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The best way to sneak into a fashion show is to be confident and friendly — at least according to Dan Bassini, who has been photographing New York Fashion Week for almost a decade, without being on the guest lists.
You might catch the New Jersey-based photographer on the street taking celebrity portraits of the likes of Heidi Klum, Doja Cat or Dove Cameron, but he also makes his way inside shows, snapping front-row pictures despite being unaccredited — which is how this writer met him, at an Elena Velez runway last year. Once, he even managed to snag a spot behind the familiar sleek bob of Anna Wintour at a Coach show.
“I’ve never really broken the law to go in — I’ve never climbed in a bathroom window,” he joked in a video call. Though he has found the odd side door, left open and unmonitored, or he gauges the flow of the crowd at the door and blends himself into a VIP group.
“I probably look like the help in most situations, but I use being as non-descript as possible to get in there,” he added, noting the neutral Carhartt t-shirt he often wears. “I’m never going to be mistaken for some high-fashion influencer.”
Occasionally, Bassini tries his luck at the door with a loose story, such as a manager who forgot to add him to the list. That was how he got into a Netflix party for the reality show “Next in Fashion” after meeting and photographing its co-host, Alexa Chung, outside. Bassini has observed the circuit of influencers and hopefuls who try a more demanding don’t-you-know-who-I-am approach, only to see them get turned away unceremoniously each time.
“Kindness goes so much further than arrogance in these situations,” he noted.
Since 2017, Bassini has published a selection of his photos in his ongoing zine series “No Invite,” with the most recent, No. 12, publishing earlier this summer with an accompanying gallery exhibition in New York’s SoHo neighborhood. The intimacy of his quick, typically posed captures stands apart from the images on the wires during each fashion season. Bassini’s vibrant 35mm film portraits often feel as if he’s in conversation with his subjects, or saying goodbye to a friend, a camera lens that celebrities seem to engage with rather than avoid.
Sometimes, that’s because he has been chatting them up, often about photography. Bassini totes around point-and-shoot cameras, lately a Yashica T4 or Contax T2, that are compact enough to go unnoticed in his pocket but draw a nostalgic reaction from models and actors. The actor and director Jemima Kirke once asked him how to fix her Polaroid camera while waiting for her car outside of a Puppets and Puppets show, he recounted, while Klum waxed poetic with him about the feeling of developing film in a lab.
During a Carolina Herrera show in 2023 inside The Plaza Hotel (a venue that Bassini noted has always proved easy to infiltrate), the actor Melissa Barrera pulled him aside when she was done with an interview, he said.
“I’m like, ‘Am I in trouble? What’s going on here?’” he recalled. “And she goes, ‘I need to know where I can get my film developed in New York.’”
Today, Bassini travels alongside a crew of fellow photographers who collect information about each show; some of them from fashion week assignments or connections within the industry. They keep information flowing across group chats and spreadsheets, and Bassini enjoys the camaraderie of it all — though he’s known to disappear at any moment if he spots a way to get inside, he said.
But during his first attempt to photograph New York Fashion Week on a wintery day in 2016, he had no connections. At the time, most shows were hosted in Skylight Clarkson Square by the West Side Highway, unlike the official schedule’s decentralized sprawl across various sites today.
“I was walking around Soho, asking people where fashion week was. It was embarrassing, and it was so cold,” he said. Directed toward the main venue, he went to the wrong side of the building and soon gave up.
“If I had just gone around it, I would have found it, but who knows what I would have done if I did,” he said.
The following September, while visiting the Whitney Museum of American Art, he happened to run into a New York Fashion Week party and his interest was renewed when he began taking street-style photos of attendees. His real breakthrough, came, however, when he got a lead on the location of Kanye West’s (now known as Ye) show for Yeezy Season 5 at Pier 59 the following year; he snapped the incoming fashionable guests, including the former Victoria’s Secret model Georgia Fowler, whose portrait was the cover of his first volume of “No Invite.”
“It all made sense from there,” he said.
Nowadays, Bassini’s favorite show to sneak into has become Eckhaus Latta, the contemporary fashion label known for its gender-neutral appeal — with its 10th anniversary show at the abandoned, dilapidated Essex Street Market being among the highlights. To date, he has yet to be kicked out of any show, he claims, though once he was caught by a publicist who had denied him entry to a Puppets and Puppets show. When she spotted him photographing first looks inside, he had to evade her until the show began.
And, despite the number of celebrities Bassini has photographed over the years, he said he doesn’t take portraits based on fame, but instead on their attitude and style. Unnamed guests fill his pages, too, while outtakes of Zendaya or Natasha Lyonne didn’t quite make the cut. He is flattered, though, when he finds out that his subjects are using his portraits as their social media profile pictures. Such was the case with Alexa Chung he said, who used his portrait of her on Instagram for years.
However, “she never did hit me with the follow back,” he said, laughing.