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Diary Entry / First Time Backstage

A photographer’s first analogue descent at BFW covering Milk of Lime, Haderlump, Clara Colette Miramon.

Berlin Fashion Week doesn’t wait. Backstage hits you fast. Sweat, lights, lashes, bodies moving in every direction. No one tells you where to go. No one slows down. You just shoot, breathe, keep up. It’s messy, loud, and kind of perfect.

I wasn’t ready.
I thought I was — but no.

The second I stepped backstage, it hit me: the noise, the sweat, the impossible beauty of it all. Someone was screaming about hair. Someone else half-naked, eating a banana with the calm of a monk.

I stood there, camera in hand. Invisible and in the way at the same time.
I shot anyway.

Flash. Model. Makeup brush. Flash again.

It smelled like hairspray, cigarettes, fear, and something floral I couldn’t place.
I didn’t know anyone’s name. They didn’t know mine.
But for a second at a time when someone looked straight into my lens, wide-eyed, exhausted, annoyed: we saw each other. And that was enough.

The clothes looked like sculpture.
The people wearing them looked like ghosts.
Beautiful, tired ghosts.

At one point, someone asked if I was “with someone.” I lied and said yes.
Then I went back out and kept shooting, real moments, posed and not.
Sometimes I asked. Sometimes I didn’t.

That’s what this is. This job. This week. This world.

Fashion in Berlin: constantly shifting, breaking, remaking itself.
A city where every season feels like a restart button.
You fall apart. Then you step back in.

Hands shaking. Film half shot.
I got what I could. I missed half of it.
But I was there.
I saw it.
And that has to count for something.

If you’re reading this believe me:
In its own chaotic way, it was NASTY.

Diary Entry / First Time Backstage

Photo & Diary: Giovanni Bilanzuoli / @giovannybilanzuoli
Editor: Anca Macavei / @ancamacavei
Designers: Milk of Lime, Haderlump, Clara Colette Miramon
@milk_of_lime, @haderlump.berlin, @claracolettemiramon
Event: Berlin Fashion Week / @berlinfashionweek

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