A fitting is not about clothes. It is about how a person stands when she is wearing something that was not made for her — and whether the camera will believe it. Ten seconds is enough time to know. It is also enough time to be wrong, which is why we do it again.
The room has one mirror, one chair, and a light that is deliberately wrong: too high, too flat, nothing like the set where the pictures will be taken. If a look survives here, it will survive anywhere.
Four questions, always the same. Does the length land where it should on this body, or does it stop at the wrong place? Is the colour still the colour when it moves? Can she walk in it, and does she want to? And finally: is there a picture in this? If the answer is no, the look is beautiful and useless.
The most common mistake is not choosing the wrong clothes. It is choosing clothes that are perfect on the hanger and disappear on the person. A shoulder that is one centimetre off, a sleeve that ends at the wrong point, a heel that changes the posture — the camera forgives nothing, and it forgives even less in motion.
The second most common mistake is trusting the mirror too much. The mirror lies about proportion, the lens lies about it in the other direction. We fit with the camera in mind: we shoot the look on a phone, on the spot, and we look at the picture, not at the reflection.
Then we stop. Ten seconds is the maximum we allow ourselves, because a fitting that lasts twenty minutes is a fitting where nobody is honest any more. After the first ten seconds, people start to accommodate the clothes. Before them, they are still themselves, and that is the frame we are looking for.