Social media has made becoming a fashion writer easier today than at any time in the past. Brands, stores and companies have adopted scores of young women, sometimes still in high school, who caught the attention of fashion companies with a personal blog, on Twitter, or on an image-sharing social network site. A number of such young women have two hundred thousand followers or 20,000 unique visits per month.
At LIM College, each of the departments—Fashion, Visual, Management and Marketing, Arts and Communications—have faculty who are experts in the techniques of social media marketing and communication. In many cases, our faculty are practitioners as well as experts, with a background in social media promotion--television shows, fashion brands--or a track record of developing the communications, pr and marketing process for major companies.
Our students are just as active. Internships in the social media sections of fashion magazines, for PR and branding firms, and even for a firm that specializes in attracting investment capital to fashion and technology companies have been held by LIM College students. Students have also launched their own PR companies, popular sites, and sites promoting their artwork, jewelry or writing. In sectors of the industry from shoes to plus-sizes to bridal to lingerie, our students are helping to transform what being a “fashion writer” means today.
Along with such promising opportunities, a few stubborn facts remain. Sponsorship by a store or company may come your way as a blogger, with travel, free clothing and products, and sizable payments for participation in events. Ad revenue can be another source of income for blogs with large followings. All the same, the average income for bloggers who make the undertaking a full time job hovers around $6,000 per year for 50 or 60 hours a week of work. The average burn-out horizon for new bloggers—from their first to last post—holds steady at about two years before they more on to another task or simply quit.
How does one become a fashion writer with genuine expertise, deep and wide industry connections, and a wealth of ideas to keep going, along with a group of friends and contributors that can divide up the workload? LIM College’s faculty can help you do so. Look to The Writing Center and faculty across LIM College to help you find answers. We have poets who edit online magazines, marketers who understand the creation of an audience as well as the technological issues of social media, artists, designers and visual specialists who work as often with words as they do with images. So, talk to us about what we do and how we can help you develop your fashion writing career.
--Robert Clark