You’re staring down the final year of your degree. Mentally, you fast
forward to the graduation ceremony as you toss your cap in the air, filled
with brio and possibility. Then you’ll be off and running, a hunter in a
crowded pack. Yes, you’ve already heard there are too many graduates for
the number of positions in the fashion industry but that truth, although
scary, doesn’t deter you. You can’t wait to be on the scent of that first
job. But as you look forward to that moment, you secretly wonder how you
can prepare. How can you stand out?
Let’s backtrack slightly. Hopefully, you laid the initial groundwork,
and enrolled in a prestigious school. “Brand name” recognition can open
doors and add credibility to your resume. A good fashion school should
offer in its curriculum the perfect blend of creativity and craft, and have
cultivated links to industry thus providing solid internship avenues as
well as opportunities to learn from both respected
professionals-turned-educators and guest lecturers. Attending the best
school might have meant you moved halfway across the country away from
everyone you knew, but it was a necessary step. Here are some online
resources for checking annual rankings for U.S. and international schools:
fashion-schools.org, Fashionista.com and BusinessofFashion.com
Waxing lyrical about your “passion for fashion” makes you immediately
irrelevant, the phrase now an empty cliché. Grit, however, is extremely
relevant in today’s industry. It’s an old-fashion word that has been pulled
out of a trunk and dusted off for the Millennial generation. It cannot be
taught at school, especially in the current education system
which tends to coddle students and can have educators bowing to the
manipulations of parents on one hand and corporate on the other. But
arguably, a graduate with a C average who possesses grit has more going for
them than an A student with none. Grit is quietly dynamic, not obnoxiously
confident. It is stealthy and focused; it is not entitled and offers little
in the way of the instant gratification associated with the Instagram
generation. Cultivate this elusive quality early and it can shape your
entire career.
Learn to draw. Although many fashion jobs have minimized hand drawing in
favor of digital illustration especially in mass market companies, there
isn’t a substitute for a beautiful sketch to evoke the dream of fashion,
the aspiration of beauty that can get lost in the daily clamor for
commercial gain. Illustration is the only language that can truly capture
the unique creativity that lives inside your head. Employers hope to see a
glimpse of that. On the job, a techpack will reduce your vision to a
practical system of numbers and technical terminology, but in your
portfolio an evocative sketch can elevate your ideas to heaven-spun
vestments that will be remembered.
Learn to technically spec your garments thoroughly. Understand the
power of detail and analyze garment construction obsessively: the
finishings, the closures, the seam placement, the interior surprises.
Students generally ignore the humble attributes of garments in favor of the
grand gesture, the sweeping dramatic runway statement. Execution of your
vision, or more importantly, someone else’s, depends on an understanding of
the minutiae that cannot be left to chance.
Fashion programs are designed to mimic as effectively as possible the
demands of working within a fashion company. Yet know that working in the
fashion industry is nothing like school. Your learning curve will be steep
in the first few years after graduation. No one cares about your GPA
anymore. Listen, observe, aim to impress, and adapt smoothly to new ways of
doing things, no matter how you were taught.
Do an internship during the summer vacation before final year; take
another if you can during the Fall semester. And be aware, upon graduation
you may have to accept yet another as entry level jobs are being
increasingly filled by interns, leaving the earning pool shallow.
Unfortunately it is commonplace that these will be unpaid. On the bright
side, you will be immersed in the culture of a fashion company observing
first hand the good, the bad, and the ugly of day-to-day operations.
What you learn as an intern will be invaluable, although difficult to
quantify so you might not even notice it is happening. Try to sample the
environment of different levels of the marketplace (e.g. mass market
retailer; small contemporary brand; designer label) so that you can begin
to refine your understanding of where you fit. Start to tailor your own
career by not relying on your school to get you the perfect internship.
Strike out on your own, locate the name of the head of HR and contact them.
Prove yourself early and when an opening comes up, you’ll be
considered––and if you’re overlooked, ask politely to be considered. When
you do gain a paid position, the habits and vocabulary you’ve picked up
during your internships will make them wonder how they managed without you.
Which brings me to another point: your employer won’t train you. Many tend
to expect assistants to pick everything up overnight by osmosis.
Internships, therefore, might be all the training you’ll get.
This next guideline is becoming harder for graduates to enact as they
leave school burdened with debt and under such heavy competition for jobs.
All the same, it bears including: choose your first position wisely. Make
sure it’s the area of the market in which you see yourself working five
years from now. Don’t apply to Macy’s (even though they do pay well, and
they pay their interns too) if you dream one day to make it to Valentino.
Recognize that in the Venn diagram Valentino and Macy’s don’t touch. There
is minimal trickle up effect in the industry: luxury companies will
exclusively hire designers experienced in creating silhouettes, sourcing
fabrics and understanding clients associated with the luxury market; mass
market companies, while curious about the high-end allure of a resume that
they might even invite that designer in for interview, will invariably opt
to hire a designer used to the pace of moving units, skilled in designing
for a particular demographic, and versed in the issues of price point.
It’s difficult for students fresh out of the gate and desperate to nail
down employment to even notice this fork in the road as they come upon it
yet those early choices can determine the future of their career. This is
particularly important if you hope to work in Europe one day, which many
students do. You will need the legal documents to work overseas which is an
extra hurdle in the way of getting hired. An Italian design house, for
example, will have no interest in sponsoring a work visa for a visa for a
designer whose experience does not match their aesthetic or address the
same level of the market.
Cluelessness in never adorable. Research the company you’re interviewing
for and communicate enthusiasm and knowledge about their business, product,
customer. The aura that you just want a job–-any job will do––will not get
you hired. In your final year of school, you should already be networking
on LinkedIn, reading FashionUnited.com, the Business of Fashion, WWD and
other trade journals, noting names of head designers at your favorite
companies, strategizing a plan of attack. All those internship connections
you made can lead to other connections. Research fashion recruiters; the
company you wish to work for might be one of their clients. Recruiters,
like schools, are not all the same. Some (but not all) have a solid
reputation, often with international offices, and a high rate of success
placing candidates. Some only work with senior level designers and won’t
want to meet with you so early in your career. Some specialize in luxury,
others in mass market. Only through research can you begin to understand
which ones might best be suited to place you.
Finally, you might leave school with the highest grade point average, a
beautiful portfolio, professional resume, and solid strategy for finding
the job of your dreams, and still suffer a hopeless run of rejections and
disappointments. One designer friend offers this simple addition to the
above list: You have to be in the right place at the right time. That’s
where grit comes in. You must bounce back after every blow and continue to
show up.
By contributing guest editor Jackie Mallon, who is on the teaching
faculty of several NYC fashion programmes and is the author of Silk for the
Feed Dogs, a novel set in the international fashion industry.
All images: Jackie Mallon
During the month of August FashionUnited will focus on Work in Fashion. For
all reads on on the theme, click .