There is a moment, usually on the second day of a shoot, when the set stops being a set. The lights are already right, the team is already in rhythm, and someone walks in who changes the temperature of the room. That person is usually not the tallest, not the most experienced, and almost never the first name on the list.
We spend the rest of the week trying to build the conditions for that moment to happen. Everything else — the mood board, the call sheet, the light plot — is just the preparation for a face arriving in a room.
A campaign is a decision, and a decision has to be made by someone. That is the part of the job that never appears on a credits page: we are the people who choose. Not because we are the most important people in the process, but because the client cannot choose alone and the model cannot choose for herself.
The shortlist goes out on Monday. On Tuesday we see everyone: ninety minutes each, in daylight, without makeup, in the clothes of the brand if we already have them. We look at the walk before we look at the face, because the walk is the part nobody can fake and everybody forgets.
On Wednesday the finalists come back, and the brief changes: now there is a story, and the story needs a protagonist. On Thursday we shoot, and the frames arrive faster than we can review them. Four hundred frames by the evening, two hundred and forty that could go anywhere, eight that could go everywhere.
On Friday the client picks. On Saturday we retouch. On Sunday nobody thinks about it for a while, until the images are on a wall in Milan and someone asks who that person is. That is the part we like.