Questions for the Fashion Industry

So very recently, fashion model and Vogue editor, Alexa Chung announced that she was going to lead a documentary series about the fashion industry and visit heads of major design houses, journalists buyers and all the workers in between. ‘Her goal is to find out what the future holds for this multi-billion industry; how the next generation will get careers using all the tools available to them; and what the landscape looks like in terms of sustainability and technology’.

This sounds like an incredible pitch already and I’m really excited for the series. Alexa posted a picture on her Instagram account asking her followers what kind of questions they’d want answered in this documentary and while flicking through them, I couldn’t help but be super intrigued by where some of these questions could possibly take this series.

And so I’ve taken the liberty of listing a few of those questions in the hope of getting more people’s minds jogging as well as appreciating how awesome the general online public are.

• How hard is it to get into the fashion industry once you’ve got a degree in fashion?
• How do you get people in the fashion industry to notice you?
• What advice is there to give to a 17 year old girl who wants to become a fashion buyer in the future?
• How strong is the competition between fashion designers? Does Balmain really want to be pictured next to someone wearing Alexander McQueen? Do they work together or fight for the limelight?
• How do you start in the modelling business?
• How can you make the most out of the clothes you already have instead of getting new things?
• What do you think of all the hype concerning the fashion industry? Especially from the young demographic?
• Do you think personality has a lot in relation to how far you can go into the fashion industry or is ti all about looks?
• What makes a designer unique among the rest?
• What classifies as a ‘fashion trend’? How do you decide what’s fashionable and what’s not? What influences a trend? Trend agencies? Tendsetters? Celebrities or cultural influences?
• What do you think about the warped beauty ideals that many designers profit from? How can a girl enjoy fashion without feeling badly about her bodu?
• Do you think originality establishes the goodness of someone's streetstyle sense and does having a stylist for streetstyle purposes make it less authentic?
• How sustainable is the fashion industry through all levels, from the raw materials through to production and distribution?
• Are fashion houses, designers and brands aware of the conditions that workers that are in the mass production of their clothes? Are there strict regulations in pace and are they enforced?
• How do you get ahead and stand out in the fashion industry in a world where everyone who takes a few pictures and post them on Instagram can claim to be a fashion photographer, blogger or fashion influencer?
• Who is actually making these clothes and they are getting paid anywhere near the amount the designer companies get? Why are the designer clothes so pricey and where does the money go?
• Why don't designers consider shorter models?
• How do you juggle being a respected persona in the fashion industry and not losing who you are? Is it hard to stay true to yourself or does your career and lifestyle go hand in hand? Are there do’s and don’t’s in fashion?
• How much damage is done to the environment for these mostly frivolous shows? How many young men and women are warped and starved into an anorexic fashion industry scale? Is every person in the industry as vapid as they seem to be?
• Most designer houses have been successful through many generations. What keeps them so resilient throughout all these decades? How does Chanel stay so relevant besides the name of course?
• Who does the fashion industry really consist of? Not only the designers, models, the tailors and the audience but what about the people who create the runway music and show setting in general? Or the people choosing the fabric?
• How do small things such as the drawing inspiration (colours etc) translate through to a fashion collection?
• How involved are the top designers with their products? Do they palm off a lot of the work to others and stick the brand names on the end?
• How does the pricing process work in the fashion industry? Things like Ellie Saab gowns are super expensive because we see the process of their workers hand beading everything but there’s a lot of brands in between that and the local ‘Target’ store that put huge prices on extremely simple looking clothes.

So there you have it. A few questions I pulled through from what people asked Alexa Chung to talk about in her documentary series. If any of them made you think that much more about the industry we’re all so infatuated with, well my post did its job.