Behind the Scenes
When I started out in the magazine industry, my friends would often say things like, “Wow naman! Ang exciting naman ng trabaho mo!” To which I would reply,
“Anyone who thinks this job is all glamour is so misguided!” Sure, there are fun events to attend, interesting people to meet, cool products to try out. But there’s so much more to it than that.
The readers see the final product—a beautifully set-up living room, a perfectly made-up model, impeccably styled clothes. But they don’t see the hours spent pulling out (mag-speak for “borrowing items for photo shoots”); the time spent in the bowels of shopping malls, waiting for said pullouts; the grunt work required to lug a piece of furniture to the shoot location; the tediousness of carefully unwrapping and re-wrapping borrowed items.
The job also allowed me to discover the hidden world of shopping malls—behind walls lined with organized display shelves and neatly arranged racks of clothes, there’s a very busy, often chaotic world where all the salespeople noisily converge, and where huge steel shelves groan under the weight of boxes and boxes of merchandise. This was when I began to understand why salespeople would sometimes say, “Ay, ma’am, wala nang size,” when you ask for a particular pair of shoes—it probably takes way too much effort to wade through all the stuff in storage, to dig up a pair of shoes you might decide not to buy.
Last weekend saw me carrying a chair, a rug, a huge box (thankfully, it was just filled with fluffy pillows, and not breakables like plates and vases), a storage basket, two shopping bags, and a bag with personal items (those things labeled “stylist’s own” on the pages of the magazine—in this case, sarongs and throws). I didn’t have a messenger or a shoot assistant with me, so I did all the lifting, unpacking, unfolding, refolding, and repacking myself. It was pretty exhausting, but it’s all just part of the job; I’m not one to stay behind a desk anyway. Fortunately, it’s a job that I truly love—and I feel really lucky because that’s not something a lot of people can say.