Fashion Week: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Impact on Health and Habits

If fashion was a sport, Fashion Week—or month, if we’re being scientific about it—would be its Super Bowl. Going to the collections is fun. For many of us, it’s a dream come true. But it’s also a lot of work, and the days are long. (Dream jobs are still jobs, folks!) For context, I spend the day, from the first time slot at 9AM to the last one at 9PM, going from show to show, and try to find pockets of time in between or afterwards to report on them.

I wouldn’t change it for the world, but, as they say, the body keeps the score. After London Fashion Week in February, it dawned on me that the shows are when most of my good habits are broken. I consider myself a decently healthy person: I work out often, generally get my six-to-eight hours of sleep, and have, over time, learned to manage my stress. But during Fashion Week most of that goes out the window—when you’re working long days, something’s gotta give.

I thought it would be informative to track how exactly Fashion Week affects my habits and overall health. I didn’t join my colleagues for the European leg of the month, but I did spend a week in China near the end of March at Shanghai Fashion Week. As a fun little experiment, I decided to use an Oura ring—the chic, tech-y “smart” apparatus that tracks sleep, wellness, and physical activity—to see what Fashion Week does to me and my body. Here’s what I learned.

One of the most interesting things that Oura tracks is your “Readiness” score. This looks at your body metrics and your activity levels to determine how prepared you are to take on a day’s worth of stressors. As a general rule with Oura, anything over 70 is optimal and 85 and above is excellent. My overall readiness for the month was a lousy 64. Oops. This means that I wasn’t performing at an optimal level. That said, my average for the four weeks between NYFW and SHFW was a solid 75.75. The week of shows I spent in China averaged a 49—a 41 on the day I got there and a 57 by the time I left.

Between the 20-ish hour trip, the jet lag, a little cold I caught on the plane, and the deadlines I had to meet, things were bumpy. So bumpy that I got a 27 on my first full day in Shanghai—despite a fun showroom appointment with Sui Tang and a great show by Mary-Kate Olsen. But things got better towards the end. Don’t they always? You’d guess that your activity increases during Fashion Week. After all, you’re running around from show to show and to appointments in between, and you’re working longer hours.

But you’re also sitting and waiting around quite a bit, and, in my case, missing out on daily workouts or cutting them short. My average Activity score for the month was a sweet 79. Work. Still, my activity decreased during the week of Shanghai. My score averaged to an 84.5 the weeks prior (the missing .5 will haunt me), but lowered to a 70 the week of the shows. I wish I could say I’ll do better to increase my step count or squeeze in better workouts next season, but speaking quite frankly, I’m usually too tired during show season to ask my body to do more.

What I can do is join my good friend and show-going companion, Blake Abbie on more bike rides to commute to shows as opposed to sitting in traffic.

When it comes to Fashion Week, my colleagues and I turn into night owls. Not because we’re going to all those glamorous after-parties (I usually allow myself just one, in New York it was a joint gathering by my good friends Henry Holland and Rachel Scott, and in Shanghai it was Marset’s clubby after party), but because that’s when we have some time to catch up on work.

If you’re a Vogue Runway reader—which you must be if you’ve made it here—then you know that we publish our reviews the day of the show. (That’s the goal, at least.) I usually try to write these on my phone in between shows or while I wait for the next one to start, but the bulk of it gets done at night. In Shanghai, the last show is at 9PM or 9:30PM, which means that the writing starts at around 11PM.

My average Sleep score for the month was…63, and I slept an average of five-and-a-half hours each night. I did sleep six hours-and-56 minutes on average the week prior to SHFW. I was feeling good. But the week of collections my average was four-and-a-half hours. Since there’s shows and appointments to get to each morning, and business to tend to with the office in New York before they go to bed, there’s not a lot of room for sleeping in after a late night.

Here’s the big one. Oura also tracks stress, and, as you can imagine, between deadlines and tight schedules (the shows actually start on time in Shanghai unlike everywhere else), Fashion Week is a stressor. The ring described April 1st, my last day in Shanghai and the only one without shows, which I spent with friends walking around the city, as a “restorative day.” I was stressed for a total of 45 minutes that day, the spike coming when I arrived at the airport and went through security and immigration.

But get this: During SHFW, I spent an average of eight hours-and-42 minutes a day stressed. Damn. The most stressful day—the first one—I spent a total of 13 hours and 45 minutes stressed. The second highest, with a solid 10 hours, was the second day, which was my busiest. Lengthy periods of acute or chronic stress like the one I experienced here can lead to an increase in cortisol levels, which in turn can cause a range of symptoms, including weight gain, acne, and fatigue.

Oura measures stress based on biometric data points including heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), motion, and body temperature. It qualifies your stress level between Restored (lowest), Relaxed, Engaged, and Stressed (highest). In my case, my graph shows that I spent all of that time stressed, which took a heavy toll on my Readiness and prompted a suggestion that I find time to recover.

Mari Karsikas, PhD, Head of Product Science at Oura, explains that stress can also come from things that are “good,” like socializing, so looking at your stress level is important to understand when you need to step back and look for some true down time. This is why April 1st qualified as restorative—I had time to chill.

One of my highest stress points of the week, in case you were curious, was when I was stuck in traffic and late to a show I was excited about. It was the designer’s Sui Tang’s first time on the runway since July of 2022. I don’t speak Mandarin, and my cab driver’s Alipay wasn’t working and I was out of cash. It’s fine, we figured it out. But then I couldn’t find the location, which made me even later.

Shoutout to my friend Blake for rescuing me, and to the PR team for waiting for me and my fellow stragglers. (I wasn’t alone!) In the end, I was only 12 minutes tardy, but no one likes to be the last one in.

The takeaway: I love my body, and my body clearly loves me, given how much it puts up with. Fashion Week is a great time, and I love my job, but I could be better at giving myself what I need in order to make this a bit more sustainable. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, as my dad often tells me.