Lauren Conrad laid down the building blocks of my desire to work in fashion. The Hills was irresistible to me — a Laguna Beach spinoff that would follow LC through Los Angeles life (mostly tanning poolside) and love (mostly Brody Jenner). But most compelling of all: Lauren’s internship at Teen Vogue. This is how the myth began for me, within scenes where LC and Whitney went off about their lives while surrounded by heaps of well-organized clothes. But it was not until The Devil Wears Prada that the myth grew its own head and led to the hype-hydra that it is now, because Andrea Sachs put the glass slipper on every aspiring fashion girl out there — only the glass slipper was Chanel.
It only took a few years until we went from peeking through Teen Vogue’s closet to watching icons like Anna Wintour and Grace Coddington justify what they do, only a few clicks from LA to the rest of the world, opened up and fueled by bloggers, and only one radical medium shift to go from MTV reality show to the real-life street style circus at fashion week. Recent years have seen fashion repackaged and commodified faster than any PR pro could exact. As the curiosity rises, so does the itch to become a part of it all. And while there’s no formula to it, allow me to share seven things I’ve picked up from working in a magazine, divorced from the fantasy that’s LC’s life.
1. You can learn on the job. There are a lot of jobs you can choose from if you want to be in fashion — retail, merchandising, styling, branding etc. — and not all of them are degree-specific. I work in an office where some of our most creative people come from an advertising or architecture background, and this does not limit their scope; on the contrary, it expands it. There are more fashion schools these days, and that training will help. But an internship will give you the experience and day-to-day skills that you’ll need. Apply to a publication, or offer to be an apprentice under a stylist or a designer. Not only will you learn so much, but you’ll also get to start sowing the seeds of your own network.
2. The calendar doesn’t always make sense. Because fashion is a business that revolves around what’s coming and dangling the prospect of what’s ahead, people who work within the industry generally have a skewed sense of time. If you’re working for a designer, you’re already working on next year’s collection, and if you’re part of a magazine’s staff, you’re already bookmarking spring-summer’s most prominent trends when it’s clearly fall-winter (in our case, rainy) outside. Always consider this timeframe and practice your ability to see forward.
3. Learn to juggle. Editorial teams are smaller in scale here, so logistics is delegated accordingly to the people involved in the shoot, versus abroad where they have separate bookings and sittings teams. Shoots usually operate under one law, and that is Murphy’s. This is normal. Take control of everything that you can (models, hairstylists, clothes, etc.) and surrender the rest of it to hope and chance, for the things that can’t be helped — like the weather, or traffic.
4. A “peg†is a reference, not a rule. On working with “pegs†— a word that’s gained popularity but also a sort of stigma. Treat a visual peg, as in a photo pulled from a magazine, a book, or a website, as a reference: the lighting, the feeling, the statement the styling has made. A peg exists as a guide, and not the manual in which you should execute your shoot.
5. Think global but support your local. Unlike international titles, local magazines don’t have a closet of samples in which we can choose clothes for an editorial from. While big fashion houses with correspondence here would sometimes send the season’s runway looks, the pullout-return system is our next best bet. But most especially, our own designers. Think globally, see and produce locally.
6. Glamour is a small part of it. That this is a glamorous industry to be in is still a popular misconception. That is probably 10 percent or even less of the job, and these are the days where it’s everything you’ve imagined it to be, like in the shows and the movies — but the other 90 percent is work. Mentally, emotionally, sometimes even physically exhausting work. If you want to be in this for the long haul, you’ve got to embrace everything.
7. Always be on your game. Always, always keep an eye out. If you’re already in the fashion industry, you have probably been hired so that you may involve your personal perspective into the work. So always make an effort to enrich that. Keep reading, keep listening, watch how pop culture ebbs and flows. Fashion manifests best when it’s within context, as clothes and trends are a reaction to a universal feeling, whether that’s maximalism or grunge.
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Vogue’s Sally Singer once said of Opening Ceremony owners and Kenzo creative directors Humberto Leon and Carol Lim: “These were not people who were educated to look right or left, because when they were at university there was no one to look at on their right or left. Instead they look inward; they look outward; and they look ahead. This is magnificent.â€