By ERIC WILSON


Ten years ago, when Amy Astley, then the beauty director of Vogue, began working on a prototype of a spinoff magazine for teenagers, the question she was most commonly asked by potential readers was this: “How can I become a fashion model?”

“It was really depressing,” said Ms. Astley, now the editor of Teen Vogue.

Now they ask how they can get her job.

What changed, Ms. Astley said, is that teenagers around the world have become interested in all sorts of careers in fashion as a result of the industry’s increasingly outsize place in popular culture. “Project Runway,” the designer competition on television originally set at Parsons the New School for Design in New York, has alone been credited with causing a spike in applications to fashion schools. At Parsons, applications have gone up 41 percent over the last five years.

But this wave of designers and editors in training is coming at a moment when the industry is shrinking; retailers are collapsing; several magazines within Teen Vogue’s parent company, Conde Nast, have closed; and jobs, of any sort, are scarce.

The situation is not entirely grim for new fashion graduates in the United States, even though the National Association of Colleges and Employers said in March that employers expected to hire 22 percent fewer seniors graduating in 2009 for entry level positions. Normally about 90 percent of Parsons seniors find jobs, but that figure dipped by only 10 percent.

So what is a young person trying to break into fashion supposed to do?

Let us take the example of Sang A Im-Propp, who was a pop star in Korea before she decided, while on a business trip to New York, that she wanted to be in fashion. Ms. Im-Propp’s command of English was tenuous, but she enrolled at Parsons and in short order found herself an internship with Victoria Bartlett, a noted stylist and designer whom she admired. Ms. Im-Propp found it difficult to understand Ms. Bartlett’s heavy British accent, and at first she thought she had misunderstood just what Ms. Bartlett was asking her to do. Get cupcakes?

Not just any cupcakes, but the glossy butter-cream confections from the Cupcake Cafe, which is a long walk from Ms. Bartlett’s studio through the garment district in Midtown Manhattan, and it was freezing outside.

“It made me cry a lot,” Ms. Im-Propp said. “Vicky is an amazing artist, but she can be difficult.”

But Ms. Im-Propp persisted, and after many cupcake runs, was entrusted with the research projects, location scouting and shopping collections Ms. Bartlett did not have time to see. When she decided in 2006 to start her own collection of handbags, under the label Sang A, Ms. Bartlett personally recommended her to a showroom.

Ms. Bartlett admitted she had been a deliberate taskmaster with interns.

“You can’t be a princess in this business,” she said. “People see fashion from the end result, which is kind of a false facade. They only see this beautiful, glamorous world, but I don’t think they realize it is one of the hardest careers out there.”

Kelly Cutrone, a publicist and reality- show fixture, often starts a job interview by telling the applicant, “You’ll be very lucky if you start and end your career liking clothes.”

Among the current crop of interns at Teen Vogue, there is little fear that the future of fashion will happen without their participation. They tell stories about 12-hour days of sorting through piles of shopping bags looking for a single skirt; or blisters from running garment bags around the city; or the disappointment of being sent to a famous designer’s showroom and glimpsing only the messenger center. Or the thrill, in the case of Media Brecher, who is 20 and a student at Barnard College, of seeing a headline she suggested for a denim story, “Bleach Streak,” appear in the August issue.

“The truth is,” said the designer Phillip Lim, “a lot of doors are shut right now, and no one is going to open them.” But Mr. Lim cited his own start as a reason not to give up hope. As a young salesman at Barneys in Los Angeles, he was so naive that he simply picked up the phone and called the office of Katayone Adeli and asked for a job.

Ms. Astley said: “Don’t listen to other people. If you want to work in fashion, you should do it.”


Teen Vogue interns often work 12-hour days running errands and doing other tedious jobs. Here, they work in the fashion closet.