Nothing On a Shoot Starts With The Clothes

Nothing on a photo shoot starts with the clothes. A brief arrives first. Someone has decided what the day is about, and every choice made after that point answers to it.

The same goes for a project, or the way you execute well on strategy. There’s a vision, a strategy, and then a plan, and you execute. In some cases it’s well thought out, in others it’s just in time, but the pattern is the same.

Then there’s getting dressed, where the decision gets made live. For a lot of senior women that means twenty minutes in front of the wardrobe, again in the lift, again in the first thirty seconds of a meeting where you read what the table wants and give it exactly that. It’s a large part of why you’ve been promoted, and recognised, likely more than once.

No one mentioned along the way that it comes with a running cost. Nothing is ever settled, so the question comes back every morning and gets answered from scratch. The answering is where the day goes.

There’s one number in the research worth knowing. A 2006 Princeton study found people rate an unfamiliar face for trustworthiness and competence in a tenth of a second. When the researchers gave people longer to look, more time didn’t move the judgement, only the confidence people had in it. A tenth of a second is what the room spends. You spend twenty minutes, several times, on a question that was never settled.

The full article covers what belongs in a brief, why a signature is the last step rather than the first, and why the wardrobe question mostly answers itself once a brief exists.

Read the full article on Substack: https://sonyachoilarosa.substack.com/p/nothing-starts-with-the-clothes