I Ate Like a Fashion Editor for a Day, and How Do You Even Do This Shit

By Tom Ley | September 10, 2018 | 4:20pm

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I Ate Like a Fashion Editor for a Day, and How Do You Even Do This Shit

This week, Deadspin and Jezebel swap beats to celebrate America’s most dangerous and controversial pastimes: football and fashion, two sports that have far more in common than you think.

Eating like a fashion editor during Fashion Week felt like it was going to be easy, mostly because I wouldn’t have to make much food. The first Google result for “fashion week food diary” is this 2007 New York Magazine piece in which former Elle editor Anne Slowey recounts what she ate during Fashion Week, and what she ate was a lot of water. As a person who regularly goes entire work days without eating much more than a packet of trail mix and who also does not like to put a ton of effort into stunt blogs, this seemed like slam dunk. But then Pizza Day happened.

7:30 a.m.

What Anne Ate:

Two 1,000-mg. Emergen-C with seven mineral ascorbates and 32 mineral complexes, one ounce of Super KMH, Mona Vie (berry extract), aloe juice, chlorophyll, two Nature’s Way Fenu-Thyme, one advance natural FloroMax, three Wellness Formula tablets, twenty drops Super Lysine Plus, two Theraveda Usha daytime stress formula tablets.

Right, so I don’t know what any of that stuff is and honestly it all sounds pretty expensive and difficult to acquire. Instead of spending 45 minutes at Whole Foods trying to track all this stuff down, I take one Emergen-C packet and call it good. The Emergen-C is coconut flavored, which tastes a lot better than you might expect.

10:30 a.m.

What Anne Ate:

Milanese eggs and iced skim latte.

I’m disappointed to discover how lame of a dish something with the name “Milanese eggs” actually is. It’s just eggs plopped on some asparagus! That’s boring! It should be called “eggs on some plants.” It takes me a few minutes to prepare the dish in my thimble-sized kitchen, at which point I turn my attention to the iced latte.

Check this out: I have a damn espresso machine in my damn apartment. It was a wedding gift from my brother, mother, aunt, and sister-in-law, and it is my most prized possession. It has a grinder and a steam wand attached to it. I love it. I would die for it. I look at it the way aging, sun-scorched Tucson residents look at their Teslas. I put some milk in a glass with a big ice cube in it, and then I dump a perfectly and exquisitely extracted double shot of espresso into that bad boy. Time to eat:

I’m not very good at eggs! It tastes fine.

2:00 p.m.

What Anne Ate:

Bottle of water and glass of white wine.

I don’t know how the hell Anne made it from 10:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. without consuming anything at all, but things have already gone off the rails for me. As I said before, I thought this was going to be a relatively easy task to complete because my workday eating schedule usually plays out in one of two ways: I eat absolutely nothing all day and then have a massive, disgusting lunch around 3:00 p.m., or I eat absolutely nothing all day and then have a trail mix packet and a bowl of cereal at around 3:00 p.m. Given that this day came with the boost of a real-ass breakfast at 10:30 a.m., I figured I’d fly through my water-and-wine lunch without issue. Everything goes to shit around 12:30 p.m., though, when the free pizza arrives.

We get free lunch at the office every Wednesday, which I completely forgot about when I picked this day to have an all-water diet. I am suddenly surrounded and beset by the delicious aromas of pizza, and even the most deranged appetite is not immune to the hunger pangs induced by such smells. It’s been just over two hours since I had the one substantial meal I am allowed to eat today and I am starving. I want that pizza so bad that I’m considering just giving up on this whole dumb food diary and devouring two pieces in secret, possibly in the bathroom.

Also, I fucking forgot to have my glass of white wine.

3:00 p.m.

What Anne Ate:

Water

Having a water.

Still feeling very hungry. Still not remembering to drink the white wine I purchased and brought to work this morning, possibly because the wine is in the fridge which is near the pizza, and I do not want to see that shit.

Also getting kind of upset that I can’t have a cup of coffee. I’ve never considered myself to be one of those “gotta have my Java!” people, but I really do enjoy having access to it at work. Partly because it provides an excuse to get up from my desk and mosey to another part of the office where the coffee is kept, and partly because nothing makes me feel like I’m Thinking Really Hard About Work quite like furrowing my brow, staring at my computer screen, and taking a big, hearty sip of bean juice. Is watching Howard The Alien clips all day a real job? It is if I’ve got a stern look on my face and a hot mug in my mitt.

I’m getting pretty sleepy.

4:00 p.m.

What Anne Ate:

Water

Having another water.

Also finally remembering that I was supposed to drink a glass of wine two hours ago, and dashing downstairs to the office kitchen to fetch my wine.

Still much hungrier than I’d like to be, I put what my colleague David Roth calls a “restaurant pour” of white wine into a plastic cup and begin sipping away dutifully. I’m determined not to get all spun out on one damn glass of white wine, partly because that would be embarrassing and partly because I don’t want it to seem like I’m getting performatively buzzed for the sake of this food diary. But the pizza-induced hunger has not subsided, and I am fearful, my friends.

5:00 p.m.

What Anne Ate:

Water

Having a water.

Feeling, unfortunately, pretty buzzed. This is not one of those fun Wine Mom buzzes, but the kind that comes on all too quickly due to a lack of cushioning in the stomach, and makes you feel like there substantial balloons attached to various parts of your body that are all pulling you in different directions. I know this will pass in less than an hour, but for now I am sitting at my desk feeling somewhat panicked over how light my head feels and how little I am able to focus on work.

Also, I’m very sleepy. I guess I really do gotta have my java.

6:00 p.m.

What Anne Ate:

Water

Am not having a water.

I leave the office right at six and manage to grab a seat on the train. I’m too hungry and tired to read my book so I consider dozing off a bit. But I happen to live in a neighborhood that is heavily populated by 22-year-old whites who travel in packs of three to five and are incapable of speaking to each other without screaming, and three such people are standing very close to me on this train. Instead of sleeping for a few minutes, I spend the ride thinking (not for the first or last time this week) that I should probably find a new neighborhood to live in.

7:00 p.m.

What Anne Ate:

Water

Having a water.

It is laundry night, which means that I have to do laundry tonight. Let me hit you with a lil’ lifehack: If you are a clown like me who does their laundry in a laundromat, pick one that is close to a bar so that you can go get a little tipsy while you wait for the washing and drying. I’m fortunate enough to live near a laundromat that is two doors down from a decent bar, and laundry night is actually pretty fun because of it. Chapter two of my forthcoming relationship advice book will be called “What If Laundry Night Was… Date Night? How Finding Fun In The Mundane Can Strengthen Your Bonds.”

8:30 p.m.

What Anne Ate:

Two glasses of red wine, Camembert and crackers, three olives.

I get two glasses of honestly pretty bad red wine at the bar, and they treat me much better than this afternoon’s glass of white. I get buzzed, but at this point I think I have caught a second wind of some sort and don’t feel nearly as tired or hungry or grumpy as I did a few hours ago. While we wait for our clothes to be done my wife and I talk about work, other bullshit, the fact that “boneless buffalo wings” is a bit of a misnomer and that they should be called “short tendies” or “chicken nubs,” and also about how the three Lord Of The Rings movies do a fantastic job of communicating the trauma experienced by the characters without having to resort to gruesome on-screen violence.

We get home and I don’t even wait to fold my clothes before ripping into my cheese and cracker and olive dinner. I am highly disappointed in Anne for being so specific about her olive intake, because one thing I simply love to do is eat half a jar of olives while standing in the cold glow of the refrigerator. I eat the three olives first, and then start in on the cheese, which is a big slice of brie because I could not find any camembert at the store.

I eat the entire goddamn wedge of cheese.

It was apparently 200 grams worth of cheese? Seems like a lot.

11:30 p.m.

What Anne Ate:

Repeat Fenu-Thyme, Wellness Formula tablets, and add Theraveda Nisha nighttime stress formula.

I’m asleep.