Are you ‘in fashion’? No, but that’s what you tell folks back home? Well played, sir or madam, but maybe this fall is the right time to actually make the career in trendsetting happen. We’ve turned a discriminating eye on the fashion industry on your behalf and dug up a list of some of the fetchest internships out there so you can apply to them all with ease. You’ll definitely do some busywork, you’ll definitely have your outfits judged, you might get some free clothes, and, at a few of them, you might even get paid!
Here’s what’s out there:
DESIGNERS
Tory Burch hires interns to work across 13 departments for a well-rounded fashion retailer internship experience. If you’re a current student with two free weekdays and the means to get academic credit for the gig (read: unpaid), you can get schooled on the behind-the-scenes production of the Gossip Girl-ready “preppy-boho” look and hopefully pick up a piece or two that you can wear to all the future interviews that this internship will help you snag.
Diane Von Furstenberg, however, wants to take you under her wing! “There is no better designer with whom to receive a full fashion education than Diane von Furstenberg and her dedicated team,” her website says. “Get experience with the best of the best.” It looks like you need to be in school to make this one happen, too: internships are a semester long and are, sigh, paid in the very viable currency of academic credit. That said, you could do worse than interning at a company founded by a woman who was recently awarded the title of the most powerful woman in fashion (we picture Anna Wintour turning purple over that one). Internship inquiries can be sent to internships [at] dvf.com.
And last but not least, if selling vintage clothes out of a mobile trailer is your idea of a good internship, then Laura at La Poubelle has just the gig for you! What’s more, it sounds like lunch will be on her :)
PAID (!)
And even though you are probably not in a fashion PhD program or even beginning to think about your internship for next summer, you can probably get some “intern-spiration” (we are corny) from the description of the internship program at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met doesn’t mess around, and it’s paid; the two concentrations within the costume institute are in collections management, i.e. maintaining the pieces that the museum owns, and curatorial, which means being a tour guide for the year’s main exhibit and conducting and assisting fashion research. The applications, due in January, don’t go live until November, but if this peaks your “intern-erest” (we’re cracking ourselves up), take a look at their non-graduate internships and make a list of professors who’d you want to write your letters of recommendation, which we have a feeling you’ll need for this one.
BRANDS
Incidentally–if you’ve been thinking about interning at any of the megastores owned by Urban Outfitters, Inc (which includes boho brand Free People and Estyesque Anthropologie), it seems to us like you’ll fare better if you just apply for an entry-level sales job. The only internships they have listed in the NYC area are unpopulated entries on their job site for “visual display internships” at given Anthropologie locations and an internship program that gets a discouraging review in a 2012 piece for the Atlantic by Rebecca Greenfield–who also mentions that it’s the corporation’s policy not to discuss their internships with the press. Make of that what you will.
American Apparel isn’t making any promises, but judging by the internship application form on the website, the company doesn’t want to discourage anyone who’s eager to work for them, either. It looks like as long as you can commit to 45 days as an intern, you can help out with anything from sewing and patternmaking to helping with environmental initiatives. You can also opt to just be considered for paid internships (seems like a no-brainer to us). And just so you don’t forget that they have a CEO who’s been the subject of multiple sexual harassment lawsuits, you’ll need to certify that you’re of age and send them a picture of yourself. Fuchsia leggings optional.
For the high-end retail experience of a lifetime, maybe try applying to Saks Fifth Avenue. They make no bones about the position being an unpaid entry level job that happens during the semester, but we’re imagining at at least some of the value of the experience must lie in getting to meet the titans of industry you’ll sell $1,000 t-shirts to.
And of course, there’s Fashion Week. Women love it, men want to be it, or something. Organized by the Council of Fashion Designers of America, New York Fashion Week is currently underway; get on the volunteer list for February if you email nicely: mbfw_volunteers [at] cfda.com for more info.
MEDIA
Refinery29 (paid!) has a few internships to fill this fall; the one we’d want if we were trying to break into fashion is their Brand Integration internship. You’d get to do research on cultural influencers for the site, assist on photo shoots, and help coordinate and produce events, in addition to plenty of other fun fashion marketing work. No need to be student for this one, but they will need you at least four days a week. Here’s the application form!
And word up, PaperMag is looking for fall interns for marketing, events, advertising and, you guessed it, fashion. If you think you can cut it, send your resume to Kelly Govekar at kellyg [at] papermag.com.
In a similar vein, Nylon has an internship application tutorial post on their blog. We’re going to go ahead and guess that they get a lot of inquiries about this kind of thing. They won’t pay you and it sounds like you can expect part of your job to be in the personal assistant vein, but a lot of the pointers they give in that list seem like excellent general advice to us.
While we don’t have any advice on getting your foot in the door at Vogue or Vanity Fair (Condé Nast is a mysterious place with a mysterious job board), we can direct you to internship info over at Cosmopolitan and Seventeen (both of which just require a resume, cover letter, and writing clips if you have them). Who knows, maybe Cosmo will even let you write them some sex tips!
The feminist bloggers among us will appreciate that xoJane‘s Editorial Internship program, which looks like it’s oriented around fashion and social media; also unpaid, also for school credit, but maybe somewhere where you might, just might get a byline?!
PAID RETAIL GIGS
What’s that, you say? You’ve already had six internships in fashion? Oh. Okay. Well, there are plenty of good spots hiring right now! If you don’t have any schmancy InDesign or print production skills but you want to get a job that will give you exposure to the industry, you might want to start out working the floor at a store that will give you a competitive edge over other retail gigs. Uniqlo, which seems to get more popular by the day, is about to open up at Atlantic Terminal, Crossroads Trading Co is looking for buyers and sellers for their Williamsburg Location (a role in which you’ll get real familiar with brands, seasons and materials), high-end FiDi discount department store Century 21 has an open call this week, the Clark’s shop on tony, tony Madison Avenue needs a new full-time stock associate, the posh boutique UK gym and retailer Sweaty Betty needs a sales assistant for their SoHo activewear shop…but, we’re rattling on. Get out there and see for yourself!
So make sure you have lots of action verbs and no typos on your resume, bust out your finest business-casual duds and make sure you report back to Brokelyn when you land a cool new situation!
Got an internship (or even, dare we say, a job?!) we should know about?! Drop us a line at tips [at] brokelyn.com.