From one fashion week to another and back again, Harriet Mays Powell talks about life in Fashion.

Mays Powell:    Well, my main job is, twice a year, to cover the collections.  The each season, the Fall and the Spring Season.  So, we’ve just had the New York shows this Fall for Spring clothing that would be in the stores for Spring 2009.  This weekend, I would leave to go to Milan and I would spend a week there, looking at the clothes from the Italian designers, and then that will be followed by a little weekend in Venice, which would be lovely.  And then, onto, which is a break… And then, on to Paris for a week of shows there.  So, those are the two main, large blocks of time where I’m literally sitting in what the fashion industry…  what I would consider to be what the world would consider trade shows, and they’re the fashion shows that are called the collections for ready to wear.  Those are the clothes that you will see at various department stores and boutiques all around the country and all around the world, as well as online.  That is followed by then a period where I come back from the fashion collections and make some pretty strong decisions on what trends I like, what I’ve seen, how I’ve amassed all these large grouping of, this [plethora] of clothes that have kind of bombarded me and everyone for about a month.  Make sense of it all and group them into stories and to themes and to things that I think will be relevant for my publication and for things that I think will be fun to photograph and shoot.  And from there, I developed the idea.  Think about what kind of imagery I’d like those ideas to be.  And think about the photography, the models, and how I’m going to actually really produce that idea so it becomes an 8 page, 10 page story in the Spring issue of New York magazine.