LIFE AT FASHION COLLEGE: Turning a CLASSROOM Photoshoot Into a Creative Direction Masterclass

WORDS BY NFC STUDENT, ABBY MALONE

Every day at fashion college feels like a main character moment. The campus is alive with everyone’s little stories — from Fashion Week to Van Cleef and Dior head office trips that make us all feel like we’re one train ride away from Paris. But the moments that stand out the most aren’t always the glossy ones. Sometimes, they’re the messy, slightly chaotic, laugh-til-you-cry memories made in class.

For me, one of those happened last term with my teacher, Matt. The class theme was creative direction, which in theory sounds chic and cinematic. In reality? We were were told to use our iPhone cameras and told to make magic happen. The catch: I’m not a photographer. At all. I thrive in other areas, but when it comes to cameras, I’m more “accidental blur” than “Annie Leibovitz.” Still, I was willing to give it a go.

OUR INSPIRATION IMAGE

Our final task was to create a campaign in groups, with five different images. That already sounded ambitious for us, a group who could barely agree on where to get coffee, but we dove in. Some of our shots were… questionable at best. (One in particular still haunts me — it looked like a half-hearted IKEA catalogue). But then came the chair idea.

We decided, in our infinite wisdom, that putting chairs in the middle of the street was high art. Obviously. So, we dragged a collection of random seats onto the road and staged ourselves like some low-budget avant-garde editorial. The number of times we had to scramble out of the way for oncoming cars was absolutely ridiculous. At one point, it felt less like a photoshoot and more like a very badly organised game of musical chairs — with actual traffic involved.

Passersby gave us that look — you know, the one where people can’t tell if you’re shooting for some weird art project or if you’ve just collectively lost your minds. Honestly, we were probably a bit of both. From the outside, I’m sure we looked cringey and awkward, but from the inside? We looked cool. Or at least we felt cool, and that’s basically the same thing.

Meanwhile, Matt stood on the sidelines, half-concerned, half-amused, watching us drag chairs across the asphalt like it was performance art. You could almost see the “what on earth are they doing?” thought bubble above his head. But he didn’t stop us — he let us run with it. And in the end, we actually got the shot. It was bold, it was weird, it was ours.

The best part wasn’t just the photo, though. It was doing something completely out of our

comfort zones together. The laughter, the running out of the way of cars, the whispered “this is so stupid but kind of brilliant” moments — those are the memories that stick. By the time we saw the final product, all of us were glowing a little. We had done something that wasn’t perfect, but it was brave, and it was ours.

OUR FINAL IMAGE

It was my main character energy because, in the midst of an ordinary class project, we transformed a quiet street into our own impromptu runway, dragging chairs across the asphalt and dissolving into laughter each time a car interrupted our scene; to strangers we must have looked absurd, but within our little circle it felt cinematic — a moment suspended between chaos and creation, where the awkward became beautiful and the ridiculous felt brave — and when the final photograph revealed itself, imperfect yet striking, it wasn’t just the image that mattered, but the memory of us together, confident in our own strange way, and the quiet magic of turning something fleeting into something unforgettable.