Culture of humiliation: Why is there so much abuzz in fashion
AT THE END OF APRIL THE BUSINESS OF FASHION PORTAL He released a large investigation into the suicide of a student at the Antwerp Academy of Fine Arts - he was a third year student of the design department from South Korea. The academy, where Martin Marghela, Drys van Notein, Walter van Beyrendonk and Demna Gvasalia studied at the time, is one of the three most prestigious universities in the fashion industry - along with New York’s Parsons and London Central Saint Martins. Unfortunately, suicides at the best universities in the world are not uncommon: students simply cannot stand the load, the atmosphere of competition and academic stress. But the story of a young Korean designer provoked a workshop discussion that had been brewing for more than a year: what is wrong with the culture of behavior in the fashion industry? Is she healthy at all?
It is difficult to enter the Antwerp Academy, and it is even more difficult to complete a graduate project in it: if sixty to seventy students take the first year of design, then a bachelor’s degree gets a maximum of twenty. Without strict standards and strict screening of quality education does not happen - it does not matter, we are talking about clothing design, directing or nuclear physics. But the text of The Business of Fashion is about something else.
The author quotes the students of the Academy, former and present, and they say that around the third year curator, Walter van Beyrendonk, "a real cult arose", and everyone who is not among the favorites is subjected to humiliation. Life favorites are also not sugar: to cope with the stress arising from the number of tasks, many begin to take drugs. In the comments to the text, readers recall their experience of studying in design schools - both at the Antwerp Academy of the mid-eighties and at the Marangoni Institute, zero students faced similar situations. From the many admissions of graduates it follows that psychological pressure, clinical depression, the amount of work that cannot be physically handled, constant stress and the fact that some people call it “culture of humiliation” did not appear in the fashion industry today and do not disappear.
There are plenty of examples - what is from the life of designers, what is from the life of fashion gloss. In 2011, Christoph Dekarnen, who then headed Balmain, went to a psychiatric hospital. The only American editor-in-chief of French Vogue, Joan-Juliet Buck, in her memoirs described how she escaped to a rehabilitation clinic from the corporate wars Condé Nast - and even being recognized healthy, she asked to keep her in the clinic for a little longer, "so that she would not have to return to work" . Alyona Doletskaya in a recent book “Not a Life, but a Fairy Tale” told something similar: Natalia Gandurina, at that time still the publisher of Russian Vogue, was taken from her job to a psycho-neurological dispensary. Gandurina herself, however, managed to be remembered by the initiative to ban the presence of dogs in the office of the Russian Condé Nast - it was introduced against the husky of Alyona Doletskaya.
In the fashion industry, designers and editors of gloss are enough to look at the current working environment as a mechanism of natural selection.
Abuse in the fashion industry has existed more or less always - and even rooted in it so much that some began to consider it an integral part of the creative process and an "attribute of geniuses." “I read somewhere here,” Karl Lagerfeld, in an interview with French Numéro, said, “Now you need to ask the models if they are comfortable posing. This is just a bust. The designer can’t do anything else.” In the same interview, he adds: "If you don’t want your pants removed, go not to the model, but to the monastery, there’s enough room for everyone." And the accusations that he set the rhythm of work for the fashion industry, which cannot be sustained without the risk of professional burnout, decisively rejects: “Absurdity. When you have a billion-dollar business, you must comply. And if [this rhythm of work] does not suit you, go better experiment in your bathroom. "
In the fashion industry, designers and editors of gloss are enough to look at the current working environment as a kind of mechanism of natural selection: only the best can withstand and not unstuck. At the same time, the most stress-resistant are equated to the "best": a strong mind and sense of duty are considered a professional priority. And talent, intelligence and vision, in fact, turn out to be secondary - despite the fact that it is, ironically, that the main design universities of the world are trying to cultivate in students.
Could a spartan approach benefit the industry? On the one hand, volitional leaders, as well as responsible performers, are necessary. On the other hand, the dominance (and often impunity) of "hard functionaries" emasculates fashion. Among the most famous opponents of the current fashion industry system is Raf Simons. Shortly after leaving Dior, he spoke to fashion critic Katy Horin for System magazine: "The problem is that when you have one team and six collections a year, there is no time to think. And I don’t want to work without thinking ".
What can we say about the pressure to which not a creative director of a fashion house is subjected, but a young employee: assistant stylist, junior fashion editor, novice PR man. The market is oversaturated with applicants for "junior" positions: there is less need for special skills (sign the names of the brands involved in the shooting, send press releases and deliver things to showrooms during the month), and the competition is much higher. Open entry level vacancies are sometimes even hard to find - and even harder to get. The average gloss editor receives about fifty-one hundred letters for an advertisement about finding trainees.
In the column for The Business of Fashion journalist Annabel Maldonado says that young employees often face threats and insults, pay them very little, but they are constantly blackmailed by dismissal: employers do not tire of reminding their subordinates that they are easy to replace. Maldonado recalls that attempts to make a career in fashion for many ended in depression and even post-traumatic stress disorder. Sometimes interns, junior editors and assistants have a relationship with work, more like the Stockholm syndrome.
“At my first internship, which overgrew into part-time work, I was paid with underwear,” recalls the author of the Telegram channel about Good morning, Karl! Katya Fedorova. “I worked in the PR department of the brand of luxury linen in New York, but since I didn’t have working papers, I couldn’t officially pay me and gave me a salary in goods. My more enterprising colleague sold it on eBay. I was embarrassed, so most of it is still untouched at home. Not my style, but to throw out sorry. "
Suffer deprivation of many make dreams of a career future. “With a good internship, you get not only an excellent education, but also experience, contacts, some experience for the portfolio - and all this, unlike the university, is completely free for you,” Fyodorova explains. “You can learn from professionals and try different things, but at the same time know that if something goes wrong, you will cover the authorities. " Experience really turns out to be a valuable currency. But at the same time, cases when junior editors, in order to work for free in the fashion industry, at the same time get hired as waiters, meet very often.
Annabel Maldonado says that young employees often face threats and insults, they are paid very little, but they are constantly blackmailed by dismissal.
Examples of ethical and at the same time effective management in fashion still exist - this is how the famous fashion houses Dries Van Noten and Alaïa work. Van Noten produces exactly two collections per year. In each of them, he necessarily includes items with embroidery to provide employment and income for embroiderers working with the house from India. In the team of Dries van Noten, it is customary to communicate on an equal footing, and instead of emails, they prefer live conversation. The behavior culture in Azzedine Alaya’s house was similar: he perceived the staff as his family, often gathered them for dinner to exchange ideas, openly stated that the rhythm of work accepted in fashion was “impossible”, and even had a break for several years. recover. But these are independent, self-sustaining fashion houses that produce just as much clothes as they can sell, and do not pursue super-profit. Luxury giants who own most of the houses from Chanel to Saint Laurent are more difficult to manage with ethical management.
Over the past thirty years, the gloss budgets have fallen sharply - multi-million spending on film and huge teams of stellar journalists from Vanity Fair since the eighties cannot be imagined today. But the amount of work has only increased, so that nervousness goes down vertically - from the authorities to the subordinates. But considering stress as a unique feature of the modern fashion world is a naive exaggeration, Ksenia Solovyova, editor-in-chief of Tatler, reminds: "The problems of top managers from some steel corporation of the 2004 model are no different from ours today. Men in suits still groan under load mails, meetings, subordinates who drag their problems to them. But then they didn’t have any instant messengers, instagram, and Amazon didn’t attempt on their market share. And startups in Silicon Valley? People sleep there for three hours and all the time they stimulate themselves eparatami varying degrees prohibited. A young law graduates who spend the night on the couch in his office, only to ever become a partner? Stress is applied to the current life and success. And this, too, must deal with. "
However, Solovyov is convinced that it is impossible to simply increase the workload of employees: "In our company, no one squeezes out all the juice for a long time. What is the point of increasing working hours? This is understandable like two or two: a person will burn very quickly. At the end of corporate training, we decided together: faster, you must first give yourself the right to slow down and exhale. "
Photo: JieDa, Antwerp Fashion Department, Dries / Dogwoof
