How to Protect Work-Life Balance in the Fashion and Beauty Industries

The Insider Advice series offers advice from leading fashion and beauty professionals, HR leaders and academics to answer topical careers questions for today’s employees and help inform and guide you in your career. Discover the latest job opportunities with 2,700+ roles on BoF Careers today.

During her 30-year career as a fashion buyer, Jude Kingston was repeatedly told she had to eat, sleep and breathe the job.

“There was this sense that, if you’re not working 16 hours a day, they’re looking at the watch, wondering what’s going on… There’s an understanding that you work as much as the job needs,” she tells BoF. After experiencing burnout, Kingston founded the Australian charity Mind Your Fashion, raising awareness about mental health challenges in fashion and other creative industries.

Her experience is far from unique. A 2025 Adobe survey of 1,000 UK working adults found that 14 percent of creative arts and design professionals work overtime at least one day a week. That figure rises to 20 percent for retail workers and 25 percent for professionals in marketing, advertising and PR.

Achieving work-life balance — finding that equilibrium of meeting professional responsibilities while sustaining personal wellbeing and private life — remains particularly challenging in fast-paced, competitive industries like fashion and beauty. Brand calendars fuel constant consumer engagement, with continuous product launches, ever-present deadlines and an expectation of perpetual newness.

In recent years, however, fashion and beauty employees have reassessed — and are increasingly reasserting — their priorities outside the office.

When BoF Careers surveyed over 1,000 fashion and beauty professionals in May 2025, “work-life balance” emerged as the most important factor when employees were assessing employers. Thirty-three percent of respondents prioritised companies that respect working hours, annual leave and paid time off, while 65 percent identified flexible working policies as the most important benefit to them — ahead of perks such as discounts, gym memberships and wellbeing services.

There’s an understanding that you work as much as the job needs.

—  Jude Kingston, founder of Mind Your Fashion.

Aaron McEwan, vice president of research and advisory for Gartner’s HR Practice, said in BoF’s What Fashion and Beauty Professionals Want From Employers report that the pandemic accelerated this shift: “[Employees] became reconnected with home and family, [which] reminded [them] of what’s actually really important.”

Work-life balance aligns with a broader post-pandemic focus on health and wellbeing. In 2024, 84 percent of US consumers said wellness was a top priority, rising to 94 percent in China, according to BoF and McKinsey & Co’s The State of Fashion 2026 report. Inevitably, this prioritisation of wellbeing, health and balance is extended to the workplace.

Yet asserting boundaries remains difficult, as well as identifying what work-life balance looks like for you and your work. Here, BoF examines the strategies fashion and beauty professionals can adopt to protect balance — and resist a culture of relentless overwork.

Understand What Work-Life Balance Means To You

Work-life balance isn’t just about working a nine-to-five, Monday to Friday, with a dedicated hour lunch break every day — it will differ from person to person, and depend on individual needs, the work at hand and time of year.

Often, achieving this will require flexibility in working hours. For example, those with young children might need to leave the office early for school pick-up, or neurodivergent employees might recognise they are more productive first thing in the morning or late at night.

Work-life balance in an industry like fashion or beauty can also mean working intense hours or a strenuous travel schedule for certain periods like fashion month or during a brand activation — followed by a sustained, uninterrupted break.

Laura Hammond, former HR executive at H&M and Aritzia in the US, suggests employees should use those moments of rush to lean into work, demonstrate competence and learn new skills, while also putting strategies in place to take care of themselves and “pull back.”

She tells BoF: “There are times we need to work longer hours to complete a project, or step outside our job description to learn skills for more senior roles. That’s how we become confident and credible in the next stage of our careers.”

There will be a different interpretation of what work-life balance looks like depending on life stages and lived experience at work — but flexibility remains critical across all of those ages.

“Flexibility [is] the number one thing Gen Z say they want,” Hebba Youssef, chief people officer at Workweek and host of the “I Hate it Here” HR podcast, previously told BoF. “Flexibility is really critical to them being able to participate in the workplace.”

However, respondents to the BoF Careers survey 2025 revealed that 68 and 69 percent of respondents in their 30s and 40s, respectively, select flexible working as their top priority for benefits, compared to 58 percent of those in their 20s.

It is important to note that hybrid working remains incompatible with many roles in the industry — from store associates to those working on production lines.

“What’s often called ‘flexibility’ just means being reachable all the time, bringing additional stress that follows you home,” says Florian Müller, a Berlin-based communication and PR professional and the founder of the "Mental Health in Fashion" campaign. “Some people will benefit from it, but who are we talking about? Probably not the factory worker.”

Speak Up and Negotiate With Confidence

Hammond believes the industry is facing a “great renegotiation”, with talent asking for clear career and salary progression from the get-go and refusing to take on more responsibilities unless they come with suitably substantial compensation.

This assertion is often associated with the younger generations entering the workforce, who have demonstrated new workplace priorities compared to their predecessors.

For example, the responsibility and resources required to manage a team lacks appeal to many, with 52 percent of Gen Z professionals saying they don’t want middle management roles, while 69 percent believe they’re too stressful with little reward, according to a 2024 survey by recruitment advisory services Robert Walters. This creates another layer of challenges for employers, who may struggle to find suitable or willing mid-level managers — especially if the compensation is lacking.

Employees want to feel heard and work on their terms. However, effectively communicating those needs and expectations with your employer is key.

If you’re in full-time employment, speak with your manager or another trusted senior leader about any misalignment of job expectations or workload pressures — displaying an awareness of what is expected of you in your job role, and what is perhaps overstepping your agreed output as per a job spec.

Within reason, so taking into consideration what the business can realistically facilitate, make suggestions for what a better work-life balance would look like for you, with a solutions-oriented approach.

For instance, these changes could be relatively small, like asking if you could include a disclaimer in your emails that state your working hours, to ensure expectations are set for when you would reply, or adjusting your start or finish time slightly to meet personal needs.

There’s no longer even that spatial gap between home and the workplace... there’s this constant connection [to work].

—  Giulia Mensitieri, doctor in social anthropology and ethnology

If career progression is important to you, you can also consider negotiating additional responsibilities as training opportunities by presenting them as a business case — tied into conversations about a promotion or pay rise when the time is right. Any increase in working hours outside of contractual obligations should be treated as a temporary set-up, and you can reasonably ask for a timeframe around what that looks like.

Should direct communication with a manager or senior leader feel unavailable to you, work with HR and people teams to discuss how else you can make those changes and give feedback. Rare Beauty, for example, has an anonymous feedback channel monitored by the people and culture team.

For those working freelance, it can also be challenging to protect regimented working hours when jobs and contracts are shorter in scope, and the promise of another pay check isn’t guaranteed.

Still, protecting working hours will be critical to avoid burnout. Communicate your boundaries early-on with your clients. Even baking those hours into your contracts, including limiting feedback rounds to ensure a timely and structured working process, is recommended.

Set Clear Boundaries Around Remote Working

The mass adoption of work-from-home policies during the pandemic blurred personal and professional workplace boundaries.

And while many businesses are pushing for employees to return to the office, hybrid and remote working practices remain popular benefits in some post-pandemic workplaces. For many employees, it gives back time spent commuting to the office, money spent on lunch, and the cost of childcare or pet sitters.

However, remote or flexible work practices also bring additional challenges to achieving work-life balance — and even those back in the office full-time are still experiencing a hangover from the normalisation of bringing work home, rather than leaving it at the office, such as responding to emails after dinner or finalising projects over the weekend

Giulia Mensitieri, a doctor in social anthropology and ethnology and author of “The Most Beautiful Job in the World: Lifting the Veil on the Fashion Industry”, says the industry still glamourises overwork. “There’s no longer even that spatial gap between home and the workplace... there’s this constant connection [to work],” she tells BoF.

When working from home, it’s important to set clear intentions for your remote and office days. For instance, home-working days might be reserved for focus, while in-office days can be prioritised for meetings that benefit from face-to-face interaction.

It’s also helpful to communicate protected hours each week to colleagues — such as blocking out time for a proper lunch break or childcare hours — to support healthy boundaries and sustain work-life balance.

Ensure Rest and Recovery

For many professionals whose work is closely tied to personal passion and ambition, resting while others continue to work diligently can feel counterintuitive. But pursuing interests outside of work, spending time with people beyond the industry, and prioritising exercise and mental rest are key to building resilience and productivity over time.

Some companies are beginning to formalise this approach. Rare Beauty employees, for example, receive dedicated paid mental health days each summer, in addition to standard holiday and sick leave.

“It’s a small but intentional way of signalling to our team that rest and recovery are as essential as the work we do,” says Elyse Cohen, chief impact officer at Rare Beauty and president of its mental health awareness organisation, Rare Impact Fund.

As an employment right, annual leave should always be protected. For instance, you should disconnect from all work communication channels on personal devices during this time. “You can’t recover without space to restore and self-care,” says Mind Your Fashion’s Kingston.

To reduce interruptions, holiday handovers should be consistent, clear and detailed, with defined escalation points for colleagues who remain at work. If boundaries continue to be crossed, you should raise the issue with your manager or HR team and agree on a plan to better protect annual leave.

If you are a freelancer, a clear out-of-office message is equally essential to avoid the “always on” trap. While stepping away can feel risky, particularly in competitive fashion and beauty industries, rest is critical to sustaining creativity and long-term performance.

Yet individual boundaries alone are not enough — lasting change depends on a broader cultural shift across the industry. “True change in fashion’s approach to mental health requires more than awareness,” says Müller. “It’s about creating environments where people feel safe to speak up and receive real support, not just temporary trends or marketing slogans. Only then can we break the cycle of neglect and stigma.”