A fashion shoot has more moving parts than any other portrait genre, and every one of them — model, stylist, garments, location, brand — has to be agreed before the day rather than on it.
Unlike a portrait session, this is usually a crew shoot, and the document that makes it work is a call sheet: who arrives when, where, with what, and who to ring when they don't. Plenty of fashion work has no crew at all, though — a friend, a borrowed jacket and an hour of decent light — and the smaller version needs the same agreement, carried by one message the night before rather than a document: who's coming, where, when, and what's being shot.
The clothes are the subject, which changes the technical decisions. Garments need steaming, pinning and hanging in shooting order before anyone is in them; the lens has to be long enough not to distort a silhouette; and the aperture has to be deep enough to keep fabric texture rather than dissolving it into the same blur that flatters a face. Framing follows the deliverable — a straight e-commerce crop, a lookbook spread and a vertical social cut are three different frames, and knowing which are needed prevents a reshoot.
The rest is agreement. A reference or mood board signed off in advance gives the model something concrete to work towards and gives the client little room to describe a different shoot afterwards, while usage rights and model releases are far easier to settle before the shoot than after a brand has already chosen its favourite frame.
A few things to plan for