The best way to sneak in a fashion show is to be confident and friendly – at least according to Dan Bassini, who has photographed New York Fashion Week for almost a decade, without being on the guest lists.
You could catch the new jersey -based photographer in the street by taking portraits of Heidi Klum, Doja Cat or Dove Cameron, but he also makes his way inside the shows, taking photos of a front row without being accessed – which is and this writer met him, in an Elena Velez track last year. Once, he even managed to hang a place behind the elegant bob familiar with Anna Wintour during a coach show.
“I have never really broken the law to enter-I have never climbed into a bathroom window,” he joked during a video call. Although he has found the strange side door, left open and unattended, or he assesses the flow of the crowd at the door and blends into a VIP group.
“I probably look like help in most situations, but I use being as non-descriptive as possible to enter it,” he added, noting the neutral Carhartt t-shirt he often wears. “I will never be mistaken with a haute couture influencer.”
Sometimes Bassini tries his luck at the door with a loose story, like a manager who forgot to add it to the list. This is how he entered a Netflix party for the reality TV show “Next in fashion” after meeting and photographed his co-host, Alexa Chung, outside. Bassini observed the circuit of influencers and hopes who try a Doe-You-Know-Who-I-Am Approach, only to see them turn away without ceremony every time.
“Kindness goes so much further than arrogance in these situations,” he noted.
Since 2017, Bassini has published a selection of his photos in his current Zine series “No invite”, with the most recent, n ° 12, publishing earlier this summer with a gallery exhibition that accompanies him in the Soho district of New York. The intimacy of its rapid and generally posed captures is distinguished from images on the wires during each fashion season. Bassini’s 35mm 35mm films of 35mm films often have the impression that he is in conversation with his subjects, or by saying goodbye to a friend, a lens of the camera with which celebrities seem to engage rather than to avoid.
Sometimes it is because he discussed them, often photography. Bassini behaves around pointed cameras, recently a Yashica T4 or Contax T2, which are compact enough to go unnoticed in his pocket but draw a nostalgic reaction of models and actors. The actor and director Jemima Kirke one day asked him how to repair his Polaroid camera while waiting for his car outside a puppet and puppet show, he said, while Klum showed poetic with him about the feeling of developing a film in a laboratory.
During a Carolina Herrera show in 2023 inside the Plaza Hotel (a place that Bassini noted has always been easy to infiltrate), actor Melissa Barrera removed it when she finished with an interview, he said.
“I say to myself,” Am I in difficulty? ” What’s going on here? He recalls. “And she said,” I need to know where I can develop my film in New York. »»
Today, Bassini travels alongside a team of colleagues photographers who collect information on each program; Some of them assignments of fashion week or connections within the industry. They keep information flowing through group cats and calculation sheets, and Bassini likes the camaraderie of all this-although it is known to disappear at any time if it sees a way to penetrate, he said.
But during his first attempted photography of New York Fashion Week during a winter day in 2016, he had no links. At the time, most of the shows were organized in Skylight Clarkson Square near the West Side Highway, unlike the decentralized spread on the official calendar on various sites today.
“I was walking Soho, asking the people where the fashion week was. It was embarrassing, and it was so cold,” he said. Directed towards the main place, he went on the wrong side of the building and quickly abandoned.
“If I had just got around it, I would have found it, but who knows what I would have done if I did,” he said.
Last September, during the visit of the Whitney Museum of American Art, he presented himself to a New York Fashion Week festival and his interest was renewed when he started taking photos of the Street of the Participants. His real breakthrough, however, came when he took an advance on the site of the Kanye West show (now known as Ye) for season 5 of Yeezy at Pier 59 the following year; He broke incing guests, including the old model of Victoria’s Secret Georgia Fowler, whose portrait was the cover of his first volume of “no invite”.
“Everything had a meaning from there,” he said.
Nowadays, Bassini’s favorite spectacle to sneak has become Eckhaus Latta, the contemporary fashion label known for its non -sexist appeal – with its 10th anniversary show to the abandoned and dilapidated market on Essex Street being among the strengths. To date, he has not yet been expelled from any show, he says, although he was caught by a publicist who had refused him entry into a puppet and puppet show. When she spotted it by photographing the first looks inside, he had to escape him until the start of the show.
And, despite the number of celebrities that Bassini has photographed over the years, he said that he did not take portraits according to fame, but rather their attitude and style. Anonymous guests also fill its pages, while the outings of Zendaya or Natasha Lyonne have not completely cut. He is flattered, however, when he discovers that his subjects use his portraits as social media profile images. This was the case with Alexa Chung, he said, who used her portrait of her on Instagram for years.
However, “she never struck me with follow-up,” he said, laughing.
