Fashion Careers

A career is an individual's journey through life in the workforce: a path of learning, work and experience that can be long or short depending on what you make of it, and fruitful in many ways with proper thought and career management. A fashion career is that path taken specifically through employment in the fashion industry — a wider field than most outsiders expect, and one in which the designer is only the most visible of many roles.

Employment, Employers and Employees

Employment is a relationship between two parties, usually based on a contract where work is paid for: one party — a corporation, for-profit business, not-for-profit organisation, co-operative or other entity — is the employer, and the other is the employee. In the fashion industry you can build a career on either side of that contract, as a business owner or as an employee; either is a viable option, and many people do both across a working life. An employee contributes labour and expertise to an endeavour, and fashion careers involve a wide variety of tasks for the people contributing them.

The role list shows the spread: pattern making, fashion design, fashion retailing, sewing, textile printing, tailoring, fashion assisting, fashion merchandising and clothing wholesale distribution — and many more. Fashion itself is a popular style, especially in clothing, footwear, lifestyle products and accessories, and careers in it involve design, manufacturing, marketing, distribution, transportation, warehousing and retailing. You do not have to be a fashion designer to work in the apparel industry; the industry has career paths for most temperaments and talents.

Planning a Fashion Career

Because the paths are numerous, choosing matters more than chasing. The fashion job descriptions section linked below sets out what individual roles actually involve day to day — the honest test of whether a path suits you — and the fashion careers pages gather the openings and guidance by category. Two narrower summaries branch from this one: the fashion assistant jobs summary, for the entry-level route most people start on, and the fashion job listings summary, for the mechanics of finding posted work.

Career management in fashion has an industry-specific wrinkle: companies rise and fall with brand popularity, so the company matters as much as the role — a theme the careers by company name summary develops. The durable strategy is unglamorous: build transferable skills (a craft, a software, a category expertise), keep evidence of results, and treat each job as one step on a managed path rather than a lottery ticket.