Those who work in fashion or a fashion/media-adjacent role often whimper about the next layer of skin they are going to wear. You know, once all this fashion recognition is over and done with, once the money has been made, once the byline or masthead meets the expectations your parents made for them, or worse, the ones they made for themselves.

Often, male, female, non-binary, gay, straight – whoever discuss the pivot they want to make towards something that ‘matters’.

“I want to train to be a therapist,” says a close friend who I worked side-by-side with inside a (caged) Condé Nast fashion cupboard for a big-selling glossy.

“I think I am going to fuck it all and become a tree surgeon” says the high-powered creative producer who works with fashion and sport’s biggest brands.

“What I really want to be is a nurse” says my signed make up artist ex-housemate, who has recently moved to Brooklyn and still paints the faces of major models for magazine covers and huge fashion campaigns, lensed by the cooler, edgier people that matter. That is, according to the powers that be (namely, Dazed 100).

Fashion and media is such a tiny bubble, a never-ending, shaky ladder that takes ages to crawl up and is literally crumbling beneath you. There is no way to take a friend or a trusted colleague up with you, unless you can see some room to climb said ladder in tandem. With media spends minimizing and budget cuts happening on a weekly basis, only the devoted (see: overworked) survive. It also feels just right to the higher-ups if you keep everyone at the level you think they do just fine at. That way, the weight is evenly distributed and the ladder won’t snap. 

Intelligent people, thoughtful people who aren’t social climbers know better than to stick to the hamster wheel, living paycheck to paycheck while making work their life, working twelve hours days in a kind of arbitrary assistant-junior-editor role for six odd years… if they don’t have fifteen years to waste (or Daddy’s money), it would only be natural for them to want to save lives or do something meaningful.

Either that, or marry rich.