The designer Zuzana Lešák Černá approached me herself: a Christmas event at her Brno boutique, with a fashion show as part of the evening. The brief came in a single message, and I've remembered it ever since:
I'll leave it entirely up to you, so long as it's beautiful and interesting and evokes the Christmas mood in an artistic way.
A free hand, from someone who works to the detail herself. Which is lovely and terrifying in equal measure.
I took it literally. Christmas has its own colours: red, spruce, silver. So I let them arrive through the food and the fruit rather than through extra decoration. Pomegranates, persimmon, clementines and redcurrants on the table. Instead of a cake, a little tree built from raspberries, blueberries, cranberries and grapes, threaded with rosemary and tied with a bow. The charcuterie went into a wreath, not onto a board.
A fashion show dictates the format more than anything else. Nobody sits down to a plate during one. Guests stand, hold a glass, and are looking somewhere other than at the food. So everything had to work in one hand: cups, canapés, boxes, skewers. Nothing that could crumble onto a boutique floor, nothing that needed cutlery.
The table stood between the rails holding the collection. That is the strictest test I know: the food mustn't look like catering there, it has to look like part of the window display.
