There’s a moment backstage at a fashion show when the noise suddenly becomes choreography. Garment bags are being moved, radios crackle with instructions, guests are still finding their seats, and teams are checking the smallest details against an unforgiving clock. Then the lights change, the room goes quiet, and the runway begins.
At SABYASACHI’s SS27 show, I experienced that transformation from behind the scenes.Â
After an 18-year absence from New York Fashion Week, the Kolkata-based designer returned with “Bengal Byzantine Broadway”, a 72-look collection bringing together Indian craftsmanship and Americana.
Through my internship at KCD Worldwide, I worked across backstage operations, seating, and guest coordination. From outside, these roles can sound straightforward. In reality, they require constant awareness. A guest arriving late, a seating adjustment, or a change in timing can ripple through an entire production. Backstage, communication is everything, knowing where people need to be, when they need to be there, and what needs to happen next.
One particularly memorable moment came during guest check-in, when another intern and I had the opportunity to check in Chloé Malle, Editor of American Vogue, at the show. Moments like that made the scale of fashion week feel tangible. People whose names and bylines I had encountered through fashion media were suddenly arriving in front of us, and our role was to make sure their experience was seamless.
There’s also an unusual intimacy to watching a runway from this side. Models move through the space with remarkable calm, while behind them teams are constantly resetting, communicating, and preparing for the next look. The polished photographs that appear online later conceal an enormous amount of movement.
And then came the moment everyone had been building toward.
Christy Turlington opened the show in head-to-toe denim, layered with SABYASACHI High Jewellery created in collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Her entrance felt particularly fitting for a collection that placed American iconography alongside SABYASACHI’s intricate craftsmanship. Denim plaid shirting, cowboy hats, embroidery handwork, and statement jewellery moved down the runway in a collision of cultures and references.
But my strongest memory of the show isn’t a single look.
It’s the backstage rhythm, the quick conversations, the last-minute checks, the movement of guests, the careful coordination between teams, and the realization that every seemingly effortless runway moment has been meticulously constructed.
Fashion is often presented as an image of perfection.
Backstage, I saw the work behind it.
And perhaps that is where the real beauty of fashion week lives, in hundreds of people moving at once, so that for a few minutes, nobody in the audience sees the chaos at all.