What a stylist does on a shoot

A stylist decides what appears in the frame and makes it sit correctly. On a person that means choosing the clothes, the shoes and the jewellery, and then clipping, pinning, steaming and taping until something that fits nobody perfectly fits this person in this frame perfectly. On a table it means choosing the bowl, the cloth, the surface and the spoon, and placing each one so the product reads first. The job starts weeks before the shoot and ends days after it. Most clients see only the middle.

There are several kinds of stylist. A wardrobe or fashion stylist chooses and fits clothing, and on a magazine the same person is often titled fashion editor. A prop stylist sources and arranges objects and surfaces, and a food stylist makes food look right under studio lights for as long as the shot takes. Hair and make-up are separate crafts with their own artists, and a costume designer, who dresses characters for film, television or theatre, does a different job again. A small product shoot with no people in it still needs a prop stylist, because the difference between a flat lay that looks composed and one that looks like objects put down on a table is most of why one brand's pictures look expensive.

At the top of the craft a stylist is an author of pictures, working as the photographer's partner. Grace Coddington, who joined American Vogue in 1988 as fashion director and was its creative director from 1995 to 2016, was known for big, elaborate shoots, and the 2009 documentary The September Issue follows her and the editor Anna Wintour through the making of the September 2007 issue, with Coddington arguing for her stories and Wintour approving most of them in the end. In London between 1983 and 1989 the stylist Ray Petri worked with photographers including Jamie Morgan and Marc Lebon on a run of fashion spreads for The Face, i-D and Arena under the name Buffalo. In both cases the look was as much the stylist's as the photographer's. So brief a stylist as a collaborator.

Most of the work comes first. The stylist reads the brief and the references, works out the looks, and sources everything, which means buying some things and borrowing the rest from showrooms and press offices. Designers lend samples to the fashion press in the four to six months before the clothes reach the shops, and samples are usually made in a single size, which is why casting and styling constrain each other. Everything borrowed is logged on arrival with where it came from, when it goes back and what condition it was in. Then comes the fitting, an hour with the actual model in which every look is tried on, clipped, photographed plainly and approved or replaced.

On the day, the stylist dresses the model for each look and then stays at the monitor, watching the clothes while you watch the picture. Almost nothing fits straight off the rail. The back of a photographed jacket is usually a mess of clips while the front is perfect, which limits the camera angles, as the lesson on fit explains. Between takes the stylist steams out creases, straightens a twisted strap and checks each look against the photographs from the fitting. A fault caught between frames takes seconds. Found in the edit, it costs a retoucher's time, or the frame.

The job ends when the last borrowed thing is back where it came from. Returns go out on the agreed dates, credits go to the publication wherever a loan was made in exchange for one, and anything damaged is paid for. Stylists charge by the hour, the day or the project, and advertising usually pays better than editorial, which is why a magazine story and a campaign by the same stylist can cost very different sums. Budget for the days either side too. Pulling and returning are real working days, and a disorganised stylist is a bigger cost to a production than an untalented one, since a lost sample or a late return comes out of the budget and the studio's name at once.