"How do I get a job in fashion journalism?"Natalie and I get asked this question a lot. We still haven't really figured out how to answer. Do you give the nice, restrained answer, or do you answer honestly and risk ruining someone's hopes and dreams? Because it's hard to get a job, and it's even harder finding a job in the media. And a job writing about fashion? Good luck...
We're not the only ones who constantly get asked this - so does Guardian fashion writer Hadley Freeman. I think she answers the question better (and funnier) than I ever could:
How do I become another Hadley Freeman?
Aside from "Does it get annoying to be constantly mistaken for Christy Turlington?" and "How did you find room on your bookshelf for your Nobel peace prize, your Academy Award and your Booker prize?", the above question is the most popular one to come into Ask Hadley's postbox.
Now, the world is very different from when I started out. No longer do I hammer out articles on a slab of stone with a chisel. And what was once called "research" has been renamed "type it into Google". So there is no point in me giving advice from personal experience on how to get a job in fashion journalism because it would be irrelevant. Fortunately, Teen Vogue (pictures of lots of young people – so very happy!) has published a handbook on the matter, with tips from people younger and/or more powerful than Ask Hadley, if such a thing can be imagined. Despite such qualifications, it doesn't mention the real requirement for getting a job in this business today: the need to be very wealthy or, to use a euphemism, "have an independent income".
You see, dear young people, more folk want to get into fashion journalism than the profession merits. This means people in the business can get away with a lot. Slavery, for instance, or, to use the official parlance, "internships" and "work experience". This is when you are expected to work for free for several weeks – with no guarantee of a job at the end – and almost always be based in London (so you also need to make sure you have at least one family member or friend who lives in London. If you don't do this, you will definitely not get a job as you will have shown a lack of keenness – as well as a lack of an independent income).
Then let us say you do actually get a job as fashion cupboard administrator number five at Happy magazine. Congratulations! Now you can conduct an experiment to see if it is possible to live on your £7,500 salary, while trying not to mind too much about the ridiculous irony that you spend your days handling clothes and bags worth at least ten times more than you earn in a month. Oh, the larks. Oh, the glamour.
Still tempted? Dear young people, your dedication to the noble cause of fashion is greater than my own. If I were starting off today, I'd have gone into a far more luxurious, far better paid, far more secure industry. I'd have gone into coalmining.
