I had a question perhaps someone here has an experience with…do you know what schools are good for fashion , specifically fashion stylist, which is what my D has an interest in? She is not interested in working in retail per se , unless it was perhaps a personal shopper type thing. Wasnt sure which schools would be good for this…
I mean, I can name some schools that have fashion design programs - like Fashion Institute of Technology, UC-Davis, and Cornell. But I don’t think your daughter has to major in fashion or go to a school that has a focus on fashion to be a fashion stylist; she just needs to find a way to get a connection into the industry.
The first people that came to mind re: fashion stylists (not designers) were the hosts of the TLC series What Not to Wear, Stacy London and Clinton Kelly. London went to Vassar and majored in German literature and philosophy; she realized she was interested in fashion after interning in Dior’s PR department, and started out as a fashion assistant for magazines like Vogue and Mademoiselle. Kelly was a communications major with a master’s degree in journalism, and also worked his way up through New York fashion magazines like Marie Claire. Then I thought of Carson Kressley from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and he majored in management and fine art at Gettysburg and started out as an independent stylist.
Then I checked out some lists of celebrity stylists. Petra Flannery (who styles Emma Stone, Claire Danes, Amy Adams, and Zoe Saldana) majored in political science at USC; Sophie Lopez (who styles Kate Hudson) studied social politics at Loughborough University in the UK and then did a styling course afterwards, interned at GQ and worked her way to fashion assistant. Micaela Erlanger (Lupita Nyong’o) went to Parsons. Rachel Zoe studied psychology and sociology at GWU and started out as a magazine editor. Not all of the stylists had their education listed, but of the ones that did, I only found two that studied fashion, and only one studied it at an art school (the above-mentioned Erlanger. Another majored in fashion at the University of Cincinnati.)
I don’t really know a whole lot about this career field, so I can’t be sure whether what I’m seeing is typical or not - after all, these are celebrity stylists. It’s like using Mark Zuckerberg as a model for dropping out of college. But everything I’ve seen and heard about fashion suggests that it’s skill, experience, and connections that get you gigs. A very common career path is to start out as an intern and fashion assistant at fashion magazines, helping to put together the styles for layouts and shoots. (Most of the stylists I checked out seem to have started this way, or interning at a fashion house in some other capacity). It’s possible that majoring in fashion helps insofar as you get familiar with textiles and fabrics; the top fashion schools like Parsons or FIT may even have more connections into the industry and such. And going to college in a top fashion city like New York probably helps, especially if you want some academic-year internships - a poster in here a few weeks ago pointed out (correctly) that several NYC-based fashion mags do not have summer internships and only hire academic-year interns who live locally.
However, as you can see, a lot of the stylists I looked up did NOT go to school in NYC. They either interned at a fashion house or mag over the summer (most fashion mags DO have summer internships, particularly the big Conde Nast ones) or they moved to NYC or LA after college and started interning.
The other - unfortunate - thing seems to be that students of fashion seem to need to be able to forgo income, or large incomes, for several months or years after college as they work their way up. Fashion interns often make nothing, and fashion/production assistants don’t make very much and live in very expensive cities.
RISD comes to mind {Rhode Island School of Design) although what @juillet wrote rings true with me also. Just anecdotal as well, but it does seem like a lot of people come to this area from all kinds of backgrounds. I know a person at Tulane’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine that is finishing her masters. However, she got involved in Fashion Week in New Orleans her sophomore year and has remained involved in that as well, including working with some design people I think, as well as the modeling she has done. Will her career go in that direction? I have no idea, and I am not sure she does either yet.
Anyway, it also occurs to me that a person can have a major such as history and use that to study design as well as develop academic skills. I could even see having a double major in business or a minor in management, just in case one’s career goes in that direction. Anyway, just adding that to juilett’s thoughts about alternatives to going the straight “design major” route. Not that there is anything wrong with that direction as well.