How can fashion students choose a role before they’ve seen the work?

Everything I know about the jobs I never held in fashion, I learned the same way: proximity.

I know what a wholesale manager does because for years, as a buyer, I sat across a showroom desk from one — and then, later, I became one, and discovered how much the view from across the desk had left out. I crossed that desk more than once, in both directions, and every crossing taught me more about a profession I thought I'd already understood.

That is how the industry transfers role knowledge: you sit next to a job for long enough, and eventually some of it rubs off.

It works. It also takes a career.

Which leaves fashion education with a structural problem that I don't think gets named often enough — not a failure of teaching, just physics.

The breadth problem

Fashion education is genuinely good at depth. A buying pathway, a marketing degree, a merchandising module taught by someone who has lived the job — that is a real transfer of one profession, and it matters.

Breadth is the hard part.

A fashion business is built from an interlocking set of professions and functions, and the tools for showing a student that whole set are structurally limited. A placement can be invaluable, but it usually gives a student the entry-level view of one role inside one company — not the full system of functions around it. A live brief simulates one function at a time. A guest speaker is a window into a job, not a chair inside it.

None of this is a criticism of placements, live briefs or guest speakers. They matter precisely because they bring students closer to real work. The limitation is structural: nobody can give a student twenty years of sitting next to thirty desks. I couldn't have designed that either.

And the cost of the breadth problem is quietly high, because it repeats the very pattern I wrote about last week.

Students choose fashion from outside, seeing only a fraction of its work. Then, once inside a course, they are often asked to choose a pathway or specialism before they have experienced the professions they are choosing between. Buying or marketing. Design or business. Creative direction or production. The pathway decision arrives before the proximity does.

The industry's deciding-blind problem does not end at the classroom door. It just moves indoors.

The seat that faces many jobs

I could not find a way to give a learner proximity to every profession in fashion. So I went looking for the one seat in the industry that already faces many of the major functions a business depends on.

The founder's.

Not because every student should become a founder. Most will not, and do not need to. But because the founder's seat is one of the few places where different functions become visible as decisions.

A founder building a business from scratch, on a limited budget, must confront the same question again and again:

Do I do this myself, or do I hire someone?

And that question cannot be answered from a job-title list. You have to understand what the work actually is — what good looks like, what it costs, what happens when it is done badly — because you are about to either do it or pay for it.

That makes the founder's seat useful as a teaching lens. It turns roles into decisions.

A logo is not just "branding"; it becomes a decision about visual identity, audience, cost, taste and whether specialist skill is needed. A product decision is not just "design"; it brings in sourcing, pricing, merchandising and customer understanding. A sales decision is not just "selling"; it raises questions about channels, margins, relationships and timing.

The role appears because the decision requires it.

What simulation can add

That is the teaching lens I have built Sim de la Mode around.

In the game, learners build a fashion label from scratch. The aim is not to turn every learner into a founder. It is to let them meet many of the industry's core roles from the inside, as choices they have to make. For learners who do want to start something of their own one day, that same structure also gives them a practical sequence for thinking through starting a business step by step.

Some learners may discover that a task bores them, which is useful to know before a pathway decision, not after. Some may discover they would rather brief a specialist than do the work themselves, which is a management lesson. Some may discover they are good at something they had never considered as a career.

That is the honest version of what a simulation can add to fashion education.

Not a replacement for depth. Nothing replaces a placement, a mentor, a specialist degree, or the first months inside a real company.

But a breadth layer that can come earlier.

A way to let students encounter the shape of the industry before they choose their lane. A way to make roles visible before the formal pathway decision. A way to compress some of the proximity that usually takes years, not by pretending to replace the industry, but by staging the decisions that reveal it.

I spent twenty years sitting next to fashion's professions, learning them one desk at a time.

What I am building now is a seat that lets learners face more of them at once.

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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. Classroom pilots are available on request — get in touch if you’re interested in using Sim de la Mode with students.