Author:Alexandra MondalekPublish date:May 30, 2019Updated onMay 30, 2019Welcome to Career Week! While we always make career-focused content a priority on Fashionista, we thought spring would be a good time to give you an extra helping of tips and tricks on how to make it in the fashion and beauty industries.
The growing sentiment budding among professionals in the fashion industry is that burnout culture — characterized by a series of dualities like long hours met with low pay; slashed budgets and greater project deliverables; the need to produce more content or product in a saturated market; and an insatiable social media machine — is spreading across the industry with no evident solution in sight.
Of course, the phenomenon of burnout exists outside of fashion but the industry may be uniquely prone to it. Several fashion insiders admitted feeling it to Fashionista, on and off the record. The nature of the 24-7 news cycle, social media, overproduction and inadequate compensation within the industry all contribute to feelings of burnout in fashion, which you can read about more in-depth below.
"I think our industry continues to glamorize the 'busy' factor of it all and makes it 'cool' to be so busy that you lose sight of just how overworked you actually may be," a 25-year-old fashion public relations professional, who asked to remain anonymous, tells Fashionista. "There's an oversaturation of product, and people buying more stuff makes companies try to compete and makes workers have to compete ... especially when you work at a big company, you're at a point where you don't get to make a decision about whether you should be working on something, you just are," Criales adds.
The aforementioned publicist described a typical 50-hour workweek, a schedule in itself normal by New York-standards, but one that is characterized by early mornings spent putting out fires for European clients, who operate six to eight hours ahead of New York, followed by afternoons playing catch up. That kind of schedule is only exacerbated during fashion month, when "burnout is the worst.
"That's so demoralizing, [media executives] in these positions talk about empowerment and equality, but you're not addressing the fact that the girl in your fashion department gets paid $28,000 a year," Patel says, referring to the salary for an assistant at one of the world's biggest fashion magazines.