Comments on: Friday Column | Business vs. Fashion?

By: Fashion Design

Fashion Design — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 10:17:12 +0000

nice article getting know how fashion is changes the life style and increases the living standard of people effects on society and culture

By: Cristie

Cristie — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 08:19:50 +0000

When I was studying at Uni the staff in the careers service were friendly and tried to be helpful, but the prospects website that they referred to most, had nothing in the way of art and design related work. Even asking about thinking about a career direction and they couldnt help me, because they didn’t know anything about art and design. Each time I went in, they gave me flyers talking about jobs that I had no experience or qualifications in, nursing or accounting were a couple of them.

I find it very strange that the Graphics course held in the same school involved work experience and regular external projects, yet art had nothing.

By: Cristie

Cristie — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 15:04:08 +0000

PS. – was considering taking an MA in fashion marketting/ business, hope I can get a job with it

By: Cristie

Cristie — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 14:56:51 +0000

Hi there, spot on!

I studied fine art as a BA, in terms of a creative profession it is no less inferior to fashion as a subject area.
my particular experience may have just been unlucky, but I think on average its not that dissimilar from anyone elses’ experience.
In the first term I asked a tutor at the end of his talk on conceptual sculpture- and knocking any form of ‘commercial art’, how he survives as an artist/ and that I was quite worried I will be doing this course for the next three years. His answer was that if I wanted to make money from it I shouldn’t be on the course, and he was quite insulted I should have asked – the tutors all felt the same as him, and they said quite openly they did not enjoy teaching.

Like the tutor mentioned in the article the general school of thought is that tutors are there to do a critique of work but also took great delight in knocking or rubbishing both strong and weak work to such a degree that students either left, or don’t paint for years after they finish.

the BA fine art degree is a damaging experience in that the whole conceptual process means you justify your work to such a degree you can’t feel you can paint just for the hell of it – artists paint because that is what they did before they went on the course.
Everyone has their own view point or way of reading something so all forms of criticism are benefitial, in terms of the way something reads, but at college even feedback of what could be considered a strong piece of work ‘that is sh**t’ is not condusive to improvement.
The plus side of it is you can produce work with no emotional attachment.

Regardless of my own personal standard of work (not blowing own trumpet, but very high standard and varied) it is daylight robbery that people are expected to pay vast sums of money for an opportunity to pursue self-led research, as I did in my fine art degree – alonside visiting lecturers talking about their exhibitions, or on the interior design course that consisted of producing paper scale models and drawings.

I have been waitressing since I graduated in 2006, I did an interior design course since, and I have been continually applying for jobs in graphic design/publishing companies since graduating. Still in hotels.

By: Emma

Emma — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:20:08 +0000

You are so right. The courses in the fashion design schools are not thorough at all. It’s a shame.

By: Jules

Jules — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 20:43:40 +0000

this article is spot on! Thanks for writing this. I’m a fashion designer – trained at both Parsons and Central Saint Martins and I managed to squeeze in ONE bussines fashion course in my time at school. It was terribly helpful, but I can’t agree with you more that fashion is no different from any other business. We designers can’t get caught up in the art/design aspects to have a viable business. It is all so self-depricating to say we NEED to find a partner to do the business side of thing – we should learn to do it all and partner with people who want to work hard for the company, not pick-up the pieces where we fall short. There’s nothing more amazing that seeing a creation come to fruition, but I know so many friends who try and try again to create their own line with little financial success. This article should be read by every fashion freshman or anyone wanting to go into business for themselves!

By: Randall

Randall — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 08:59:43 +0000

Ok, having just seen images from the most recent London and NY fashion weeks (not in person) I’m feeling a bit of ‘commenters remorse’ and feel I’d definitely tone down my response were I to react today. NY had two interesting shows, or maybe just one. All of the rest seemed dreary and. a few days later, basically are already marching into my forgettable dept. To be honest, the majority of these simply wimpered onto a catwalk with what is in retrospect the predictable NY fraternity of monoculturalistic sameness, that organic zeitgeist of sameness that’s sort of the sixth sense of the fashion world. Hit the snooze button if you missed it. By contrast, the biggest and boldest brands seemed to show a literal reheated serving of the past, presenting everything from Max Headroom’s danceteria to the Beetlejuice dinner party to the cast and crew of the old Sherman Oaks High School Salad Bar. The most escapist retro, exaggerated almost not at all. Clomp for clomp, London this season just seemed to have a higher percentage of relevant shows which to me is something I envision you determine by tabulating the amount of authentic design proposals, new variations or more clever and timely reworkings or subversions of tradition, and that beautiful rush that comes from seeing the birth of what’s next not just what’s reheated, refried and retried. Since more London shows resonated on a greater variety of chords with me, be they major, minor, sharp or flat, that feels like the first step in a fashion business plan to me. For fun (and to see again where my tastes and predictions differ/dovetail with the market) I’m thinking of making my own subjective spreadsheets and pie graphs, based on my own cool-o-meter ramblings and inclinations just to see if my favorites sell through (something I’ve done for a few years at work anyway actually) but I’d be interested to see the results of what sells from each brand that showed at NYFW and LFW, then if the factories (god bless them) can deliver on time and what’s the final sell through. Etc etc. Fun stuff for fashion geeks and garmentos, maybe not so fun for fashionistas.

By: rosa

rosa — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:56:55 +0000

I attended the thesis collections presentations at Parsons, New York, last year. Coming from a London fashion background, it surprised me immensely the way those young graduates were presenting their collection: price points, customer profile, potential retailers. It was very focused, and of course the technical side of the garments was perfect, but I didn’t find it poor from a creative side. It was very interesting to hear where the inspirations came from: books, the human anatomy, brutalist architecture, colour theory..These designers managed to capture the essence of very abstract ideas into perfectly constructed clothes ready to hit the shop floor.

Attending Graduate Fashion Week in London a few months later, it all looked like a bit of a mess: the collections didn’t seem to have a focus, and I bet not many in the audience would have felt like buying these clothes from a boutique with a four-figure price tag. The winning collection itself was said to have been born out of a confusion of textiles and with an unclear goal (it was a womeswear collection just a few weeks before being presented on the catwalk as a very rigidly designed collection of suits, for men). I don’t think London students are ready for the industry at all, and I say it as a potential consumer and budding journalist. If I see their inadequacy, I can imagine the industry feeling the same, or worse about them and their work.

By: Anon

Anon — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 22:07:05 +0000

This cynical nurturing of students as stars is criminal and the casualties innumerable. I recently met up with a friend who graduated from CSM a couple years ago and asked how his fellow graduates had fared. Despite landing a well-paid corporate design job himself (and admittedly not being entirely comfortable with that fact) he confessed with some chagrin that his colleagues had for the most part unravelled into excess and despond so busy had they been pursuing the ‘terrible’ of ‘enfant terrible’. Its not rocket science to understand the basic principles of a) a business plan b) a spreadsheet c) accounting, but if you have to understand these elements after the fact rather than while still in the relative comfort of student life the effects can be both financially and psychologically devastating. Sending these lambs out with little more than an inflated ego and a sense of creative entitlement is both unkind to their youth and inconsiderate of their future.
Ultimately creativity and commercial dexterity have the same goal: Identity. The business of fashion is an obscenely costly one and to continue to treat these two elements as mutually exclusive is to risk long term international industry parity for short term local admiration.

By: Katlin

Katlin — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 10:56:55 +0000

My university is no where near the level that CSM is at, but just wanted to give my input about other schools around the world.

I attend a university in Hawai’i and see a lack of creativity, drive AND business skills from the students getting a fashion design degree. A lot of people complain that being in such an isolated location, in terms of geography, puts us at a disadvantage because we always seem to catch on to things after they’ve been handed down from other places… but then there are sites like this and thousands of other blogs that can give them the information they need to know to succeed… it’s all about digging for that information if know one else is handing it to you!

I am part of the program (though not majoring in design) and I also feel no passion coming from my teachers, with very few exceptions. The lifestyle here is so laidback that our teachers aren’t properly preparing us for the industry because they go so easy on us! I really also wish teachers would tell other students that they should get more than one internship and not wait till their last semester in school! I even did a mini presentation on this site to my class and my teacher had never heard of it before, nor had any of my peers!

What I’m trying to get at is that the INTERNET (definitely including BoF!) is a huge resource for students, and is my main resource since I don’t get much help from my school.