I‘ve always known I wanted to work in the fashion industry, even if there wasn’t room for me. I planned to force myself in like too-small shirts and tight jeans. I thought that navigating the notoriously distasteful community would be easy because, growing up, I was never blinded by the glitz of red carpets and runways, but rather forced to find the sparkle in second hand sequins. When I came to college for legal studies, I quickly decided that overworking myself by studying for the bar exam wasn’t much more fulfilling than overworking myself to create garments and changed my major to Fashion. I was sure that the change would lift the mental burden I carried, but I was wrong. What changed was that instead of constantly critically thinking about global issues in the context of policy, I began thinking about it through the lens of industry, anthropology and material culture.
What excited me about fashion as an art form was is its democracy. Looking at artifacts from 100 years ago and 1000 years ago, garments tell the stories of people rich and poor, black and white. In wartimes and in depressions, clothing has been one of the few things humans continue to create and adorn. I started to look for histories within garments. But when looking in the past, all I could be reminded of was the present. Dressmaking, which was once a handicraft has been colonized into an industry that most of the world is forced to participate in. Today, fashion is hardly a democracy, yet garments still hold the stories of the upper and lower classes. The 1% wear quiet luxury and tattered streetwear as a costume to live peacefully only blocks away from the working class that wear garments from season’s past.
Fashion is a machine moving so fast that it’s impossible for designers to keep up. To prepare for the industry, we start to stretch ourselves thin in college. We join student organizations and cross our fingers for fellowships that demand full-time hours. We work through the night in freezing studios running on vending machine fare and hopes that our hard work will pay off for a better chance at a living wage.
When you graduate and enter the industry as a designer you decide which kind of worker you will be. Your options are: fast fashion trend analyst, sustainable outwear designer [Portland based], Haute couture unpaid intern or indefinitely poor entrepreneur. You begin to bargain with yourself about which pathway will make the time and money you spent on college worth it. Before you can revel the only-exists-in-movies bustle of fashion week, you are tasked with rebranding the entire fashion industry. Within each assignment you are reminded of your contribution to the tormented body image of teen girls, the impending climate crisis and the future of child laborers. We are asked to design clothing that can transcend all of these issues while sacrificing no loss in profits. We are taught to justify budgets and create cutter’s musts to minimize textile waste. Suddenly, we become business majors and marketing majors, environmental engineers and PR consultants. At times the influence of fashion feels like bearing the weight of the world while simultaneously being ridiculed for pursing something creative.
It is commonly known when making a career out of a passion, you will start to resent it. At times, fashion has made me resent consumers and resent models. Fashion has made me resent myself for caring what I wear and resent my closet full of clothes that I can never assemble into outfits. Fashion is killing the land and killing my creativity, and fashion is killing me.
If fashion is the source of my anxiety and stress: an embodiment of a senseless obsession with perception, then why can’t I go a day without dreaming of draped silks and natural dyed linens? How can all be forgotten by the smell of fresh pressed magazines and the feel of “pleats please”? How can the very thing that sends me into spirals of overwhelm and disorientation feel so entrancing and magical over catwalks and under spotlights? To love fashion is to love something that consumes you.
While the fashion industry can feel like being crushed by textile mills, it can also feel like being pulled in, pushed around and shoved out of pit of gorgeous people wearing beautiful attire. When entering the fashion industry, we all know what we will get. The important question is whether the moments that feel surreal and dreamlike are worth the seasons of sacrifice in between.
Modeled by: Sydney Taylor Collins
