When a photographer tells you they're heading to Paris for fashion week, you give them a brief.

Friend of the house and renowned fashion photographer Liam Lawell told us he was in Paris for fashion week, so naturally, we gave him a brief to shoot the part filled with flavour. No matter the taste preference.

Find what Paris looks like during fashion week when you point the camera at the thing everyone is carrying rather than the thing everyone is wearing. The part that keeps the whole weekend moving.

What he came back with today stopped us mid pour.

Fashion week pulls the same world into Paris every season and it moves at a pace that leaves very little room for anything that isn't on the schedule. The stylist fitting a collection at 7am has the same energy as the creative director still in meetings at midnight and somewhere between the two of them and everyone else operating at that same sustained intensity, the city's coffee culture becomes the one thing that doesn't have a call time or a dress code attached to it.

Liam's brief was to find that thread and follow it. What fashion week actually feels like from street level, not the front row version but the pavement version, the cup in the hand that tells you more about someone's week than anything they're wearing. 

Every image carries the weight of a weekend that moves too fast to sit with anything for long and somehow the coffee is always there in the middle of it, completely indifferent to whose show is next. 

Each shot tells a story about the weekend that no show review ever could, about the pace and the tiredness and the need for something familiar in a week that offers very little of it.

The espresso is always on in here and Paris just reminded us what it's for.

Shot of the good stuff.