 of it is spent in the back of a car, rising to 97 per cent when in Milan. Mostly, we sit in motionless traffic, trying to get between venues that have been chosen using what can only be described as a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey approach. We eat sweets, take it in turn to charge our phones and try to reply to emails between bouts of motion sickness. Yet here I am at London Fashion Week, cruising through dappled sunshine, the wind in my hair and the lightning symbol on my phone as the electric charge on my elegant new e-bike tops it up. I arrive more than 20 minutes early for a show 13 minutes away from the last with a fully juiced iPhone before any of the dark-tinted cavalcade. You'll no doubt have seen those Insta-pics of immaculately dressed street stylers searching photogenically for lost chauffeurs during 'the shows'. This is no contrived photo opp: they really are impossible to find in the inevitable honking snarl-ups that happen outside every catwalk venue. Not for me. Forget the Mercedes A-Class. My getaway vehicle is the most reliable steed of the lot: a top-of-the-range e-bike in a putty-ish shade of clay (OK, millennial pink). Cowboy bikes are so fashionable that the Parisian label Ba&sh has just collaborated on a limited edition version in pale lilac with white wheels. That may sound more pretty than practical but, as the battery on mine smoothly kicks in and I sail off to my next show — leaving behind me a street that looks like the escape scene in a disaster movie — I feel not only can-do but borderline carefree. Such optimism during the shows is almost unheard of. Over my years as The Times's fashion editor, filing copy on the hop and dashing between deadlines, I've nailed the swift exit from the benches only to then waste cumulative hours of my life in haute bottlenecks. Repo){kind=link}
How do front row types spend their time during Fashion Week? Contrary to popular belief: not quaffing champagne or even watching models on the catwalks. The majority (80 per cent) of it is spent in the back of a car, rising to 97 per cent when in Milan. Mostly, we sit in motionless traffic, trying to get between venues that have been chosen using what can only be described as a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey approach. We eat sweets, take it in turn to charge our phones and try to reply to emails between bouts of motion sickness.
Yet here I am at London Fashion Week, cruising through dappled sunshine, the wind in my hair and the lightning symbol on my phone as the electric charge on my elegant new e-bike tops it up. I arrive more than 20 minutes early for a show 13 minutes away from the last with a fully juiced iPhone before any of the dark-tinted cavalcade.
You’ll no doubt have seen those Insta-pics of immaculately dressed street stylers searching photogenically for lost chauffeurs during “the shows”. This is no contrived photo opp: they really are impossible to find in the inevitable honking snarl-ups that happen outside every catwalk venue.
Not for me. Forget the Mercedes A-Class. My getaway vehicle is the most reliable steed of the lot: a top-of-the-range e-bike in a putty-ish shade of clay (OK, millennial pink). Cowboy bikes are so fashionable that the Parisian label Ba&sh has just collaborated on a limited edition version in pale lilac with white wheels. That may sound more pretty than practical but, as the battery on mine smoothly kicks in and I sail off to my next show – leaving behind me a street that looks like the escape scene in a disaster movie – I feel not only can-do but borderline carefree. Such optimism during the shows is almost unheard of.
Over my years as The Times’s fashion editor, filing copy on the hop and dashing between deadlines, I’ve nailed the swift exit from the benches only to then waste cumulative hours of my life in haute bottlenecks. Reporting from the catwalks in Copenhagen a few years ago, I yearned to copy the locals on bikes as spindly and elegant as they were, but I didn’t have the courage. Not only did I not know the way, Danish bike lanes are as busy as the M25 and every bit as unforgiving of confused foreigners.