Can Fashion Sell a New Generation on Trade Jobs?

Sheena Butler-Young (0:08)

Hello, and welcome to The Debris from The Business of Fashion, where each week we delve into our most popular BoF professional stories with the correspondents who created them. I'm Senior Correspondent Sheena Butler-Young.

Behind every luxury handbag, bespoke suit and couture gown, lies an intricate value chain powered by skilled artisans. Yet as master crafts people retire without successors, fashion is facing a growing shortage of skilled workers. The numbers tell the story. Tailoring employment in the US has fallen roughly 30 percent over the last decade. And Nordstrom, the largest employer of tailors in North America, with nearly 1,500 alteration specialists, is working to rebuild that pipeline, funding tailoring programs at FIT, Seattle Central College, and soon Asu Fidm.

At the same time, skilled trades are enjoying renewed interest. More young people are considering careers in plumbing, electrical work, and construction, as they question the value of a four-year degree, and what generative AI could mean for entry-level white collar work. The question for fashion is whether it can tap into that momentum, and convince a new generation to consider careers in tailoring, pattern making, and leather work. Joining me today to unpack this shift is BoF Commercial Features Editor, Dan Hastings. Dan, welcome to the debrief.

Dan Hastings (1:30)

Thank you for having me again.

Sheena Butler-Young (1:32)

So Dan, let's start with the basic problem here. It's probably the most poorly hidden secret that fashion has long needed skilled craftspeople and has struggled to find them. In fact, one of the interesting things I heard in reporting the story was from a recruiter in Europe who said, she goes to ateliers and to these factories and steps out on the floor. It is very obvious when you look on those factory floors that this is a skill set that skipped multiple generations, that a lot of the people that are doing this work are very visibly in their 70s or even older than that. There are very few people out there that's 20s, 30s, 40s. So you can see that it's leapfrogged a whole generation or two.

What do you think is the inherent problem here? Why is fashion struggled so hard to attract people to these jobs?

Dan Hastings (2:23)

It's a really good question and I feel like we perhaps need to start at end of the 90s, early 2000s, when these independent couture houses were being bought out by LVMH and Cairn. I feel like the petits mains, as we would call them in France, those amazing craftspeople who were helping building the first dresses and tailoring from Yves Saint Laurent and Dior and all other amazing people were mostly women. They probably did apprenticeships instead of going to fashion design school.

They were not really well-paid. And I feel like this shifted when these big conglomerates came in, and a lot of the manufacturing was then offshored to Asia and elsewhere. And we kept the offices in the West, in the US, in the UK, in France, and we had the stores, but we didn't really train that next generation of handicraft people. And so that's why now we end up with these amazing luxury houses, filled with talented people who are in their 50s, 60s, or more. And they do have apprenticeships and we know they have made investment in creating their own academies and programs and modules.

But we really left with a generation of people who go to fashion design school because they want to be the next Karl Lagerfeld, and not necessarily because they want to be the next amazing Taylor. And that's due to many things, but we, our industry, I feel really venerate the creative director and they are our rock stars. And we kind of like forget about the production side, perhaps because it's less glamorous for some. I find it very glamorous. I find it very interesting when I watch Dior on TikTok showing how they make things. But there's definitely an issue with making that more glamorous. And I think, sadly, the pay is a big reason for that.

Sheena Butler-Young (4:32)

I want to double click on a few of the themes that you mentioned. The visibility thing, I think, is interesting. The history you just described is also fascinating. What I think about as a millennial is around the 2000s and the 90s, or just as a child, like the kind of career that parents, teachers, people in the community steered a whole generation of us towards, were college-educated and not crafts, like college education, doctor, lawyer, engineer, not even, in many cases, police officer or mailman. There was just a general lack of glamour that started to be associated with these more traditional careers. And then also with the trades, it was like, if you don't go to college, you may be, as a consolation prize, you go to a trade school.