Are there too many interns in fashion or not enough work?

What does it take to break into fashion? According to a friend of mine: a LinkedIn profile, a firm handshake, and a high tolerance to boredom.  

At some point this afternoon, checking the time has become the main deliverable. A friend of mine recently started an internship at Yves Saint Laurent in Paris, which, on paper, sounds like the beginning of a very good story. In practice, it is often the beginning of a very long afternoon. She told me she goes home exhausted most days, not because she is overworked, but because she has done almost nothing. There are other interns around her in the same situation, all recruited through proper interviews, all approved by job titles with calendars, all waiting for someone to remember why they were hired in the first place. 

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Are there too many interns in fashion? The honest answer is that fashion does not have too many interns, but too many reasons to keep inventing them. Internships are useful to everyone involved. Universities get to say they prepare students for the industry. Brands get to look dynamic, youthful, and supportive of “the next generation”, which looks great in annual reports. Students will get a logo on their resumé that will open doors whether or not the experience behind it opened anything at all. 

The industry that invented the waiting list

The research, for its part, is not especially romantic about any of this. One study of fashion students found a very weak, statistically insignificant relationship between internship experience and learning outcomes, with internships accounting for just 1.6% of the variation in performance. One point six percent is not a transformative bridge between school and industry. It’s not even a decent SPF. It suggests that the internship, so often sold as the key moment when theory becomes practice, can also be a beautifully branded detour. The study even points to the problem directly: misalignment. Interns are present in companies, yes, but the work they are given is not always tied to what they are supposed to learn. Which is a very serious way of saying that folding tissue paper may build character, but it does not necessarily build competence. 

And yet, saying fashion has too many interns would also be a bit dishonest, because some interns are very quite busy. Some are doing the work of junior staff on intern wages, or on no wages, depending on the city and the company’s moral flexibility. Some are not underused but overused, drafted into the daily churn because the team is understaffed and the budget is allergic to permanent hires. In that version of the story, the intern is not ornamental at all. She is cheap labor in good shoes. 

Fully booked or barely briefed?

The same study notes, without much surprise but with some satisfaction, that interns learn most when they are actually treated like part of the company, when they are given responsibilities, proper supervision, and the vague but thrilling sense that someone trusts them more than a coffee order. Interns rated their experiences highest when they felt integrated, valued, and given meaningful tasks; they rated them worse when they felt ignored, badly guided, or simply parked in a corner with a title. Maybe the real question is not whether there are too many interns, but whether there are too many internships that exist as prestige décor. Fashion, of course, loves décor, it’s one of its core competencies. It decorates bodies, stores, websites, dinners, campaigns, and, when necessary, entire corporate structures. Why would the internship be spared?

The answer, like the fitting, depends

The thing with this question is that it’s all over the place. Ask whether there are too many interns, and you’re suddenly really asking whether fashion knows how to train people, whether brands want talent or just access to ambition, whether young workers are entering an industry or just orbiting it. So, are there too many interns in fashion? Yes, if half of them are there to perfect the art of looking busy. No, if what the industry really has is too little structure, too little management, and too much faith in the holiness of brand names. Yes again, if internships have become a substitute for proper entry-level jobs. No again, if the real shortage is not positions but adults willing to mentor. 

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Fashion asks a lot of young people and offers, in return, the considerable privilege of wanting to be there. For many, that is genuinely enough. For the rest, there is always the commute home to reconsider. My friend, for her part, has started bringing a book.