The Realities of Working as a Fashion Intern

By Laurel Poole

The unpaid fashion internship is infamous online. It invokes images of The Devil Wears Prada mixed with Funny Face. Young people take unpaid internships with the hopes of being hired full time and receiving compensation for their work. However, the reality is that such positions usually end up scarring the unpaid intern, ruining the glamour of working in the fashion industry. If these stories are repeated so frequently, it begs the question of why nothing has changed. 

Evidence Doesn’t Lie

A report from the OR Foundation and the Sustainable Fashion Initiative conducted by students at the University of Cincinnati found that interns spend an average of $37,607.50 on internship experiences. All responses were from fashion interns and 77.8 percent said they received financial assistance from their families in order to do an unpaid internship.

This closes the industry off from anyone whose family may not be able to afford supporting them during an unpaid internship. This inequality is the case not only in fashion, but in many creative industries. A report coming from the Creative Industries Policies and Evidence Centre in 2020 found that only 16 percent of those working in creative industries like publishing, photography, and fashion, are from working class backgrounds within the United Kingdom. Yet, the apparel and textile sector is the fourth largest in the world and accumulates approximately $2.5 trillion a year globally.

Clearly, a lack of money isn’t holding corporations back from paying their workers properly.

From Apprenticeships To Internships

Apprenticeships can be traced back to the 1700s, but varied wildly on trade, and often included food and housing accommodations. The modern internship replaced entry-level positions in the United States most noticeably in the 1940s. In 1947, the United States Supreme Court ruled that a company didn’t have to pay railway brakemen while they were being trained for the position. Employers still use this loophole to avoid paying interns on the grounds of “training experience.”

Offering assistant work disguised as “internship experience” closes fashion off from those outside of the upper class.

Companies have come to rely so heavily on interns that in some offices, the amount of interns outnumbers full-time employees. Many brands, like Marchesa, take interns every season. These internships can last months to a year, or more. 

As the industry attempts to value sustainability, labor, and diversity, unpaid internships reflect a lack of ethics inherent to the system. This irony explains the disenchantment many Americans and the West feels towards designer goods. In 2020, new fashion spending decreased 79 percent with projected losses of over $640 billion.

Fashion builds itself up by functioning as a hierarchy of class, but its downfall is remaining tone deaf to the needs of the worker. Unpaid internships are just one of many pitfalls within fashion that reflects exactly how much major corporations value their employees.