The countdown begins

Posted by Carla Bevan at 09:02 on 7 Aug 2008

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It is exactly a month until the international catwalk collections kick off, and panic has already set in.

I have changed my New York hotel twice already (since Tuesday) and am still negotiating with my managing editor over where I'm staying in Milan and Paris (the euro is not helping us Brits with our expenses).

Don't even get me started on what I'm going to wear. I've been pouring over the lavish autumn fashion in this month's round of glossies and getting into a suitably folksy/structured/statement tailoring kind of mood – and then I remembered that in New York last September it was so hot I spent the entire week in flip-flops and the one sundress I'd thought to pack (thank you, Topshop).

Which means I need to find my warm-weather clothes, which thanks to this unutterably crap summer we're having haven't yet been unpacked. Who am I kidding 'yet'; haven't been unpacked full-stop since, well, 2006, if I'm being honest (Topshop sundress not withstanding).

And then there's the body to put inside my yet-to-be-found summer clothes. My Fit-Flops and Twix diet isn't really paying off to be honest (I'm not eating the Fit-Flops, btw, just wearing them at every given opportunity. And, no, I don't actually believe that they're going to tone my posterior, but they're so wonderfully comfortable.)

I'm not too worried about New York, in fact, as my fashion week buddy Kate Carter, the Life & Style editor at the guardian.co.uk, will be heavily pregnant by then, next to which I should look positively svelte and skinny no matter how many Twix bars I eat. Still, it's hard not to compare yourself just a little bit to the girls trotting past you on the catwalk. And, yes, I know they're born that way and actually look frankly quite strange when you bump into them round the back entrances to the fashion week tents, but when they're swanning down the runway I still feel a little envious of those cheekbones and slimline waists.

Learning from experience, one thing that's easy to fix quickly is your make-up. Back to New York last year and the temperature meant my foundation never lasted much past the first show of the day. With this in mind, I'm planning an assault on my skin so it looks good enough to go without base come September 5th (or at least good enough that when the foundation does slide off what's underneath doesn't scare anyone).

To this end, I have armed myself with the entire Eve Lom cleansing regime, after hearing it sorted a friend of a friend's adult acne recently. The instructions of which are fairly scary (seven different steps, just to apply the cleanser), but I live in hope.

The boyfriend is going jogging after work tonight so as long as the District line gets me home before nightfall (not always guaranteed), I should have time to cleanse, mask and shower again before he gets back (he doesn't react well to face masks, I tried it once and I undid two year's worth of 'I'm a low maintenance girl really' work in 30 seconds flat).

Step one on the fashion-week preparation regime is underway…

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