When I was in junior high, I had a huge desire to become a fashion designer. I thought there was just something so cool about seeing something that you made being worn by someone you didn’t even know.
And so, in the summer of 2009, I signed up for this event called 3 Days of Fashion at FIDM (Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising) in LA. It was an event where you could meet your future classmates, get an intro into the fashion business, and get to know Los Angeles a little better. Overall, I was quite excited.
Now, if you know me personally, you know I’m a very quiet person. This proves to be a problem whenever I’m in a new place because it’s very difficult for me to make new friends. However, on the first day of this, I met two girls, Jonika and Marie, and everything worked out splendidly afterwards.
By the end of the event, I had had a lot of fun, but I just didn’t feel right about going into a career in fashion anymore. There was something very amiss. And a few things that I heard from staff at the school really irked me.
On one of the days, we took a tour of the city on a bus. They talked to us about trends as well as showcasing to us the wonderful city of Los Angeles. While we were driving around, someone on the bus asked,
“How do we come up with trends?”
Our tour guide answered,
“We don’t. All the trends you see in our culture come directly from European trends.”
She said it so nonchalantly as if everyone knew but that just really got me mad. We don’t make any of our trends? What’s the point of even becoming a fashion designer then?
I am not a person who is very subject to trends or fads, so the whole idea that we had to pay attention to all the trends turned me off and then to add to that, the only thing we had to do to become a successful trendsetter in America was to pay attention to European fashion designers. That just seemed so boring to me. So distasteful and shameful.
The other big thing that turned me off from fashion was all the capitalism and superficiality involved. Mostly everyone there only cared about status, money, and image. Was I the only one who just wanted to make the world a better place by selling cheap, fashionable clothing? I didn’t even need to make a fantastic living off my label. I just wanted to make people happy and not have them spending their entire paychecks on one shirt.
And so, that weekend I spent at FIDM was reason #1 why I stopped wanting to be a fashion designer.
