A Vicious Fashion Circle
In 2015, as part of Li Edelkoort’s Anti-Fashion Manifesto, she called out fashion schools to rethink how they were educating students to be part of fashion’s future. She provided many suggestions including a return to materiality and craft, as well as a shift away from the smoke and mirrors of marketing. It was a wake-up call for many schools that had, for many years, relied on the coattail effect of Project Runway, influencer culture and fast fashion.
Since then, many fashion schools have grappled with their role in the fashion system and have tried to update their application processes and curriculum. However, with the onset of Covid-19 and the political and social unrest that followed, many of these schools found themselves still woefully behind, not fully up to speed on new technologies, and still very much based in a Western approach to history and design, despite a more diverse student body.
And while institutions must take responsibility for this, they are very much a reflection of the fashion industry itself. For example, even though schools can’t guarantee a job post-graduation--that isn’t their purview--they certainly highlight graduates who obtain high-profile positions, because potential students judge schools on their successful alumni. And leadership positions in fashion are still primarily held by white men, so they get most of the focus. The numbers are even lower when accounting for Bipoc or LGBTQ+ representation.
According to Mckinsey, over 50% of fashion employees don’t feel their leadership is diverse or represents them. And yet, according to a 2019 Fashion United article, author Marjorie van Elven points out that 80% of fashion students are women, and 75% of the fashion workforce is women.
It could be construed that over time, because women represent the majority of fashion graduates, executive jobs will increasingly be filled by women. But this has been the case for quite some time and hasn’t produced immediate results without any real policy change. Nor does it account for other diversity issues.
There are deep rooted systemic issues at work, where the interplay between school and company is very real. But the cycle needs to be stopped. Fashion schools must do more to promote their graduates, building on a more inclusive curriculum and a diversity of ideas and lived experiences, perhaps even more aggressively and against the fashion industry status quo. This may mean eschewing financial partnerships with brands that aren’t willing to change or who haven’t taken meaningful action.
And students must demand change from fashion institutions, to be more inclusive in their application processes, to offer more opportunities and scholarships for less-represented groups of people and then better represent the diverse student body they graduate.
What’s more, students are also consumers--both of the schools they pay for their education and of the brands they want to work for. Demanding change “with your wallet” can be an effective change agent in both cases.
Finally, fashion companies need to be ready and willing to learn from graduates, their new employees, to provide space where they can innovate and bring to bear the concepts they studied in school. Too often companies quash new employee ideas and force them into old ways of doing things; it’s easier that way. It’s no wonder that many fashion students choose to create their own businesses where they feel they can effectuate change more immediately.