Fashion careers are decided at sixteen — with almost no way to check

For twenty years, whenever someone outside the industry asked what I did and I said I worked in fashion, the reply was almost always the same: "So you're a designer."

Eventually I gave up explaining and started answering, "I'm the person who decides what you're going to wear next year."

I was a buyer. It's one of dozens of jobs the industry runs on — merchandisers, brand managers, wholesale directors, production managers, planners — and outside the industry, almost nobody can name a single one of them. To the public, fashion has two visible jobs: the designer and the sales assistant — the dream role and the visible retail role. Everything in between is invisible. And it's from that picture, assembled out of campaigns, catwalk clips and shop windows, that young people decide — at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, when subject choices and degree applications force the question — whether fashion is for them.

They are making an expensive early career decision from the industry's shop window, not from its working reality.

Here is what they can't see.

The unwritten rules

Some students arrive at fashion school treating fashion as a traditional industry: get the degree, get the job, climb the ladder. Sooner or later, many discover that fashion does not work quite like that.

The big companies have structures, of course — but there is no ladder in the traditional sense, nothing like the graduate escalator of an accountancy firm. The industry rewards enthusiasm and initiative — going after what you want, approaching people, thinking sideways. For confident students, that's energising. For more reserved ones it's a genuine struggle, and some struggle hardest with the discovery that it's expected — that nobody is going to hand them a route.

At the same time, the industry punishes the very newcomers it demands initiative from, by asking for "experience" before it offers work — a ritual of entry so established that many fashion degrees build a placement year around it. What the industry actually runs on is subtler than either of those things: knowing how it works, and knowing who to ask. That knowledge is the real currency of a fashion career. And there is nowhere a sixteen-year-old can see any of this. It isn't in the campaigns. It isn't on the open day. Much of it isn't even said out loud inside the industry.

Checking costs money

If you do want to look behind the shop window early, the options have one thing in common.

Summer schools in fashion capitals are genuinely valuable — and residential, with four-figure price tags. A design pathway means materials, portfolios, kit. Serious opportunity, sooner or later, means relocating to a fashion city, at fashion-city rents. And the industry's own entry ritual, the internship, asks young people to work for free precisely at the point when they can least afford to.

So the ability to find out early whether fashion is for you is, in practice, paywalled. Which produces a quieter effect that took me years to notice: the young people who arrive already fluent in this world are often the ones who have had earlier exposure to its codes — through shopping, family networks, travel, media, or proximity to fashion capitals. Fashion marketing is brilliant at making people feel they belong to the world it depicts — and some of the teenagers it recruits as customers, it also recruits as the next generation of its workforce. They walk into fashion school already fluent.

For everyone else — the kid whose family has never set foot in the luxury stores, who is being sensibly pressured towards a "good job" — fashion isn't rejected as a career. It's never seriously considered as one, because from where they stand it offers two jobs: a dream role and a visible retail role. The well-paid careers in between — the buying, the merchandising, the production — are the ones nobody can see.

I've thought about it as: a fashion career takes money, connections and dedication — and triple the last two if you don't have the first.

What this costs — on both sides

This filter fails in two directions at once.

It filters out talent the industry needs. This is not to suggest that fashion is the answer for every young person. But when, for example, more than a million 16-to-24-year-olds in the UK are not in education, employment or training — 1,012,000 people, or 13.5% — while employers in large creative industries still struggle to find commercially fluent entry-level talent, something about the visibility of pathways is worth questioning.

And it filters people in wrongly. I have watched plenty of capable people be drawn by the glamour of it — as I was, at the start; the fashion week trips did their work on me too — and then, mid-degree or mid-career, meet the actual industry. Some recalibrate and thrive. Many end up somewhere else entirely, or keep fashion as a hobby they once paid tuition for. That outcome costs the student years and money, and it quietly costs institutions too, in disillusioned cohorts and in graduates whose outcomes don't reflect the teaching.

None of this is an argument against fashion education — it's where the picture finally gets corrected. It's an argument about when the correction happens. Right now it happens after the commitment: after the subject choices, the applications, sometimes the relocation and the fees.

What would checking early actually take?

For a sixteen-year-old to genuinely test a fashion future before committing to one, the test would have to be affordable enough to try before committing to a course, a portfolio pathway, or a move to a fashion city. It would have to live where they already are — on their phone, not in a fashion capital. It would have to show them the industry's real breadth: all the careers between the dream role and the visible retail role. And it would have to let them do something — make the decisions the work is made of and feel the consequences — because the campaigns and the catwalks have already shown them everything that watching can show.

That is a difficult brief. It's also, I'd argue, one of the most worthwhile problems in fashion education — because the industry's shop window should not be the only part of it a sixteen-year-old can see.

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Ekaterina Adamovich spent twenty years in fashion buying, wholesale, consulting and education before founding Sim de la Mode — an iOS game that teaches fashion business through interactive missions where players build their own virtual fashion brand. Phase 1 is free on the App Store, with new learning missions launching in August 2026. Pilots with a small number of institutions are planned for this autumn — get in touch if you're interested in a pilot