Gisele
There’s a moment no one prepares you for—the one where handling everything by yourself stops feeling like strength and starts feeling… incomplete. Not because you can’t do it. You can. You always have. But because somewhere along the way, you found someone who makes you want to share the win before you even leave theroom. Someone who turns a solved problem into a story worth telling. And once that shift happens, once independence makes space for connection instead of replacing it? Well. That’s when everything gets a little more complicated… and a lot more worth it.
Playlist: “The Night Will Always Win” by Manchester Orchestra
The hotel room in Minneapolis is nicer than the last one.
Derek arranged it, which means it has a rainfall shower and a view of the city and a minibar that I’ve been ignoring because I’m here to work, not to sit by a window drinking ten-dollar wine and thinking about a man who is currently somewhere in Illinois losing his mind over a power play sequence.
I know he’s somewhere in Illinois because he texted me from the airport at six this morning: Springfield first. Then Milwaukee. Back Thursday.
I texted back: Kill it. Which is not the most romantic send-off in the history of long-distance communication but it was six in the morning and I was already reading Derek’s revised shot list for the day.
That was seventy-two hours ago.
We’ve texted. Not as much as either of us would like, I think, though neither of us has said that out loud because we’re both apparently committed to performing competence at all times. His texts come in clusters—before practice, after games, the occasional late-night message that arrives while I’m alreadyasleep and reads like something he thought about for a while before sending. Mine go out between calls and fittings and the seventeen daily conversations with Derek about creative vision, which is a phrase Derek uses approximately forty times a day.
I am, by every measurable standard, girl-bossing to the extreme .
The shoot has been good. Better than good—the content we’ve captured is exactly what the campaign needs, and the Luxe team is happy in the specific way that means they’re already thinking about the next collaboration before this one is finished. Derek has been manageable. The models have been professional. My technique has been flawless, which I’m noting for the record because the last time I was in Minneapolis with a camera pointed at my work, a woman left with significantly less hair than she arrived with.
No pixie incidents this trip.
What I did not account for, when I agreed to the extended shoot schedule, was how loud a hotel room gets when you’re used to someone being in your space.
Not loud with noise. Loud with absence. The specific silence of a room that has exactly one toothbrush and one set of products on the bathroom shelf and no evidence that anyone else exists in the world except the person standing in it.
I’ve been alone in hotel rooms my whole career. I’ve always been fine.
I’m fine now. I’m just more aware of the fine than I used to be.
The problem happens on day three.
It starts with the sweater.
The campaign has a hero look—a specific styling moment that anchors the whole visual narrative, the one Derek has been building toward since the first planning call. We’ve been shooting around it for three days, building context, and today is the day we shoot the centerpiece. The model is in the chair. The lighting is perfect. Derek is practically vibrating.
And the sweater—the specific, carefully selected, flown-in-from-the-brand’s-New-York-studio sweater that the entire hero shot is built around—is the wrong color.
Not slightly wrong. Not a shade off in a way that only bothers people who think about color for a living. Wrong in the way that makes the model’s skin look gray and the whole composition fall apart, wrong in a way that’s immediately visible to everyone in the room including Derek, who goes the specific shade of pale that means he already knew something was wrong before I said anything.
“It’s the lighting,” he says.
“It’s not the lighting.” I look at the monitor. Look at the sweater. “The lighting is fine. The sweater is pulling green. It’s going to read completely differently from what we approved.”
“The brand sent what they sent.”
“Then the brand made a mistake.” I straighten up. Think. The whole day is built around this shot, and we have the space until four o’clock and the model until five and a campaign launch that does not move because a sweater is the wrong color. “What do we have on the rack?”
“Nothing in this palette. Everything else is—”
“Show me.”
He shows me. He’s right that nothing is an exact match. He’s wrong that nothing will work, because there’s a rust-colored silk blouse on the end of the rack that shouldn’t work with the campaign aesthetic and is going to work beautifully if I adjustthe rest of the look around it and trust my instincts instead of the approved shot list.
I pull it off the rack. Hold it up against the backdrop. Look at the monitor.
“Restyle the look around this,” I say. “Different accessories. Lose the structured jacket, go softer. Give me twenty minutes.”
