How to Figure Out Where You Actually Belong in Fashion

THE EDIT, Issue 10

There is a version of this conversation that takes place in every career services office, every mentorship session, every DM from someone who is somewhere in their fashion journey and suddenly realizes they don’t actually know which direction they’re going.

It goes like this: I love fashion. I want to work in fashion. But I don’t know what I want to do.

And the answer most people give them is some version of: follow your passion, think about your strengths, make a list of what you love.

That advice sounds reasonable. It’s almost completely useless for someone who has never actually worked in the industry, because you cannot know what you love doing in a field you’ve never been inside of.

You can know what looks good on Instagram. You can know which company names sound impressive. You can know what your friend is doing or what your professor suggested or what the person with 50,000 followers said their day looks like.

None of that is the same as knowing whether you’d thrive in that function, in that environment, in that culture, doing that specific work on an ordinary afternoon when nobody is watching and nothing is glamorous.

And yet this is exactly how most people choose their direction. A recent BoF Careers survey of over 1,100 fashion professionals and aspiring workers from 93 countries found that the same three brand names dominated the list of where people most want to work: Chanel. Hermès. Dior.

The prestige pull is real, it is powerful, and it has almost nothing to do with whether those environments are actually right for the people chasing them.

The fashion industry has a visibility problem. What gets seen - the shows, the campaigns, the front rows, the perfectly curated office aesthetics - represents about two percent of what actually happens inside these companies every single day. The other ninety-eight percent is spreadsheets and margin conversations and sample trafficking and vendor negotiations and inbox management and meetings about meetings.

Some people love that work. They genuinely do. But they only find that out by being in it, not by looking at it from the outside.

Which is why the most common career mistake I see early in someone’s fashion journey has nothing to do with their resume or their interview skills or their network. It’s that they chose a direction based on what looked right rather than what felt right once they were actually inside it.

They chased the company name. They followed a friend into a function that didn’t suit them. They believed what social media told them a job looked like and discovered the reality was something else entirely. They thought they wanted to work remotely until they realized they needed people around them to do their best work. They assumed they were a corporate person because corporate sounded serious and stable, and then they got inside a startup and felt more alive than they had in years.

These are not rare stories. They are the majority of stories. And the reason they happen isn’t that people are careless or naive. It’s that there is almost no infrastructure in fashion education that teaches you how to figure out where you actually fit before you’ve committed to something.

Here’s the reframe that changes everything, and I want you to sit with it for a second before we move on.

You are not trying to figure out what you want. Not yet. You don’t have enough information to answer that question accurately, and pretending you do is how people end up in roles that looked right on paper and felt wrong from day one.

What you are actually trying to do is rule things out.

This is not a pessimistic approach. It is the most efficient and honest approach available to someone who is early in their career and hasn’t had enough real exposure to know their own preferences with any certainty. Every experience you have in this industry, every room you walk into, every function you observe up close, is giving you data. The goal is to collect enough data that the options narrow themselves down to something real rather than something imagined.

The internship that wasn’t a great fit wasn’t a failure. It was a three month education in what doesn’t work for you. That is genuinely valuable information that someone who has never been in a room doesn’t have. You are now ahead of them.

The volunteer shift that made you realize you hate event chaos is useful. The informational interview that made a role you thought sounded exciting feel suddenly less exciting is useful. The class project that made you stay up until 2am because you couldn’t stop working on it is useful.

All of it is data. The question is whether you’re paying attention to what it’s telling you.

Behind the paywall is the full framework for how to actually do this, including the specific questions to ask yourself that cut through the noise, how to use every experience you have access to as a testing ground even if you’ve never had a formal internship, what to look for when you’re in a room that tells you whether you belong there, and how to audit a company’s culture and values against your own before you commit to anything.

If you’ve been stuck on the “what do I want to do” question for longer than feels comfortable, this is the issue to be here for.