On my way to meet Cat at Kings Cross, slightly inebriated from the previous night’s antics, I ponder about the last time Cat and I spent time together when we interned for a PR agency together in the summer. Since then she’s been all over the place, slaving away for various fashion companies in Milan and Amsterdam, only to return to London where I took advantage of the fact she had just committed to a yet another 3-month internship.

 

I didn’t think it had been that long since we last saw each other but upon hearing a familiar voice behind me at the station I spun around and there she was, awkwardly turning away from an innocent bystander that apparently looked like me because ‘she had a nose piercing just like you!’

 

I’ve always felt comforted being around Cat, since we met on our internship I was pleasantly surprised to find that people beneath 5”2 do exist! We clicked instantly, but I doubt I’m unique in that way. As a person that is always chasing the night away, meeting up with friends, sneaking into fashion week after parties and underground events, Cat is always on the move. She claims she gets her confidence that way from her education growing up in Italy.

“In Italy, every week we used to study like 10 subjects all together in middle school and high school and out of these 10, people would interrogate you on a single subject – a spoken test where you would have to go to the front of the class and speak a chapter of something explaining what it is.”

 

She talks about how she has picked up on this sense that people in England, especially her peers at uni are so reluctant to speak aloud and approach each other; she describes how there is a ‘cultural difference’ between the two countries and that she is glad to have been brought up in a society that encourages public speaking.

 

Having said that, Cat finds a huge attraction to being in London as a student. Growing up in Italy, Cat moved to London to study fashion at UAL and has thrived off the city’s culture and vibrancy that comes in abundance. She explains how in Italy, specifically Milan, everyone has great taste and it is just ‘in your genes’ to dress well, yet resulting in everyone looking the same and quick to judge anyone that looks differently. Cat describes her attraction to London “because it’s a hub for people from all over the world and when you put different cultures together, different minds together, big things happen”.

For someone that has a creative mind, London is a constant flow of inspiration, ideas and appreciation for diversity – It makes getting up in the morning all the more exciting. I recall that buzz feeling getting the Northern Line from Morden all the way up to Tottenham Court Road on my way to my internship, watching the footwear transform from office wear to ugly walking trainers as we moved past Kennington into the tourist zone of central London. I used to get a thrill from marching up Oxford Street batting away the leisure shoppers, pretending that I had never dragged my mum up and down the miles of shops to find the perfect pair of flip flops, aged 7. (Ended up in Carnaby Street with a pair of Havaianas where my mother rewarded herself with a glass of pinot at The Shakespeare’s Head).

Something that Cat and I enjoyed the most about working in the office above Trident Studios was upon returning from lunch with our Tesco meal deals, we’d have to push through a Rock and Roll Tour to get to the front door, as though we had something to do with the production of some of the greatest music of all time.

 

As we have both experienced working in London in a fashion orientated work place, we’ve both experienced the highs…and also the lows of unpaid interning in a cut throat industry.

In the interview Cat shares her opinion on attitudes towards interns in the fashion industry:

 

“I don’t know what it’s like in other industries but in fashion they expect you to be their slave, pretty much. And being a slave to someone unpaid means you have to really love the industry because it is a very fake mentally draining industry, it’s very aggressive.”

 

Cat and I used to take ourselves off on particularly bad days for hour long lunch breaks (how dare we) exploring the nooks and crannies of Soho. One time we saw Blondey McCoy and stalked behind him slowly for a good 5 mins before even we had to admit this was odd behaviour.

 

Ultimately, it could have been a lot worse and in fairness, at least we had each other.