solicitor doesn’t send an invoice and then spend the next two months chasing it. The creative industries have somehow normalised payment terms that would be considered completely unacceptable anywhere else, and we’ve all just quietly accepted it because that’s how it’s always been done.

Something that is also starting to become more common practice — and something I’d actively encourage — is asking for a percentage of your fee upfront on signing. Twenty to thirty percent on contract or deal memo is becoming more standard and it’s a reasonable ask. It means you have something confirmed and in your account before the job has even started, which offers a small buffer against the inevitable gap between wrap and payment. If you’ve never done it before it can feel uncomfortable to ask, but it’s a legitimate and increasingly normal part of how freelancers are protecting themselves. The worst anyone can say is no.

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I ended up working predominantly in theatre because that’s where the money, the more regular, secure work was — which is ironic, because looking back I’m not sure there was actually any money in theatre. There certainly isn’t now. There was just more of it, more consistently. From there I worked my way up through most of the bases — TV, music videos, editorials, e-commerce, celebrity — and eventually landed on commercial styling and live events, with a bit of theatre still in the mix.

Almost everything I know, I learned on the job. But not in a “someone took me under their wing and showed me” way. More in a “this is your problem now, figure it out” way. Which is, frankly, still how most of this industry operates. So here are some of the things I wish someone had actually told me.

There is no handbook

One of the first things that catches people off guard is that the same job title can mean something completely different depending on where you’re working. A costume supervisor in theatre and a costume supervisor in TV and film are not the same role. The responsibilities are different, the structure around you is different, the pace is different, the demands are different. And nobody really tells you that.

The same goes for the day-to-day reality of the work more broadly. There’s no manual for what this job actually involves, no standard induction, no one sitting you down and explaining what’s expected. You piece it together as you go, usually by making mistakes and hoping they’re not too costly. The sooner you accept that and lean into figuring things out quickly rather than waiting for someone to explain them, the better.

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The most obvious problem: we are not banks. If you want to produce work, you need to fund it. That’s how production works across every other department — you don’t ask the art director to buy the props and wait to be reimbursed (although I’m sure they probably had a similar problem too), you don’t ask the DP to cover the camera hire and send an invoice later. Wardrobe somehow became the exception to this, and it needs to stop being one.

Part of this, I think, comes down to assumption. If you’re buying contemporary, there’s sometimes a perception that a stylist has a personal stock that’s filled with a back catalogue of vintage gems and all things contemporary that they can just pull from — and even if they do, that’s not anyone’s to access for free. That’s a hire, and it should be treated as one. And beyond that, the reality of pulling product in this day and age is harder than people realise. Unless you’re working with a celebrity or brand ambassador where PRs are incentivised to lend, getting clothing on loan for a commercial shoot is genuinely difficult — brands are unlikely to see the credit, if there is one at all, and without that there’s very little in it for them. So the assumption that a stylist can just “pull” things and keep the budget down is increasingly out of touch with how it actually works.

If you’re a production company still operating on 30, 60, or 90-day payment terms — first of all, we need to have a different conversation entirely — but asking a stylist to go out of pocket for that duration to cover your production costs is genuinely not okay. That’s your cash flow problem, not ours. And in this current climate, where getting consistent work is harder than it’s been in years, please do not assume that the stylist you’ve hired just has that money sitting there. It is not a given. We shouldn’t even be waiting that long for our invoices to be paid either but again, another conversation.

The float problem is bigger than people think

Here’s where it gets more complicated, because it’s not just about covering the budget you’ve been given. It’s about needing to go well beyond it in order to do the job properly.

When you’re doing fittings — real fittings, not just a quick run through a rack — and a director or client wants to see options, you need to physically have those options. That means buying more than you know you’ll keep. And this is before you even factor in fit, which is its own nightmare. Every store cuts differently, every brand has a slightly different idea of what a size means, and talent sizes are notoriously unreliable. I once had a talent’s agent tell me her client was a size 6. She missed two scheduled fittings and turned up on set and laughed — laughed — that she was more of a size 12. You can’t account for that without a buffer (although to buy that much of a size difference is wild and obviously not expected). You need to be able to over-buy and return, and that means having a float that’s bigger than the actual spend, which means having money that isn’t yours tied up while you sort it.

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I’ve always been a very chilled and calm person — ask anyone I know and they’ll tell you that. I have emotions (obviously), I get excited or sad about things, but I just tend to hold up well under pressure and chaos and can keep level-headed when things get a bit crazy (which they do — we work in the entertainment industry). I’m also genuinely relaxed about going places, doing things, where to eat etc. It’s not that I don’t care — if I really wanted to go somewhere or avoid something, I’d say so.

So it only really occurred to me a few weeks after I opened The Fitting Space that I was really suffering with decision fatigue — and that it had not only bled into my personal life but had me in a total chokehold at work too.

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Almost everyone who has come through our doors — whether it’s to use the space for fittings, attend one of our workshops, or come to an industry insider event — is really struggling to find work. And it isn’t because they aren’t good at their jobs or don’t have the contacts; it’s because the work simply isn’t there. But why?

It’s normal to hit dry patche…

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Not the technical stuff — most training covers that. The other things. How a production actually runs from the inside. What’s really expected of you at each level. How to handle the situations nobody prepares you for. The unwritten rules around working with different personalities, working as an ally, understanding what a Costume Supervisor actually does day to day versus what you assumed they did.

That knowledge exists. It just lives in the heads of people who’ve been doing this for years, passed on informally — or not at all.

We’ve had a lot of people ask for something that goes beyond a single workshop day. This is our answer to that.

Costume: The Inside Guide is a 6-week online programme built collectively with working costume professionals across theatre, TV and film. Six live sessions on Zoom every Wednesday evening, recorded if you can’t make it live. A workbook for each session. A community space to connect with everyone else going through it at the same time.

It’s for anyone in costume — graduate, early career, already working — who wants to understand how the industry actually operates, not just the corner of it they’ve landed in so far.

It starts 4 August. Pre-sale is open now at £125, and that price closes 22 June. After that it’s £250.

Secure your spot →

TFS 🧡

I don’t know why, but sometimes it really bothers me that we just accept this as part of the deal. The worst part is arriving on set or at a location and watching every other department have a runner or someone helping them carry things in — and styling are just left to figure it out alone and more often than not having to drag this all up a flight of stairs too. Just because we aren’t carrying expensive camera equipment doesn’t mean what we have isn’t heavy, time consuming to move, or important to the job.

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— it’s your boss. Not an emergency, not a crisis, just a thought they had. You reply because you feel like you have to. Then another message. Then another. By midnight you’ve had a full work conversation and now you can’t sleep and you’re on set at 6am.

Sound familiar? Because I’d be surprised if it didn’t.

This is one of the most common — and least talked about — realities of working in costume, wardrobe and fashion. And the really insidious thing about it is that over time it starts to feel normal. Like this is just what the job is. And look, some of it is — but a lot of it isn’t, and knowing the difference, and protecting yourself accordingly, is something nobody really tells you how to do.

This also isn’t about working less or being difficult or not being committed. I want to say that clearly because I know how many people in this industry feel genuinely guilty for having boundaries — like wanting to switch off means you don’t care enough, or you’re not a team player, or you’re going to get a reputation for being hard to work with. That guilt is real and I’ve felt it too. But boundaries aren’t about caring less. They’re about being able to keep showing up, do your job and do it well without completely running yourself into the ground.

The reality of the hours

The shape of the problem depends a lot on what you do and where you’re working. As a freelance stylist your time is largely self-directed — but if fittings aren’t going well you might be out shopping until 9pm to get things ready before a shoot. That’s sort of part of the job and most of us go into it knowing that.

In TV and film though, 12, 13, 14-hour days across five or six days a week — sometimes for months at a stretch — is a different thing entirely. Rest and decompression aren’t optional extras in that context, they’re genuinely necessary to function. And it means everything else — friends, family, any version of a personal life — goes on hold for the duration. It can be brutal.

And then on top of all of that, there’s the boss who expects everyone to be on call 24/7, who texts at all hours, who sends you a minute by minute update of their journey and expects you to reply in real time (yes, I have experienced this, yes it is as insane as it sounds). The thing is, unless you protect yourself in that situation, it will not stop. And honestly? My view is if you’re working for someone like that and nothing is changing — get out. They won’t change. You’ll wait forever.

The guilt piece

Before we get into practical stuff I want to sit with this for a second because I think it’s important. So many people in this industry — especially when you’re earlier in your career — internalise the idea that being available all the time is the same thing as being good at your job. It isn’t. And a lot of the time the people at the top who have zero boundaries aren’t modelling good behaviour, they’re just passing their own chaos and dysfunction down the chain. These people are horrible to work with, for every department.

You are allowed to have a life outside of work. You are allowed to not reply to a non-urgent message at 10pm. That doesn’t make you uncommitted. It makes you someone who is trying to sustain a career long-term rather than burn out in two years — and frankly that’s the smarter play.

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The format was deliberate. Rather than a traditional panel, I sat with each speaker one at a time — Ollie Savile (actor), Emily Lunnon (Producer and Managing Director of DEM Productions), and Daisy Frost (Go For Wardrobe) — and had a proper conversation with each of them before bringing everyone together for the Q&A. Three separate perspectives, heard properly, before the room got to weigh in.

That structure did something I hadn’t fully anticipated. By the time we reached the Q&A, the audience had already been given the bigger picture — different professions, different relationships to costume, different ways of understanding the same work. So the questions that came weren’t surface-level. People asked the things you don’t usually feel able to ask, or have the space to. About how decisions get made, about what the work looks like from the other side, about the stuff that doesn’t make it into job descriptions or industry conversation.

One question that stayed with me was about returning to work after having children — specifically, how to approach job sharing in an industry where that conversation can feel loaded. The advice that came out of it felt genuinely useful: if you want to offer a job share, don’t present yourself as one half of an arrangement and leave the producer to figure out the rest. Find your person first. Someone you’ve already worked with, whose process you trust. Go in as a unit with a clear proposition, so the person hiring doesn’t inherit the problem of wondering whether you’ll actually function well together. You’re not asking them to take a risk — you’re removing one. It wasn't a groundbreaking insight, but it was a really good illustration of something we don't talk about enough in this industry — how to set boundaries in a way that also offers up a solution. How to advocate for what you need without creating more work for the person on the other side of the table. That balance is something we should all be getting better at.

That’s what I wanted Industry Insider to be. Not a panel where experienced people talk at an audience, but a space where the questions people are actually sitting with get a proper answer. The buzz in the room didn’t peak and drop — it kept building, all the way to the end. People were listening to each other, supporting each other’s questions. You can’t manufacture that. It comes from people feeling like they’re somewhere that takes their work seriously.

The next one is Industry Insider: Styling Edition on 10th May. Same format, new perspectives — an afternoon I’m already very excited about. If Sunday is anything to go by, you’ll want to be in the room.

Tickets are available now — link here: www.thefittingspace.com/industry-insider

One of the hardest things about the role is learning to adapt to how different people work. If you’re freelance and working with a handful of leads, each of them will have completely different ways of operating, different expectations, and different needs — and you have to get up to speed with all of that quickly, while still actually doing your job.

You also have to figure things out fast. If you’re new, you might get thrown in at the deep end with something like “email this person to try and get this loan” — and how you find that contact, and then word that email in a way that’s compelling enough to actually get what your stylist needs, is not something anyone sits you down to teach you. Unless you’re lucky enough to work with someone who takes the time, it’s almost always learned the hard way.

There are also a lot of logistics and conversations happening around you that you’re not part of — but that are directly affecting your workload. Developing a real understanding of how jobs work on a practical level is invaluable: knowing what’s expected, understanding timelines, getting ahead of things like couriers and transport, and anticipating what’s coming rather than waiting to be told. It’s a fine balance — being proactive without overstepping — but knowing how to do all of this well is also essential groundwork if you eventually want to lead your own jobs.

I’d say being an assistant is one of the most undervalued roles in the industry. Sometimes you’re left with only the thankless tasks. Some leads have egos and treat you more like a PA. Others are disorganised and poor communicators themselves, which makes it impossible to work productively — and then the blame lands on you anyway. It’s not always like that, but it happens more than it should.

Finding a great stylist or designer to assist is genuinely hard — someone who’s going to support your growth, not just use your time. And equally, finding a great assistant is hard: someone who takes initiative, is proactive, but also understands what it means to support someone well. Both sides of that relationship take real skill.

Maintaining boundaries as an assistant is also harder than it sounds. I’ve worked with people who had no concept of boundaries — who worked every hour going and expected you to be available for it, including messages at midnight on a Saturday. I was always firm on that, but I know it’s not easy, especially early on when you don’t feel like you’re in a position to push back. Ultimately, anyone operating that way needs to look at how they’re managing themselves — but as an assistant, saying no can feel like a huge risk.

What all of this does, though — the adapting, the navigating difficult dynamics, the learning to hold your own — is build something really valuable. It develops your people skills, your resilience, your understanding of pace, and your sense of what you will and won’t carry with you when you eventually lead your own teams. It’s all a learning curve. A steep one — but a useful one.