Road To Success

Fashion brings people together, no matter how different they are. But it's not always easy to follow your dream when the industry is cut throat.

For a majority of young girls fashion is important, it’s a form of expression and art. For four girls in particular, it’s a career aspiration. Jessica, Lauren, Isabelle and Zoe all hope to get a job out of fashion journalism, one of the toughest careers to break into, but not impossible.

For Jessica, fashion journalism combines two of her passions, allowing her to immerse herself in two artistic fields that help her use her creativity in differing ways. For her, fashion has an ever changing face that has steadily developed its own artistic niche and reputation that demands to be heard, and fashion journalism allows that.

Jessica can see herself in a life long career with fashion journalism, not only in traditional fashion media such as magazines but with ever growing technologies, online sources seem to be the future

“I would like fashion journalism to lead me to recognition for my work in well publications, eventually developing into editor positions.”

Social media throughout the years has made drastic changes to journalism, there are cons and pros to this. Jessica’s view on this was that social media has provided a giant platform for fashion journalism to reach far wider audiences. However, with this outreach, quality of work can be lacking.

” Social media in this day and age not only benefits journalism, but the fashion realm allowing for new developments in bloggers and self made fashion icons to develop status within the industry.”

I was interested to find out what each different girl thought were the biggest changes in fashion in the past 10 years, through interviewing them all, I noticed they were completely different people with nothing in common apart from wanting to be fashion journalists, all dressed differently, all had different hobbies and interests and all had a different approach on the questions being asked.

Jessica thought we had ‘literally’ gone back to the 90’s when it came to fashion.

“The use of vegan or cruelty free clothing items has become far more of a larger issue with teams such as PETA rallying against the use of fur and animal products within the fashion industry.”

Isabelle and Zoe’s reasoning for wanting to be a fashion journalist were a little simpler than Jessica’s and related more to trends rather than the artistic side of fashion.

“I have a great interest in fashion and following the newest trends.” Said Isabelle.

“I just love clothes, and celebrities, and celebrities wearing amazing clothes.” Said Zoe

They both also viewed it as a way of being able to travel the world and experience different things, with cities such as New York and Paris sparking her interests. Isabelle had only a positive view on the way social media could effect fashion journalism claiming that it allows for a larger audience to be reached through the use of many different platforms. Zoe agreed with this but also saw the same negatives that Jessica stated.

Isabelle’s personality was shown during her last answer to the question of how fashion has changed with her answer simply being ‘crocs’.

Fashion bloggers have become internet sensations over the past couple of years, and I was lucky enough to interview Lauren, who goes by theblkcanvas online, who is interested in fashion journalism because she gets to share and write about fashion, and its a mix of both of her interests. She also believes it’s a really interesting and diverse career that lets you meet lots of other creative people in the industry. Like Isabelle, Lauren hopes that fashion journalism will give her more travelling opportunities, and she would love to interview and photograph people in other countries and share different cultured fashion with her readers. Japan being one of her favourites.

“I think the most drastic changes in fashion over the past 10 years would definitely have to be influenced by the internet. Through Instagram, tumblr, facebook and even pinterest, it has become so much easier to find people in the industry and get in contact with other people who are doing the same thing.”

Lauren uses the internet to share her own style and it has been such a great way to establish herself in the industry especially due to its competitiveness.

“I think the social media has definitely made people feel more confident in sharing their own personal style, and this is definitely not something that could have happened 10 years ago”