Why are so many people in fashion retraining as therapists?

A trend has emerged that points to a growing lack of fulfillment and pleasure in fashion jobs.

By Ryan White

Recently, in conversations with our industry peers, the same announcement has come up again and again. Perhaps you’ve heard this, too, in a queue for a show or at the pub after work: “I’m retraining to become a therapist.”

We began to think this was more than just anecdotal, so took our fledgling theory to the only reliable barometer of truth on the internet, an anonymous 1 Granary Instagram Stories poll, and asked our hive-mind of followers if any of them were thinking of transitioning professionally from fashion to therapy. We received an abundance of yeses, more than enough to deduce that, get Lyst on the phone, we have indeed found a trend.

So, the next question was… how come? Trading a soulless corporate job after a few years of making shitloads of cash for something more holistic, like therapy, may be an accepted trope, but why should that trope extend to fashion? Much of the industry’s work is creative, social, and morally sound (with exception), none of the qualities that naturally inspire an early career change.

We began to suspect the answer might lie in the fact that jobs in fashion were those things, but, more recently, tactile, artistic, human-led work has steadily become more homogenous, solitary, and money-driven. So, in search of a richer understanding of this hypothesis, we spoke to a handful of fashion people – designers, editors, creative directors, lecturers – who are currently studying or practicing therapy, to get their perspective.

Everyone interviewed for this piece just so happened to have spent about 10-15 years in the industry before they began retraining in the last five, and has continued to keep a foot in the industry, even, in some cases, after fully qualifying as a licensed therapist.

Jorinde Croese

Jorinde is a founding member of 1 Granary, who after a long hiatus returned to become our editorial director. Alongside this work, she’s recently started training as a psychotherapist.

I started working in fashion when I moved to London in 2012. When the pandemic hit, things fell apart – tensions, money issues, the usual. I’d already been feeling detached from fashion. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it either. I couldn’t imagine spending another 30 years in this industry. It felt exploitative and surface-level. Somewhere along the way, I’d forgotten what drew me to fashion – creativity, self-expression, curiosity about people. I’d become cynical and disillusioned.​

That disillusionment led to an identity crisis. I can write, but I didn’t feel like writing about anything. There wasn’t a single topic that truly excited me anymore. So I started asking myself what had actually held my interest over the past few years, and the answer was mental health. It started from my own experience in therapy, reading about it, and finding real meaning there. I spent about a year thinking about what might come next, and eventually decided to apply for a foundation course in psychotherapy – partly to see if I even want to become a therapist, but also because I’m deeply curious about the field. Even if I don’t end up practising, I know that kind of knowledge could feed back into my work as a writer or editor.

A lot of people I know in fashion are in a similar place. There’s this broader sense of disillusionment. Therapy has become more visible and less stigmatised, so people are engaging with it more openly. Many who’ve gone into training, like me, were profoundly affected by their own therapy. You realise how powerful that process can be, and it becomes hard to return to an industry built on surface, aspiration, and commerce. I think many people reach a point – maybe around 10 years into their career – where they ask, Is this it? The external pressures of fashion getting tougher have only amplified that: magazines folding, brands shrinking, jobs becoming less secure. You start to question what’s meaningful, what has longevity, and what actually helps people.

“I think many people reach a point – maybe around 10 years into their career – where they ask, Is this it?”

People often say journalism and therapy have similarities because both involve listening and storytelling. But doing this course, I’ve realised they’re very different skill sets. If anything, therapy training makes you a better journalist – more attuned to silence, to what someone isn’t saying, to how you respond in the moment. A friend pointed out that maybe we’re drawn to this work precisely because we’ve spent years telling other people’s stories.

The people on my course come from every background imaginable. A lot are mothers starting second careers after raising kids. Others, like me, are re-evaluating what they want out of work. Everyone’s a bit drained, burnt out, and aware of how fragile the world feels. That collective exhaustion might be pushing people to do work that feels more rooted in care.

For me, studying therapy isn’t about abandoning fashion completely; it’s about expanding what I understand as meaningful work. It’s an experiment in depth, in paying attention differently. Maybe it’s a way to reconnect with what I lost somewhere along the way – curiosity, empathy, purpose.

Laura Scott-Rosales

Laura is a textile and fashion designer. For the first decade of her career, she worked in-house under some of the most respected designers in the industry. Today, she has a psychoanalytic practice, directs a small charity for children and families, and teaches fashion at Ravensbourne.

After graduating from my MA, I quickly reached the job everyone wanted, working for some of the best in the industry. I loved my work and the speed at which I advanced, but that same speed eventually destroyed me.

I’ve always had one foot in psychoanalysis. I’m from Latin America, where it’s common to engage in analysis from a young age. I began therapy early, paused, started again in New York, then again when I moved back to London. When I reached my last job in London, I was thriving professionally yet working extreme hours. In London, unlike New York, the textile designer also handles development, so I was doing both roles for a brand that was expanding at lightning speed. My boss’s imagination was immense, and I loved translating it into fabric, but the pace was impossible. My health began to collapse. I was in and out of hospital, diagnosed with illnesses that didn’t make sense for someone my age – pneumonia, thyroid issues, chronic insomnia.

Just before I turned 30, a doctor looked at me and said, “Do you realise you’re going to die?” I still remember holding my phone, colleagues calling to ask when I’d be back, and the doctor asking, “Is that work?” When I said yes, he asked why I was laughing. That moment was a shock. I loved my job, yet it was killing me. I went back anyway and asked for help. Eventually, they gave me an intern, so I kept going until I completely collapsed. My thyroid gave out, and I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s syndrome, an autoimmune disorder.

That collapse forced me to ask why I’d pushed myself so far. Psychoanalysis gave me a framework to explore that. It made me confront how much of my identity was tied to being productive. When insomnia made it impossible to function during regular hours, I asked myself, If I can’t do this, who am I?

“In fashion, help is withheld precisely because employers know you love the work.”

Fashion isolates you inside a bubble where everything feels urgent and personal. You think your deadline is the most important thing in the world. It’s not just the long hours that push people toward therapy; it’s what those hours reveal. In fashion, help is withheld precisely because employers know you love the work. The job gives you a deep, almost addictive pleasure – what I call the silent recognition. Your boss’s name appears in Vogue or Business of Fashion, praised for textiles or silhouettes you developed. You feel proud because you know the credit is partly yours, but your name never appears. That invisibility is intoxicating and destructive at the same time.

Fashion isn’t simply capitalist – it’s almost feudal. It revolves around a monarch figure, a single “genius” at the centre, while everyone else remains unseen. It’s an older system than capitalism, but now it’s been swallowed by it, creating a double bind. You’re working under both regimes at once: absolute creative power and corporate efficiency. Navigating that contradiction damages people. I see it constantly in my consulting room. It isn’t only fashion – I work with writers too, and the patterns are similar – but fashion is the most extreme expression of it.

Psychoanalysis has helped me understand those structures: the mix of pleasure, ego, and annihilation that creative industries produce. It’s helped me see that we need new ways of defining value and success, ways that don’t depend on sacrificing our health or invisibly propping up someone else’s legend.

Pandora Lennard

Pandora is an executive creative director and founder of the street-casting agency Anti-Agency. She trained as a clinical psychodynamic psychotherapist and ADHD diagnostician, and now runs a private practice. @polymorphouslyperverse and @pandoralennard

I actually started out studying psychology, but it was really clinical and statistical, and I found it quite uninspiring. During the summer, I interned at Tank magazine, and it was the height of fashion being fun – parties at Claridge’s, free handbags, late nights. I remember thinking, Why would I go back to lectures when I could do this? So I dropped out and stayed in fashion. I was asked if I wanted to be a writer or a stylist. Styling sounded easier, so I went with that.

Eventually, I felt like styling wasn’t expressive enough. I couldn’t communicate what interested me with advertisers to please, and on-set hierarchies diminished the role of styling to wardrobe. After Tank, I freelanced and did creative consulting but got frustrated with how closed and repetitive representation in the industry felt, so I created Anti-Agency. It came together in a week and was on the cover of the Evening Standard the next. It was born from frustration. Brands looked at models as one-dimensional clothes hangers, when people buying and wearing clothes are complex and multifaceted. Influencers didn’t exist yet. When it caught on, I was thrilled, but eventually I became disillusioned again: diversity-washing, green-washing, everything came down to hype and money.

When I started in fashion, it was a career built on art, expression, and value for the humanities. Over time, it became more like a science; data lead creative, economic value, self-promotion, and commodification. It stopped being a safe space to express yourself and became about money and scrutiny. Fashion has evolved by gathering data on your psyche and building strategies to effectively manipulate you into purchasing things. Clothing is coded and fashion advertising sells us our biggest insecurities back to us with a guarantee no one will know; buy this shape wear to love your figure, buy this luxury brand to feel good enough, buy from this exclusive drop to feel like an insider, and buy from that sustainable brand so you can live with yourself.

“When I started in fashion, it was an art form, a career built on values. Over time, it became about economic value.”

After enough bad experiences and burnout in fashion, I thought that working in mental health and academia would be more meaningful. I thought it was about helping people, but quickly I realised it’s not. People have friends and TikTok for advice. Psychotherapy isn’t advice-giving; it’s not about you at all, most of the time. You, your brain and your unconscious are tools for hire. It’s not dissimilar to being a creative freelancer. But coming from fashion, where self-expression is everything, to dressing neutrally and keeping my personal life out of the room, it was a shock to transition into a blank canvas for people to project onto me.

Creative people – especially in fashion – tend to be highly intuitive, sensitive, often outsiders who found belonging through aesthetics and culture. That’s why they’re good at predicting trends and forming communities of early adopters. Fashion used to be an art form, full of crossovers with literature and visual art. That world has mostly gone. Now we have Dior handbags of books no one has read and Gucci ads with teen models holding Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.

But I don’t hate fashion. I perversely love it. And I’m grateful for it. It’s just that it had stopped being fun, and I couldn’t express myself anymore. I reached a point where I realised I needed to do something that felt genuine and sustainable. The fashion world glamorises exhaustion. People compete over who’s busiest, who’s most tired, who’s done the most shows at Fashion Week. It’s a strange hierarchy of burnout. I’ve seen so many people become ill from it – autoimmune conditions, IBS, eczema, poor sleep. Your body eventually tells you what your mind can’t admit: something is wrong.

Therapy for me, at its best, feels like the creative space fashion used to be. Carl Jung says therapy is alchemical: you never know what will happen when two minds meet in a safe space. There’s no agenda, just curiosity. For me, the psychodynamic approach is deeply creative.

Of course, the scrutiny aspect doesn’t disappear. In therapy, your patients project onto you: they wonder if you’re married, rich, kind, cold. You can’t answer, but you learn about them from what they imagine. People will see you as their mother, boss or ex. It means you have to be comfortable with every part of yourself and the parts of others. I practise under a professional name to give patients the best chance of a blank canvas, but I’m learning that to be a good therapist, you can’t hide the parts of yourself that formed you. It’s not so different from creativity; you also have to be authentic.

Tom Murphy

Tom is a shoemaker who has worked with a number of London independent brands and now runs a brand with his partner. He’s also been a lecturer at the RCA and LCF. He’s currently in the final year of training to become a psychotherapist.

Before Covid, I’d started personal therapy, and what came out of that was how much I valued real human connection. Around the same time, I was teaching at the Royal College of Art and collaborating with young designers. My job was to help them realise their ideas, but I found half of what I did was listening – hearing their insecurities, their doubts about whether they were good enough. The work was split between making shoes and supporting people emotionally, which, in hindsight, was already a kind of therapy.

When the pandemic hit, I’d moved out of London and began questioning whether I wanted to stay in fashion forever. I realised the parts I found most meaningful weren’t the products but the relationships – the mentoring, the conversations. So I started training as a psychotherapist. I still work part-time in fashion, collaborating with a few designers, but the balance has shifted. I probably do half and half: therapy and design.

For me, fashion just wasn’t enough anymore. Making beautiful things gave me satisfaction for a while, but eventually it felt hollow. The human element was missing. It became a means to an end – producing, delivering, being efficient – but rarely did anyone say thank you or seem moved by the work. I felt lonely and disconnected, spending long hours in the studio. Fashion, though, is a hard world to leave. It’s intoxicating – the pace, the glamour, the creative buzz – and what’s unacceptable elsewhere quickly becomes normal there. Working through the night, ignoring your health, sacrificing everything for a show or a deadline. It’s a culture without boundaries, and after a while, you don’t even notice. Every time I tried to step away completely, something pulled me back in. There’s an addictive quality to it. For many of us, the idea of saying I’m not in fashion anymore feels like failure. But I think more people are beginning to see that it’s okay to want something different, something more human.

“I have friends who’ve worked for the biggest luxury houses in the world, and almost all of them would say it’s brutally hard, often joyless, and yet impossible to leave.”

I have friends who’ve worked for the biggest luxury houses in the world, and almost all of them would say it’s brutally hard, often joyless, and yet impossible to leave. You’re only as good as your last collection or campaign. Therapy, by contrast, offers something completely different: space, listening, real human exchange. In that sense, therapy feels like the antidote. It’s the opposite of fashion’s performance. No one knows what you do; there’s no applause, no catwalk, no show. It happens behind closed doors. It’s private, quiet, and real. The satisfaction comes from depth, not visibility. When you sit with someone and they start to understand themselves differently, that’s meaningful. It’s something that lasts longer than a seven-minute runway show you’ve worked six months for.

I think a lot of people in creative industries are starting to crave that – something nourishing, something with boundaries. Fashion doesn’t really have them. It’s normal to work through the night and live on adrenaline. What therapy teaches is almost the opposite: to stop, to feel, to reflect. It’s about being rather than constantly doing. That’s a radical shift for anyone from fashion, where identity is tied to productivity and self-promotion. As a therapist, there’s no need to broadcast who you are. You’re not curating an image. It’s not about followers or aesthetics – it’s about honesty, presence, and empathy.

I still love aspects of fashion. It’s creative, expressive, and can be transformative. But it’s also exploitative, boundaryless, and often dehumanising. You can make the most beautiful shoes in the world, but if the process destroys you, what’s the point?

Modesta Dziautaite

Modesta is an executive creative director who started in fashion journalism before moving towards commercial creative direction within media companies like Condé Nast. Now she is in her first year of studying to become a psychotherapist.

My early work was writing show reviews during the rise of Hintmag and Fashion156. It was a really exciting moment – the democratisation of fashion, when the internet felt fresh and full of possibility. I interned everywhere, endlessly, until I got my first job at Nowness. That was when fashion film was just emerging, and journalism was shifting into short-form storytelling before “content” became the word for everything. We had genuine creative freedom, and it felt new and meaningful.

Eventually, I moved to Condé Nast, into the commercial side – brand partnerships across Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair, and others – using the magazines’ reach to help brands shape cultural narratives. At first, it felt exciting to be inside the machine, trying to make the work smarter, more purposeful, to use that visibility to tell better stories. Then I realised that wasn’t what most clients wanted. The real priority was selling product, not ideas. The volume, the speed, the repetition – it all started to drain any sense of creativity. I missed depth, originality, and long-form thinking.

I’d been in personal therapy for about five years by then, and that experience changed me. It shifted my sense of what mattered and what I wanted my work to do. Therapy gave me a language for reflection, a way to explore identity and meaning, and I began to see how powerful reframing can be. It struck me that, in a different form, that’s what I’d always tried to do through writing and editing: helping people see things from a new perspective. Therapy just offered a truer, more human version of that.

Fashion had once been my space for self-expression and belonging. Like a lot of people who go into the industry, I’d been a bit of a misfit at school. At first, fashion was a playground for that. But then it became fashionable, as Louise Wilson liked to say, and somewhere along the way it lost its soul. Therapy felt like rediscovering what fashion used to give me: a place to explore who you are, what drives you, how you connect with others.

“Therapy felt like rediscovering what fashion used to give me: a place to explore who you are, what drives you, how you connect with others.”

A couple of years ago, I took a foundation diploma in counseling as a bridge between careers, and now I’m in the first year of a four-year master’s in psychotherapy. It’s a long, rigorous process – next year I’ll start seeing clients, building up 450 supervised clinical hours before I can qualify with the UKCP [United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy]. For now, it’s theory, skills practice with peers, and group therapy. It’s humbling, starting again from scratch, but it feels right.

Fashion today feels relentless – an infinite scroll of output. You pour yourself into a project, post it, and it disappears within hours. That erosion of meaning does something to your confidence, to your sense of self. There’s no time to pause or reflect; everyone’s just feeding the machine. I see that in myself and in friends who’ve burned out. The system rewards overwork and public performance. Therapy, by contrast, values slowness, silence, introspection – all the things fashion now discourages.

I see a lot of peers quietly retraining or building new parallel lives. Some are studying, others exploring hobbies that might one day become careers. We’re all questioning whether the industry we entered still exists in the same form, or if it’s even compatible with a healthy life. For me, therapy offered an alternative rhythm, a focus on listening instead of producing, presence instead of projection.

In therapy, you’re just present. And I think that shift from performance to presence is what a lot of people are yearning for now.

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