How pain shapes a career in fashion
Beyond glamour or ambition, fashion offered a refuge – a creative adjustment to pain, loneliness, or the desire to belong.
Have you ever wondered why certain people are drawn to working in fashion? A writer and Gestalt therapist in training, curious about this, asks a handful of industry peers to share their stories. But first, news!
Redundancies for A/W26
Another week, another round of layoffs in fashion. This time at Alexander McQueen, who shared their plans with WWD to cut up to a third of jobs – cue redundancy-bingo keywords like restructuring, commitment, and long-term growth – which translates to about 55 employees in their London HQ. As a luxury brand, McQueen will naturally be affected by the great industry slowdown. As a Kering brand, more specifically, they’ll be feeling the consequences of a particularly rough year. When Gucci sneezes, the whole of Kering catches a cold… That being said, the brand allegedly hasn’t been profitable for a while, so its misfortunes can’t solely be blamed on Gucci.
Vibes monopolisation
Pharrell, aided by the full might of the LVMH legal team, presumably, is fighting the claim that Louis Vuitton’s men’s knitted sweaters for A/W25 infringed on Coogi’s copyright. The counterargument puts that Coogi’s knits’ “undefined, functional aesthetic” lacks “protectable expression, consistent use, or secondary meaning”. Or, as The Fashion Law put it, “Louis Vuitton, Pharrell Say Coogi is Trying to Monopolize a Vibe”. If you can’t picture a Coogi sweater, there’s that image of The Notorious B.I.G. wearing a multicoloured one and sunglasses against a white studio backdrop that does the rounds on Insta a lot. We’re not going to link to it in case you get distracted and forget to read our newsletter.
How much is a flight to Antwerp?
Tickets are on sale for a very exciting new exhibition at MoMU Antwerp celebrating the Antwerp Six. It’ll mark 40 years since the designers first met at the Royal Academy and – surprisingly – is the first major exhibition dedicated to their collective work. We spoke to one of the six’s more elusive members, Marina Yee, earlier this year. A necessary read for anyone fascinated by the inner workings of this fashion vanguard (that doesn’t require you to leave the 1 Granary Substack).
Megawatchsaleolis
Following the monumental box office bomb that was Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola is putting a few of his watches on the resale market to recoup a lil bit of cash. Who among us hasn’t turned to the resell apps after an ill-advised blow out? Meanwhile, two suspects in the Paris Louvre heist have been caught, so at least two remain at large. Where were you on the morning of October 19th, Mr Coppola?
Congrats Nicklas Skovgaard!
The Wessel & Vett Fashion Prize – the Nordic region’s biggest fashion award, on which 1 Granary sits on the jury – announced Danish womenswear designer Nicklas Skovgaard as this year’s winner. He’ll receive about £60,000 on top of the mentoring in sales, production, PR, and business development that all finalists receive.
By Shonagh Marshall
It feels well trodden at this point to talk about some of the issues at play when working in the fashion industry – unfair pay, long hours, discrimination, nepotism, racism, classism, sexism… I could go on. But why did so many of us come to work in fashion in the first place? It is a space that deals in fantasies, a shiny, slippery mirror surface that draws us in and reflects us back at ourselves. Then again, if it were so appealing, wouldn’t everyone want to work in fashion? There has clearly been a rise in interest in fashion as fashion shows evolved from cloistered trade events to huge celebrity extravaganzas, but recently, I have been intrigued about what else might be at play, a common thread, so to speak, in the experiences people had that came to influence their interest as young people.
For context: I have spent the last three years retraining as a Gestalt therapist. Up until now, my work has been fashion curation – shows like Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore!, Hair by Sam McKnight, and English as a Second Language, as well as writing and teaching. Now, I am learning how Gestalt theories can be applied to the nuances of the industry.
While studying, one particular theory caught my interest in relation to fashion: the Gestalt idea of a creative adjustment. A creative adjustment is the thinking that, in particular situations, we creatively adapt to meet the scenario. This can at times be life-saving, say if you are growing up with abusive parents, you might become a people pleaser – walking on eggshells you become amenable and pleasant. This works well as a child, but as an adult, you may find yourself in a toxic work environment. At this point, pleasing people is not helpful, and you have to develop a new approach for this new environment. Gestalt therapists don’t pathologise this adaptation; instead, we see the person’s strength, resilience, intelligence, and creativity to survive a challenging situation. Looking at it this way helps honour the person and what they went through.
In my work as a therapist, I began to consider fashion as a creative adjustment. To a young person, it can offer solace and escape, a vehicle for identity, self-expression, and belonging, a way to jet-pack yourself away from poverty, bullying, loneliness, boredom, neglect, or physical and emotional abuse into the pages of a magazine. It certainly held that appeal for me growing up in an unstable situation, as I desperately leafed through Vogue, wishing I could live that seemingly beautiful, magical life. Thinking about my experience as a young person in many ways, fashion saved me – my reality was too difficult to be in.
I became curious if other people had had similar experiences. Fashion is a play of smoke and mirrors, and for this piece, we asked people working in fashion what it was like for them before they saw behind the scenes, when fashion was all glamour and fantasy. What did fashion mean to them as young people? What were their fashion origin stories? This may not be a universal experience for all who carve out a career in the industry, but for many, it seems that the jobs we hold have far more significance than just earning money. They are so completely imbued in our sense of self and, in some cases, fashion was at one point a lifeline into another world.
Some of the following names have been changed.
Elisabetta
I grew up in a house where love was complicated and silence often weighed heavier than words. My brother was born with paraplegia (the result of a doctor’s mistake that altered his nervous system and, in many ways, the course of my family’s life). My mother poured everything she had into him, and I don’t blame her for that. He is the best thing that has ever happened to me. But in her devotion, I often felt like glass, fragile, invisible, seen through rather than seen.