Never has my decision not to move to NY a few years ago and pursue a career in the fashion industry felt more validated. Even during boom times the industry is cutthroat and oversaturated with both the talented and the delusional, but now it’s getting downright Darwinian as the handful of companies experiencing growth are not nearly enough to absorb the layoffs due to significant contractions of the majority of the industry.

The strong will gobble up the weak

From the Economist’s American Retailing section, Left on the Shelf:

Every single retailer is hurting from the drop in demand, but the weakest are in grave trouble. Some, already struggling in an intensely competitive retailing market, are in free-fall, possibly even heading for bankruptcy. For their stronger competitors, that makes the present such an unmissable opportunity.

“This bifurcation, in which the strong get stronger, the weak weaker, is occurring at every level of the retailing industry, from top to bottom,” says Thierry Chassaing, a consultant at Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

The crisis in American fashion consumption is also having a dramatic and immediate affect on the overseas production side as well. WWD reports, China Manufacturing Hard Hit by Financial Turmoil:

About 10,000 textile and garment factories shut down in the first six months of the year and 20 million manufacturing jobs were eliminated, according to Chinese government figures.

“The truth is that the total amount of manufactured products is already too high,” said textile analyst Li. “There’s not enough demand and the only solution is for some of the factories to close down to rebalance the equation of supply and demand.”

While there is plenty being written about the fallout at the corporate level, including reports of job losses at the retail stores, I’ve been unable to find analysis on what this means for aspiring fashion designers and others at the tastemaker level (marketing, stylists, editorial, etc.) But as demand dives, revenue shrinks and lines of credit are cut off, it can’t possibly be good news for job outlooks, and those who had only a few months ago assumed a bounce back was months away are now acknowledging no viable path back to the happy days of the recent past. Whitney Beckett writes for WWD, More Players Vie for Shrinking Better Space:

The better floor of department stores is in for a shake-up - or shakedown - for spring.

…”It’s going to be extremely difficult to come back to the level of consumer purchasing that we used to have prior to this meltdown,” said retail consultant Emanuel Weintraub.

Alongside the fashion consumption boom of the past decade we’ve also witnessed a spike of interest in careers in fashion design. This has no doubt been fueled by the stellar success of Project Runway, but perhaps more subconsciously by pop culture aspirational representations of success; characters who are, or are becoming fashion designers and live/work in cool loft spaces. This is compounded by the pervasive ‘follow your dreams’ and ‘do what you love and the money will follow’ self help gurus full of anecdotal success stories.

But you know what you never see, but would be awfully interesting? Statistics that show those success stories in relation to the number of individuals who don’t make it. What would it be? 100 to 1? 1000 to 1? I refer to this as the ‘American Idol’ phenomenon - just because you really, really want to follow this creative, glamorous dream, and you really, really believe in yourself and work really, really hard at it, and maybe even diligently write your affirmations in your journal and say them all the time does, unfortunately, not always, or even often, add up to fulfilling those dreams. What it does, however, is provide delicious fodder for reality TV shows.

It also encourages a steady supply of students to very expensive design vocational schools, the flipside of which will be swelling ranks of the disappointed and hopelessly in debt. The following excerpt is about an illustrator, but it just as easily could be a fashion designer from the same school, Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Nan Mooney writes about a kid who finds herself a horrifying $112k in debt and unemployed, College Loan Slavery: Student Debt Is Getting Way Out of Hand:

“All of a sudden the work just dried up,” says Golden, who got her degree in traditional illustration. “I’ve sent out probably a hundred resumes from L.A. to Canada, but I haven’t had a single response. Experienced people are getting laid off, so why would anyone take a chance on a college grad?”

…For years, young people have been banking on the message that acquiring job skills and an education will pave the way to financial security. Instead, for many, the quest for a college degree has only dumped them even deeper into the financial pit. For a country depending on coming generations to get us out of the economic mess we currently find ourselves in, such lack of faith in a brighter future truly is a petrifying prospect.

We’ll probably see a built in correction of sorts by simple virtue of the credit crunch lessening the availability of private student loans combined with parents’ inability to afford big ticket schools as their stock portfolios shrivel. And as unpaid internships become an institutionalized rite of passage into creative fields, this will tip the balance away from talent and towards those with parents that can afford to financially support them - in Manhattan or LA, no less - through this post college ‘emerging adult’ phase of the early twenties.

One thing that I’m incredibly curious about will be the response of popular culture, if there is one. It’s to be expected of commercial corporate media to be populated with aspirational characters that are compelling to target demographics, and unrealistic dreams and career expectations are part of being a teenager and young adult, just as disappointments and reality checks are part of growing up. But what is unique about the Millennial generation as opposed to their Baby Boomer parents or even Gen X predecessors is context in which they find themselves, the thing one must react to, but did not, or cannot, create of one’s own accord. Unlike Baby Boomers growing up with affordable tuition and housing during the resource rich time of unprecedented growth, their children face a vastly different landscape of opportunities… or lack thereof. How will this socially networked, media savvy generation who outnumber their Boomer parents respond as they find themselves in a world that looked nothing like what they may have felt they were entitled to?