How to Look After Yourself Through Fashion Week Season

For the designers, stylists, PRs, dressers and production teams who make the shows happen, fashion week is less a week than a season. London rolls into Milan and then Paris, call times start before dawn, and the evenings fill up with launches, dinners and after-parties that somehow still count as work. Nobody gets through it without feeling tired. The goal is to finish the season tired and still in one piece.

Notice When the Parties Stop Being Fun

Drinks and late nights come with the territory, and for most people a heavy fortnight is followed by a quieter month and a few more early nights than usual. Sometimes the pattern does not reset, though. A couple of glasses at a launch turn into a bottle most evenings, or something stronger gets passed round at an after-party and starts appearing on ordinary weekends too. 

Help for that is more varied than many people realise. A GP is a good first conversation, and treatment now exists for almost any substance, from alcohol detox to specialist programmes such as PCP Rehab for phencyclidine. Noticing when partying has slipped into a habit, and knowing support is easy to find, makes it far simpler to act early. 

(London Fashion Week backstage by Chris Daw)

Eat Before the Show

Backstage catering tends to run on crisps, sweets, pastries and very strong coffee. Fine as a backup, poor as a plan. Hair and make-up can start at six in the morning, and by the time the last model walks, plenty of people realise they have eaten nothing but a croissant and half a protein bar.

Packing proper food changes the whole day. A pot of overnight oats, a couple of bananas, a box of nuts and a sandwich take up very little room in a kit bag. A refillable water bottle matters even more, because venues are hot, the lights are hotter, and dehydration makes everything from headaches to short tempers worse.

Treat Sleep as Part of the Job

The fear of missing the one party where the right buyer or editor happens to be is real, especially for a designer showing at London Fashion Week for the first time. In practice, the conversations that lead anywhere usually happen at a handful of events, and most of those wind down earlier than people expect.

Picking one or two evenings that matter for the business and going home after the others is a perfectly professional choice. Staying for an hour, speaking to the people worth speaking to and leaving before midnight is rarely noticed by anyone. Turning up to a client fitting at nine the next morning looking grey is.

Pace the Drinking

A free bar is generous and also a bit of a trap. It is easy to lose count when glasses are topped up constantly and nobody is handing over a card. Alternating each drink with water or a soft drink is an old trick that still works, as is holding a glass of something sparkling and non-alcoholic so the waiting staff stop offering.

It also helps to decide on a rough limit before arriving. Once the music is loud and the champagne is flowing, nobody makes careful decisions on the spot.

Look After Feet and Back

Dressers, runners and production crews can spend fourteen hours standing, crouching and lifting. Steamers, rails and boxes of accessories weigh more by the end of the day than they did at the start. Comfortable trainers in the bag, even when something smarter is needed front of house, make a noticeable difference. So does asking for a hand with heavy rails instead of being a hero.

Keep a Foot Outside Fashion

During show season the industry can start to feel like the entire world. Everyone talks about the same collections and the same gossip. Keeping in touch with friends who could not care less about hemlines is surprisingly grounding. A phone call with someone who wants to talk about anything else, or an evening spent cooking at home, can reset a lot.

Conversations about mental health in the fashion industry have become far more open in recent years, and that openness is useful here. Telling a colleague, “I’m running on empty this week,” is no longer the confession it once was.

Plan for the Comedown

The days after the final show are often harder than the shows themselves. Adrenaline drops away, sleep debt catches up, and a slump in mood is very common. Booking a day off straight after the season, with nothing scheduled, gives the body a chance to recover.

If the low mood hangs around for more than a couple of weeks, or if drinking or drug use carries on long after the parties have ended, that is worth raising with a GP. Next season’s call times will come round soon enough.

Top image: London Fashion Week Paul Costelloe by JoJo Iles