Have you ever wanted to attend a Fashion Week in one of the big cities but never knew how to start? Well I’ve been in your shoes 4 months ago searching websites curious of how I could get in. Now I am not an expert what so ever and only got one positive response after the 90 emails I sent but I still think this is the coolest experience ever and everyone should try it. So if you ever want to taste the crazy world of fashion I have two words for you: Cold Emailing.

Paris is an 8 hour FlixBus drive away from where I study in University so when I saw that my birthday is during Paris Fashion Week and the day after our final midterm I felt it was a moral duty to buy those tickets, convince some friends and celebrate my 19th birthday in Paris. 

Now 2 weeks before the trip the official PFW schedule was posted, all the brands and in which days their shows took place. And then I had the crazy idea, why don’t I just email the brands from the days we are in Paris telling them I am a very passionate student asking for an invitation? What do I have to lose? Time? I have plenty of that. 

Now part 2 of my plan was to find some sort of association I can link myself with. In our city there is this student-led fashion association called NFS (New Fashion Society) very professional with hundreds of followers on Instagram, so I messaged the president on Instagram asking if I could use their name as something in my email to have more credibility. 

Imagine this: you are a brand organising the most expensive runway of the year in the city of fashion, you want press and people to come and write about your brand, but not just anyone. So if you get an email with: Hey! I am a passionate student bla bla… invite me! VS. Hey! I am an ambassador from a student fashion association and my goal is to bla bla… invite me! 

Which one would you invite?

Exactly my point. 

Now the actual email I used is something like this:

The email itself is pretty important, so do spend some time on it. I did the outline with ChatGPT and then edited some paragraphs that sounded very robotic. But you are free to change it whoever you want.

Now I have to say I sent around 90 emails, because after like one and a half weeks of no responses from some brands I sent them another email, a gentle reminder for them to give me that invite, now a lot of people have called me crazy and I totally understand their point of view. I like to call myself insistent and very goal oriented, I wanted to attend PFW for my birthday so I was going to send as many emails as it took. Now I got around 10 responses back, 7 of them were negative, 1 of them straight sent me the invite (AAAAAAA). It is worth mentioning I never expected this and to this day it is still the most impressive thing I have ever done in my entire life. Again I knew no one there, just sent a bunch of random emails. And then 2 of them required more information, to which I responded but then they never emailed back, which I can’t blame them. It’s nothing personal. They had an entire show to organise why they would care about a student.

Now the show I got a response from was Maxhosa, I wanted to be as prepared as possible so I researched a lot about the brand and looked at their clothes because in online articles and Youtube videos it said that you should dress in the brands clothing or something similar if you attend one of their shows, Maxhosa pieces are extremely beautiful and also extremely expensive, tops and dresses were ranging between 400 and 900 euros, for one. So that was definitely not something I could afford but I did find a dress in my closet, a gift from  my aunt that was similar in terms of colours. So I used that. At some point I was considering buying a pair of socks from Maxhosa but the delivery from South Africa was more expensive than the actual socks so I just gave up and went with the dress. I was very proud of my outfit. I felt it was very similar to the vibes of the show but I was so stressed and so anxious when I went inside that I didn’t even take my coat off and you couldn’t see the dress. So I stressed and picked it out for nothing. 

Now the experience inside. First of all they couldn’t find my name on the list at the entrance, I was starting to shake, I had my email ready with the invite my intrusive thought were already on high alert: what if this was all a prank, what if they just kick you out now, but the lady there called someone in charge and the woman who came took one look at me, borderline sweating and almost crying and one look at the email invite and she just let me in. 

But this delay made me miss the beginning of the presentation a bit so me being overwhelmed and sweating from the entrance experience now getting inside and seeing all the models already moving was the death of me. I didn’t know which one to pull out first and film, my phone or my camera or simply look at them. I ended up filming with both but it was over very fast, I barely got to process the entire experience. They served us some food, there was a server walking around with something on his plate and people started to socialize. I found another girl who was sitting by herself and started talking to her. 

Now this might seem kind of wild but when I am nervous I like to talk and my mindset is always that the other people are also as stressed as I am. I found out she was from Berlin and a street photographer. And very randomly she had the addresses from all the other big shows happening in Paris. And what people do, I had no idea about this, is they go in front of the building like paparazzi and wait for celebrities or the guests invited to come out from the shows and take pictures of them.

So that’s basically what me and my friend did for the rest of the day and our excursion there. We went to sit in front of Vivienne Westwood, Hermes and Alexander McQueen. 

Now I will definitely write another post about the entire trip but this is already 1300 words long and it started as a guide on how to get an invite to Paris Fashion Week.