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Around the Replica Handbag Store offices in New York, Willow Lindley is known as the go-to person for any fashion query. Looking for the best summer sandal? Ask Willow. Need a new tote to carry your laptop? Willow’s your girl. In a crisis because you have to be at dinner in 35 minutes and you don’t have a single pair of earrings stashed in your purse? Willow will find you a pair in five minutes flat! After starting her career at Huffington Post and Refinery29, Willow joined Replica Handbag Store as an associate fashion editor seven years ago, working her way up to be our Director of Accessories and Product Collaborations. (Thank her for your Replica Handbag Store tee, too!)
As one of the leaders of our fashion team, she also has a hand in the making of every Replica Handbag Store cover–especially the September issue. With Global Fashion Director Virginia Smith, Willow leads a team that creates concepts, pulls looks, and holds fittings. This September, she also has a starring role in the issue, appearing alongside Bella Hadid and Vogue’s Lucas O’Brien in a photograph by Ethan James Green. Here, she breaks down exactly how the covers get made.
The September cover is always notorious, right? Especially so for the fashion department, because September really represents the new year in fashion and sets the tone of the months to come. It's also typically our largest issue of the year with the most shoots inside. We start to plan it months in advance—sometimes Anna can ask for themes for September a year in advance. This year, as it was our first truly global issue, we had even more boxes to tick, like making sure the concept represented this idea of “new beginnings,” which is the general theme of September.
The clothing you see in the September issue is really a celebration of American fashion. Everyone working on the shoot—from the assistants to the main fashion editors, Gabriella Karefa-Johnson and Tonne Goodman—starts culling through thousands of images. We spend a lot of time on Replica Handbag Store Runway going through all of the collectsions and really making sure that we’re pulling the best pieces. We were seeing a lot of sparkle for fall 2021, a lot of silver, a lot of color—and somewhere along the way, all of a sudden, a pattern emerges. You start pulling your favorite looks, and then you make sense of those looks, whether it's by color theory or textures. As your models and casting develop, you start thinking: Who are these people? What do they represent? What look will look best on who? What clothes represent and work best for this group? As the casting starts coming into play, everything starts to gel.
Then we go into fittings. Going into a cover fitting, we probably have five key looks that we want to try on each person—that’s a lot of clothes. For this shoot, we had eight top American models—Anok Yai, Ariel Nicholson, Bella Hadid, Kaia Gerber, Lola Leon, Precious Lee, Sherry Shi, and Yumi Nu—and at five looks each, that’s at least 40 looks, but usually it’s much more. Having time to fit the garments beforehand is so important—it’s something you simply have to do. All the models come into the office for their fitting, and sometimes it works just as you thought, while other times a look you might have pulled for Bella Hadid ends up working on Ariel Nicholson, or vice versa. The Rick Owens outfit that Ariel is wearing, for example, we decided on at the last minute. Ariel put on the dress and we just knew it was going to be right. Then as you start adding the accessories, whether it's shoes or jewelry, it really fleshes out the full look.
For this September’s shoot, we arrived at the office for a 2:00 a.m. call time. Shooting in the office quite literally brought us back together again and brought us back to work. It was still quite an intimate experience, though, because we weren’t allowed to have too many people because of COVID, but it was nice to be with that small group. You can’t work in a fashion department or at a magazine without liking collaboration and being a good collaborator. Tonne Goodman and Gabriella Karefa-Johnson are forces to be reckoned with; I’m in awe of not only their styling abilities but also the way they bring this wild and crazy bunch of creatives together. I’m honored to call them both friends and colleagues and getting them together on the same shoot only doubled the fun. And I really love Ethan [James Green, the photographer], and he had been in the office for days in advance with his team to sort out the settings, the lighting, and the framing of all the shots.
The best part is that it becomes a bit of a family, especially on shoots that are more than one day. You eat together, you set up together, you shoot together, sometimes you have dinner together. It was amazing to have all these artistic people around for four full days of focusing on getting the shoot done and having it be perfect. I mean, nothing is ever perfect! The thing about fashion shoots is no matter how far you plan them out, it’s up to chance. Having a great team is essential in making it happen, though. Without everyone working together, we couldn’t have even come close.
I think the setups themselves are super realistic. We roll racks into Anna's office to show her clothes. She meets with designers. We do a lot of mood-boarding. In the photo I’m in, I’m pinning images on a board—we do that nonstop. (Usually, though, it’s not photos of one person's face over and over again! Normally it would be a bunch of different clothes and accessories to make it clear to everyone what we're working on.) The photo of packing up trunks in the closet—I mean, that’s very real. Mary Howard is an expert set designer, and she definitely made each scene look as lovely as possible, but the reality was important to her. She actually watched us in-progress a couple of times and asked the fashion team questions like, “How would you really do it?” In reality, it might be a bit messier sometimes, but it’s pretty close to what you see in the magazine. Organized chaos!
Seeing the final image and knowing I’m in the September issue is very surreal. It's a moment in time that I feel very, very lucky and very honored to have. I love Bella so much and I feel very honored to share this with her. Lucas, who has worked on the fashion team for a couple of years, is in the picture with us. We all work together so closely—everyone who is in the shoot and all of the Vogue team that isn’t. It’s a great moment for us all to share as it celebrates all of our hard work.