TEN years ago, when Amy Astley, then the beauty director of Vogue, began working on a prototype of a spinoff magazine for teenagers, the question she was most commonly asked by potential readers was this: “How can I become a fashion model?”
“It was really depressing,” said Ms. Astley, now the editor of Teen Vogue.They all wanted to be models, and of course they couldn’t, so Ms. Astley found herself offering teenagers a harsh dose of reality, rather than something positive or inspiring.“That was the most visible career in fashion at the time,” she said. “But I’ve seen a really profound change. They don’t ask me anymore how to become a model, or if I’ve met Britney or Justin Timberlake.” Now they ask how they can get her job.
What changed, Ms. Astley said, is that teenagers around the world have become interested in all sorts of careers in fashion as a result of the industry’s increasingly outsize place in popular culture. “Project Runway,” the designer competition originally set at Parsons the New School for Design, has alone been credited with causing a spike in applications to fashion schools. At Parsons, applications have gone up 41 percent over the last five years. At Pratt Institute, they have gone up 20 percent. “We have tour buses stopping outside so tourists can take pictures of us,” said Simon Collins, the dean of fashion at Parsons. “They’re looking for Tim Gunn or Heidi Klum or something.”
And given the intense scrutiny directed at “The September Issue,” the behind-the-scenes documentary of a single issue of Vogue, and the ever-escalating coverage of Fashion Week, which begins Thursday in Bryant Park, it stands to reason that there will be even more interest to come. Feeding on the demand, Teen Vogue has its own book coming out next month called “The Teen Vogue Handbook,” a how-to guide for students dreaming of jobs as a designer, stylist, photographer or editor.
For much of America’s youth, fashion is where it’s at. But this wave of Anna Wintours and Michael Korses in training is coming at a moment when the industry is shrinking; retailers are collapsing; several magazines within Teen Vogue’s parent company, Condé Nast, have closed; and jobs, of any sort, are scarce. A report last month from the NPD Group estimated that 12 percent of fashion companies will not survive the recession.
The situation is not entirely grim for new fashion graduates, even though the National Association of Colleges and Employers said in March that employers expected to hire 22 percent fewer seniors graduating in 2009 for entry level positions. Normally about 90 percent of Parsons seniors find jobs, but that figure dipped by only 10 percent. At Pratt and at the Fashion Institute of Technology, they have remained about the same.
“But we are seeing a trend toward some jobs disappearing into unpaid internships, which is a little troubling,” said Judy Nylen, the director of career services at Pratt.
So what is a young person trying to break into fashion supposed to do?
DON’T EXPECT TO START AT THE TOP
Let us take the example of Sang A Im-Propp, who was a pop star in Korea before she decided, while on a business trip to New York, that she wanted to be in fashion. This was nearly a decade ago, and Ms. Im-Propp’s command of English was tenuous, but she enrolled at Parsons and in short order found herself an internship with Victoria Bartlett, a noted stylist and designer whom she admired and hoped would introduce her to the glamorous world of design. Instead, Ms. Im-Propp found it difficult to understand Ms. Bartlett’s heavy British accent, and at first she thought she had misunderstood just what Ms. Bartlett was asking her to do. Get cupcakes?
Not just any cupcakes, but the glossy butter-cream confections from the Cupcake Cafe, which is a four-block crosstown walk from Ms. Bartlett’s studio through the dodgy garment district, and it was freezing outside.
“It made me cry a lot,” Ms. Im-Propp said. “Vicky is an amazing artist, but she can be difficult.”
But Ms. Im-Propp persisted, and after many cupcake runs, was entrusted with the research projects, location scouting and shopping collections Ms. Bartlett did not have time to see. When she decided in 2006 to start her own collection of handbags, under the label Sang A, Ms. Bartlett personally recommended her to a showroom.
Ms. Bartlett, reminded of the cupcake episodes, said she had been a deliberate taskmaster with interns, having encountered a few who did not live up to expectations. There was one who, without asking, borrowed her car on several occasions, and another who ran off to Los Angeles with the company computer.
“You can’t be a princess in this business,” she said. “People see fashion from the end result, which is kind of a false facade. They only see this beautiful, glamorous world, but I don’t think they realize it is one of the hardest careers out there.”
BE PREPARED TO SUFFER
This is a point that is made repeatedly in “The Teen Vogue Handbook,” which compiles stories of how many now-famous designers and editors got their starts. The common themes in the histories of Marc Jacobs, Ms. Wintour, Gucci Westman and Mario Testino are that hard work and persistence lead to opportunities to be seized — with a caveat, of course, that it’ll be a lot harder than that for anyone else. Karl Lagerfeld says that rather archly: “Are you ready to accept injustice? The idea of the fashion industry may look better from the outside. It can look like the world of dream jobs — for a very happy few.”
Still interested?
It’s a wonder, given the portrayal of fashion in “The Devil Wears Prada” and the counterpoint of “The September Issue,” that anyone would think this is a glamorous business. (There is the specter of Grace Coddington in the new film directing a colleague, “Don’t be too nice, not even to me, because you’ll lose.”)
Read the rest of the article here
Source: New York Times
