The detachment of fashion schools.
The artistic awakening that comes after conversations with fashion design students is one of a kind. For anyone with a non-creative background, those chats about school projects, design prototypes and foolish inspirations taste like a multi-flavoured heady drink. When they reveal the meanders of their phone galleries to show the concrete experiments of those abstract ideas, that’s the best moment.
But after the enthusiasm that animates the first drinks, an aftertaste of blurry disillusion mixed with an aroma of pale frustration might pervade the tone of the conversation. A sort of disconfirmation might appear. The same that an Italian can feel while sipping filtered coffee, after years of espresso.
Maison Martin Margiela studio and atalier.
No matter the discipline, the future frightens students all around the world. But the risky nature of artistic careers makes the ramp way more uphill for fashion design students, and for all the creative kids as well. And since the future is also about “how to survive?”, fashion schools have not been completely honest while selling the dream, particularly after decades of elevation of the status of fashion designers as narcissist celebrities.
Even though some dedicated professors (i.e., masters of dress) try to craft brilliant talents, driving the aspiring designers into the real handmade process of cutting and sewing, fashion schools tend to forget (or deliberately omit) that creativity itself does not assure students to establish any kind of financial stability in the future. Many students have no clue about how to start their own label, how to empower their ideas, how to defend their intellectual and artistic properties, namely, how to make money from their creative genius. The gaps of the educational system of fashion better outline its ephemeral detachment.
Microeconomics say…
According to several fashion journalists, in the last decade there has been an overproduction of fashion degrees. Founder and editor of independent fashion magazine StyleZeitgeist, Eugene Rabkin stated that “there are simply not enough jobs for everyone”. Hence, this oversupply of young fashion designers is not capable of finding (or making) a symmetrical demand. Following microeconomics principles, if the offer is too high, prices go down. That’s the way.
But fashion schools have been clever enough to turn this situation upside down. As fashion design is a matter of learning-by-doing, and creative youngsters know how to be very dedicated and close-knit without caution, fashion schools found a stunning ploy to hire design students, to give them a job position, without paying them. That’s the gist of the so-called unpaid internship. This way, the market obtains the creative inputs of young talents during one of the most thrilling and fruitful periods of their careers, for free. To understand this unhealthy practice in its entirety is to seize that its genuine features are far less than the paradoxes that make internships as legitimate exploitation contracts. And no, it’s not a matter of money. It’s more than that.
Internsh**.
In its positive purposes, the internship template aims to develop the technical skills of the students and sustain the credibility of fashion degrees. Some might argue that students are paid with the practical competencies that they acquire during the experience. This is quite in line with Aristotle's thought, according to which the first economic action is typically free of charge. The economy always starts with a free action, when and where there’s the willingness of someone to self-expose to the uncertainty. Think about when people want to establish a friendship: at the beginning there might be an exchange of gifts between the parties, or there might be someone that offers a warm cappuccino in a café, or a drink in a nightclub. Whatever analogy we find, the logic is the exact same for fashion students: for the odds that they manage to get an internship, this is a free gift (with the ultimate hope of being employed on a more permanent basis one day, but with absolutely no promise).
Therefore, as long as the educational offer won’t be really exhaustive, and internship experiences will not be an integral and coherent component of a more thoughtful educational strategy, fashion schools will just perpetuate that illusive dream.
And for some the dream might switch into a nightmare.
A tale of some dresses from the Met Gala.
When you are in your twenties and you are studying fashion design or fashion styling, the world has already taught you that you probably cannot pretend to get money. The first concern of fashion students is to explore and refine, not to be greedy. That’s why no one complains with the common acceptance of internships or non-paid jobs in the fashion industry. But there is an even more toxic and unethical omission that afflicts the hidden army of interns, and designer assistants as well.
In the movie industry, for example, there is an almost complete acknowledgment for everyone who takes part in the creative production of films in the end credits. In Spotify too people can know the names of the producers or the songwriters and so on. However, the acknowledgment of all the design or product contributions behind every collection, runway, dress does not happen in the fashion industry. Although fashion design is a collective process, the outcome is presented as the merit of one only, namely the creative director.
The last Met Gala was the triumph of stolen ideas. The faceless black dress that Kim Kardashian was wearing, with the signature of Demna Gvasalia aka Balenciaga, had been created two years before by the hands of a student who was interning for Vetements. Same with the majestic dress of Grimes, proudly signed by Iris Van Herpen but projected and made by three interns based in Copenhagen. Two of the most buzzed dresses of the fashion’s biggest night out, which potentially cost thousands of dollars, have been conceived or made by non-paid, and foremost, non-acknowledged interns (I was certainly not waiting for the Diet Prada Instagram account to say anything).
Take as much as you can.
We could potentially go on and on. For the sake of portfolio, fashion students rush to enter a still closed and retrograde system, trampling on their role of trendsetters and accepting every possible opportunity. Despite the absence of any regulation for the market of creations in the fashion industry, schools and institutions take no measure to mind this frustrating theft. Fashion students have no guidance to control their intellectual rights for their artistic contribution, and after graduating they end up not knowing what to pretend by the fashion system, as mere token.
The educational offer gap is a key factor that feeds this vicious circle. The insufficient economic, strategic or organizational framework leads fashion students to be unready when entering the work environment, particularly considering that “fashion” became a corporate system over the years. Even in the case that they wanted to start an independent business, they lack the foundations to strategize activities, manage costs, project a solid value proposition, intercept market opportunities, and sustain their operations and processes.
The detachment.
The literature of fashion business has plenty of failure stories. Yohji Yamamoto was filing for bankruptcy in 2009, before being acquired by a hedge fund that reimbursed the entire debt. Maison Margiela hasn't turned a profit since the Only The Brave fashion group (OTB) bought the label. Today, most of the conceptual or avant-garde brands belong to a bigger corporate apparatus, and at the end of the day they all share profit dynamics. That’s why fashion schools should focus on delivering a more honest educational offer, aimed at empowering a generation of students that can handle both design and economic and social concepts.
It’s no longer sufficient to push conceptualism, especially when fashion no longer seems to be able to innovate: Universities cannot be detached from the rules of the business environment that surround fashion students. This interaction should start not only with more concrete and ethical contacts with networks, manufacturers and brands, but also with the introduction of a new category of cross-disciplinary studies, that can attach the world of business with the one of creation.
