"Just because you don’t get into sixth form it doesn’t mean it’s the end. It doesn’t mean you can’t do what you want to do. Excuse my language, but screw them. Get up and do something for yourself.”
At 16, Talia Collis was turned down by JFS for her sixth form studies because her GCSE grades did not meet the school’s minimum requirements.
Six years on, she is an associate producer for Vogue magazine in New York City, working round the clock creating avant-garde videos for the fashion giant in its quest to dominate the online market.
Her message: don’t allow sometimes rigid academic norms to curtail your ambitions. All you need, she says, are passion, hard graft and a positive attitude.
Talia, originally from Hendon, found the world of fashion after a love of theatre and its “performance aspects” morphed into an obsession with photography and creating “fantastical, dream-like” images.
As a teenager she was known at JFS as “that little photographer”. Equipped with her trusty camera, she would approach “girls I thought were pretty” in the school halls, shooting them and uploading the results to Facebook, where they caught the eye of her peers.
“Someone messaged me on Instagram the other day — she wasn’t someone I went to school with but someone I photographed when I was at JFS,” she said.
“She said something like, ‘I’m so amazed for you that you’ve done something you’re passionate about, and you’ve made something out of your hobby’.
In a typical working week Collis will find talent and directors for shoots and in helping to manage the logistics of each projects, she is charged with stretching budgets far enough to meet her magazine’s lofty artistic ambitions.
As a producer, she has to be “the first one on set and the last one to leave”, which can sometimes mean working from 6am until 10pm.
She frequently works with director Steven Klein, famed for his collaborations with Lady Gaga and Madonna.
“It’s a fun job but it’s definitely not an easy job,” she said. “Everything can be quite complicated and stressful and I do have a lot of responsibilities.
“With every print edition we have, we have to make a cover video. We come up with some crazy artistic concepts and I have to execute that.”
After being turned away by JFS, she enrolled at the private Brampton College in Hendon, later winning an unconditional offer to study at the prestigious Parsons School of Design in New York on the strength of her photography.
In the middle of her degree, she spent a year in Paris at the famed Studio Pin-Up, where she made the contacts who would recommend her to Vogue.
Working alongside her studies meant sacrificing the all-consuming social life typically associated with studentdom.
“At the end of the day, I wasn’t into the idea of just going out and partying and getting drunk and having nothing to show for it at the end of four years,” she said.
“I wanted to come out with some sort of direction in my career, which is why I worked so hard.
“I would always see photos of my friends going out and I’d sometimes feel I was missing out or that I was with them.
“But I was also in New York City and making new friends. There was so much for me to do here.
“I knew I had to make things happen quickly and if you want to be successful in this industry it takes years. So why not start as soon as possible?”
After collecting her GCSEs, the results of which were not a million miles from the six Bs demanded, it was unceremoniously broken to her that she hadn’t cut the mustard.
“JFS is a good school. I don’t think it’s a bad school,” she says. “What I felt was there were so many gifted people who never really developed to their full potential because it wasn’t obvious to the teachers, who were over-worked.
“The teachers were looking for that in-the-box type of student. The one who was good at science, maths, geography — and I was never one of those.
“I always knew they knew who I was because I had a personality and I was sharp but I wasn’t academically sharp. In a large school environment, if you don’t tick the box you’re not really looked after.”
Does she think the Jewish community, famed for its countless Nobel Prize winners, is too wedded to the “traditional” academic disciplines?
“I do think so,” she says. “There are other routes to get to where you want to get to.
“It’s not just about being a lawyer or a doctor.
“Technology has created so many different paths — I know so many people who work for amazing start-ups.
“Students shouldn’t feel like they’re pigeon-holed in an inflexible system. They should have the resources to maximise their potential — students like me who have so much potential but don’t fit into any academic boxes.
“It took me a long time to understand that.”
