Through the Looking Glass: The Horror of the Milan Shows…. From a publicist's perspective Part Three

And here it is, the third & final part of my publicist mole's account of her Milan Fashion Week experiences. I know she's thrilled with all your feedback, so do keep commenting.

9. Hoorah, time for bed. You will definitely be in a nice hotel, maybe not all that nice but certainly with a nice little basket of toiletries. If you are super unlucky you will be in a very grand hotel, at which point you will discover that your client/boss thinks it’s ok for you to share a room with up to 2 other PR girls. Yup. You are an international PR professional in a dorm.

10. Your client will have booked you on a flight back that requires you getting up at 4am, latest. You will probably wake one of the other PR girls who will then hate you unreasonably for ever.

11. Your boss will look on your Milan trip as a ‘treat’ and will require you to go straight to the office to do your report, which your client will require by the end of the day.

This is only a broad outline - there are of course variations on this. You might be sharing a room with annoyingly box-fresh PR’s who want to go and party and will then bounce in to your room at about the same time as you are leaving, looking, you might charitably call it ‘tired and emotional’, following the shock discovery that at 3am and following much booze and what-have-you in a seedy Milanese discotheque, their new gay best friend editor is actually only interested in the strapping Milano taxi driver by the bar and not in chatting about shoes.

Or perhaps you will stay another day or so, at which point you might get to do a quicky hustle up Via Montenapoleone where, now the Euro is strong, you will spend an unfeasible amount on a pair of shoes that you will subsequently regret , followed by a lunch of really quite dire, shockingly expensive rocket salad at La Langhe. But these are rare treats.

So perhaps I am being unreasonably churlish, but it is a fact that for the properly jaded fashion PR, the Milan shows are really only fun once in a blue moon.