Giulia - Blög Störy

The go-getter transported all the way from the outskirts of Milan to settle down in her cozy apartment in South East London to pursue her dreams in a world that revolves around fashion models and casting directors.

After discovering that a route of a psychology academic wasn’t for her, life surprised her with a whirlwind of experiences from landing a job in AMCK - A top male modelling agency in London - to then be backpacking through Europe to assist fellow casting directors and finally being featured in Models.com (An official fashion registrar) as a verified casting director before a period of receiving requests as a casting director during her pursuit of solo jobs.

Giulia has been given the pleasure of working with her favorite photographer Horst Diekgerdes and many popular magazine covers including Play it by ear, ELLE UK and Z magazine cover but that’s not only what her achievements limit to!She has two exciting projects coming up and one of them involves her leading a mentoring program with @daisieapp for newbies in casting and modelling. In her next upcoming project - All Womxn Collective - she’ll be launching a full shoot production service to provide for clients with @scruffstudio.

Make sure you give her instagram a follow on @giuliawiththeg and if you want to keep up with her exciting new projects follow @giuliawiththegcasting on instagram!

1. Who are you? My name is Giulia ( with the g ;-) ) I currently live in South East London in a sunny flat and spend most of my time working in my Peckham studio, which is my creative hub.

What's your heritage?

How I got here was a succession of quite random events, I come from the outskirts of Milan and moved to the UK when I wanted to learn English at 17. Got here, couldn't understand anything anyone was saying to me, no one had told me about the English accent. Now I people don't believe me when I tell them I am Italian, coz apparently I picked up a London accent.

How did you end up in London?

I studied Psychology at uni, then decided I definitely didn't want to be an academic, always wanted to find out more about the fashion / casting / advertising industry, so I applied to work in a top male modeling agency in London called AMCK, an agency that from the start had secured exclusives and campaigns for international labels such as Prada and Givenchy, and editorials in fashion bibles such as Vogue Hommes, GQ, I-D and AnOther Man.

So here is when I got my foot in the door, started going to parties where I could meet people in the industry, luckily at this point I was 21 / 22 so I could stick out lots of hangovers. Tried to become friends with as many people as I could, photographers, stylists, MUAs, models, and finally casting directors. I would confidently say social settings is where most of the magic happens, this is where people let their hair down and you get to then see them again in professional settings you can talk about projects you mentioned 'briefly at the party'!

I then left this agency and started assisting various casting directors around Europe, pay was awful if not non-existent in the very beginning, but this is now starting to shift with more people speaking about paying for internships and work experience which I totally support. Anyway, from this I then got some solo jobs and began to receive requests as a casting director. Then in January I finally got featured on Models.com (which is the equivalent of an official fashion Register) and got verified as a Casting Director! This is the link https://models.com/people/giulia-filippelli

This being said, my parents still don't understand what I do as a job.

2. Tell me a little bit about your work. Describe the casting process:

My work focuses on both high fashion and scouting new talent, mostly on how I can positively impact something that has been so negative for so long with various size restrictions, non-existent representation for several minority groups, trying to making cultural and societal backgrounds diversity flourish in the industry. This is still very hard to do, as the final word on who will get a campaign or cover is with the client. so the process goes like this:

The client comes to you with a specific idea/concept and requests, you then speak to the photography and styling team on how to make it come alive. To do this, we work directly with modeling agencies who will tell us who can work for this specific fee and for that particular brand. Added to this, I always like to provide the client with 'streetcast' suggestions, meaning suggestions of people who are not signed to any agency. I can scout these people literally on the street, or even on socials like Tik Tok.

3. How do you view your industry post-pandemic?

The industry has become more digital and more aware of the stress induced by the usual sense of urgency that sometimes poisons a healthy & creative pace. I think this is a good thing.

4. Tell us about your previous projects. What has been your favorite projects to work on?

I recently got to be the casting director for some very cool magazine covers & got to shoot with some legendary names, my favorite being photographer Horst Diekgerdes, whom I used to fangirl about (I still do ) and he’s one of the kindest souls I met in the industry so far! I’ll attach some of the covers here:

Z magazine cover / Skarla Ali.

ELLE UK / April & August

Play it by ear / Elisa Loehr

5. What would you like to achieve in the near future?

I actually have some very exciting plans for the near future, one being a mentoring program with @daisieapp for people who want to learn more about casting and modeling, I will be leading this mentoring session and anyone can join, so keep an eye out for that!

The other project I want people to know about is this all womxn collective I’ve recently joined called Scruff Studio, we will be launching this year as a 360° creative consultancy (@fadzta + @rafireaky + myself and friends) which will mainly focus on providing clients with a full shoot production service (from concept to casting, providing streetcast talent, styling, photography, artwork and more) and also parties since so many of our friends dj, and party is what we do best give us a follow on @scruffstudio!