A conversation with the Sustainable Fashion Initiative
Draven Peña by Jessica Keightley
To obtain a job within the fashion industry, you are expected to undertake multiple internships, often unpaid. Operating within the parameters that these positions will be an opportunity for knowledge sharing and learning, they are unregulated, and tasks set range from getting coffee to making clothing presented on the catwalks at international fashion weeks.
This week I spoke with Draven Peña, Elie Fermann, and Alexa Ream from the Sustainability Fashion Initiative. As fashion design students at the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning at the University of Cincinnati, when embarking on internships within the fashion industry, they found them lacking in value. The Fair Labor Standards Act uses a set of guidelines to examine the "economic reality" of the intern-employer relationship and determine which party is the "primary beneficiary" of the relationship. Draven, Elie, and Alexa found that they were not the primary beneficiaries in many of the internship positions they and their peers undertook. Eager to channel this frustration into action, they embarked upon a two-year research project to trace the internship's origin within the fashion industry, how they had evolved, and the issues with internships today.
They compiled their finding into this report titled 'The Dream Will Never Pay Off: How Unpaid Internships uphold exploitation and hinder financial sustainability within the Fashion Industry.' Using a mixture of primary and secondary research, they found that today there were multiple negative factors associated with unpaid internships. They disproportionately impact black, indigenous, and people of color, and predominantly those that are female. There is not an apparent correlation between workload and pay within unpaid or paid internships. Finally, low-income or working-class students are underrepresented in the intern pool due to their economic status; therefore, immense financial support is required to enter the fashion industry.
Most personally, impactful to me was their findings around shame. They found that 81% of the people they interviewed felt ashamed of working in fashion. I thought about my internship experiences. They had been devaluing, and I do feel ashamed that I had taken unpaid opportunities for which I had been told I should be grateful. If everyone in the industry has experienced internship positions for which they feel shameful, this leads to a group of people with low self-esteem.
The report makes three suggestions for how the industry could improve. The first is through fashion education and forming meaningful university and industry collaboration, so the positions offered have real educational and developmental benefits. The second is to look directly at brands and companies to ascertain what they can do to support these roles. The third is to engage the help of the Council of Fashion Designers of America as a governing body to enforce regulations. I encourage you to support their suggestions. It becomes increasingly clear that this is another facet of the fashion industry, which is simple unsustainable.
Shonagh Marshall: What is the Sustainable Fashion Initiative (SFI)?
Alexa Ream: It was founded in 2018 by Liz Ricketts and our executive team. It is a branch of Liz and Branson's The OR Foundation. Essentially its founding is rooted in the immense waste that the fashion program at the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP) at the University of Cincinnati (UC) produces. We have grown it to now have a community base of just over 1800 Instagram followers, roughly 200 people who subscribe to our emails and, depending on the semester, about 20 active student participants. We interact with other students, departments, institutions, and community organizations here in our Cincinnati area, as well as some further out.
Elie Fermann: Our main goal at SFI is to create a zero-waste environment at the University of Cincinnati and in the fashion program specifically. We also expand our efforts to tackle ethics within fashion at large through research and bringing in speakers. We also have clothing swaps, pop-ups, and mending classes.
Draven Peña: On top of the goal to be a zero-waste program, SFI also poses the question: what if waste is your only resource generally, and more specifically, our only resource to the fashion program at DAAP at the University of Cincinnati? One of the building blocks of SFI, and what makes it intrinsic in the community, is we have a closet where we keep all of the fabric waste collected every semester. It's an open closet; anyone can access it and access the fabric, trims, notions, anything from tiny scraps to full yardage. Not only is it a fantastic resource, but we've also reduced waste phenomenally. Also, students don't have to pay a couple of hundred dollars a semester to buy fabrics for their classes. A lot of students rely primarily on SFI as their resource to get their courses done.
Alexa: In my first semesters before the founding of SFI, I spent several hundred dollars on fabric materials. Since founding SFI, I have spent zero dollars on materials, and we're in our fourth year.
Elie: Because we are in Cincinnati, Ohio, our only in-person fabric store is Joanne fabrics. So this is a great alternative to get interesting materials. In addition to the benefits of no cost and zero waste, it also localizes the community.
Draven: On top of just the UC community, SFI has reached out into the Greater Cincinnati area to engage with local crafters and artisans. We frequently collaborate with a small group called Cryptogram, which uses paper to screen print. We've done many collaborations alongside pop-ups in thrift stores, which has been fulfilling. SFI also works with people who do visible mending and the local recycling company that we work with on waste management initiatives.
Elie: SFI has enabled us to fill many gaps in our education here at DAAP, either through workshops or involvement in the community.
Shonagh: This is a very relevant topic, and universities and art schools worldwide are rethinking their teaching practices on design courses to create alternatives to the way we produce and consume in the wake of the climate crisis and social justice uprisings. Have you seen sweeping systemic change at the University of Cincinnati as a result of setting up SFI?
Alexa: Even here, where SFI is prominent within our program, it still doesn't feel like sustainability—true sustainability, circularity, and ethicality—are being talked about nearly enough or being approached from the right perspectives.
Draven: I think SFI can succeed because it goes back to kindergarten basics—you have to clean up your mess. It's the students who are collecting the waste and the students who are auditing and separating this waste into different categories. We're the ones who are taking the fabric from the bins that we have in each studio and picking out the pins to make sure that we can shred material and turn it into paper or shoddy if it's too small for anything else. It encourages the student, aka the designer, to see their creative process all the way through to waste management. Being connected to your product's end life and the waste it creates means you have a different sense of responsibility. That is hard to replicate if you're just in a classroom talking about sustainability.
Alexa: Liz Ricketts taught us to think about how it's visibility that matters. For example, it's tough to quantify the amount of waste when you give a pound number to it, or when you provide a volume to it—it's hard to visualize and truly understand the actual size. But when you can see it in a giant 40-gallon bucket in every one of our studios, full, if not overflowing, it is sobering. It makes you consider where you're placing your patterns, the way you're using your fabric. Both when buying new fabric or if you're going into the bins or closet to reuse something.
Shonagh: There is a tradition in fashion design courses to create competition between students. When these individuals enter the industry, the designer is positioned in the media as a solo genius creator. This construction of a design hero enables a disconnect from the making process, the materials used, and, eventually, the waste. In contrast, SFI encourages you to work together and take responsibility for your debris, incorporating this into all the design decisions you make.
Draven: It is this mentality that we, as an organization, are trying to figure out how we can share with other universities because we've proven with SFI that it's possible. It's about changing people's ideas about sustainability. We have designers in our program who had never thought about sustainable design. They felt that by studying fashion design, they would be creating their fantasy, vision, and designs. They're able to do that still, but consciously. As Alexa mentioned, this could be through careful placement of pattern pieces or choosing the right textile that you know can become another product once you're finished with it. That has been amazing to see, collectively. We are a small fashion program; our graduating class is 55 students, so perhaps our ability to change that behavior was slightly more manageable, but it is possible on a larger scale.
Shonagh: Through the SFI, you just published a report called 'The Dream Will Never Pay Off: How unpaid internships uphold exploitation and hinder financial sustainability within the fashion industry.' Why did you decide to create a report on the impact of unpaid internships within the fashion industry?
Alexa: The fact that we're all implicated in this problem was the initial inspiration. I think we all have additional unique reasons on top of that. For myself, before entering DAAP, I did three unpaid positions in fashion and art-related areas. I am privileged and have familial wealth that could support me in those positions, but since starting at DAAP, I realized that I needed to be pursuing corporate jobs to be able to afford my living expenses. I think that was the motivation for me. I was frustrated that in order to be paid, interns are pigeonholed into an area of fashion that is far from how fashion is perceived. Areas like corporate design, retail, marketing, or other branches of corporatized fashion. Livelihood should be the bare minimum across the board, not just in retail positions. Payment is only found in the corporate spectrum of fashion and that is a problem.
Elie: We started the report as a task force under SFI. I was about to embark on my first unpaid internship, and I was grappling with the ramifications of it. I was questioning why I was doing it. My roommate and other peers in the industrial design or communication design pathways would never have to face this dilemma. I wanted an answer for myself and for my peers who I knew were navigating the same issue.
Elie Fermann by Jessica Keightley
Alexa: We wanted to clarify why there was inequity amongst the design disciplines that are hallways away from each other.
Draven: I'm an out of state student; I'm not originally from Cincinnati; I'm from Portland, Oregon. I chose DAAP because it was more affordable than most other design schools in the country. Also, DAAP sells itself because students complete five internships every other semester; you get paid for those internships and that helps to offset tuition costs when you return. When we were getting ready to embark on our first co-op semester, I had to take an unpaid job. In the second co-op semester, I also took an unpaid position. As a group, we started having candid and frank conversations about financial transparency. I am a first-generation American student, I pay for my education with federal and private loans and aid, and I realized this is impossible. I started to think I was going to have to drop out at some point. I couldn't keep paying for it. It was cognitive dissonance, we were told one thing, and we realized it was not true. That's what prompted us to do this research. We thought if it's true for the three of us, then it has to be true for the vast amount of people who pursue fashion internships.
Shonagh: I want to highlight, unlike students studying in New York, Paris, or London, where there might be several fashion internship opportunities, as University of Cincinnati students, you complete internships in a different city from the one you live. These internships led to incurred costs for housing, travel, and the general costs associated with living somewhere unfamiliar. This scenario is untenable for the vast majority of students. Then there is this sliding scale; if you want to work somewhere considered highly creative, you will not be paid; however, if you take an internship at a corporate fashion brand, you will. How does it work to get a paid internship?
Alexa: Through our university, we can apply for co-op internships through a portal called PAL. It's essentially like LinkedIn, but for co-op experiences connected to collegiate education. The list of jobs here ranges from high-end luxury brands to corporate positions like TJ Maxx, Chico's, American Eagle, Abercrombie and Fitch, and Victoria's Secret. The corporate companies are the ones that pay, and they pay well. I received $18 an hour with overtime and an additional thousand dollar housing stipend in my first co-op position. That's definitely in the top five of the highest paying fashion co-ops.
Draven: If "fashion" is the nucleolus, the further away you get from that, the more money you can make.
Alexa: The places that don't pay are sold as "the dream."
Shonagh: When you began the report, you posed several questions to yourself and the industry at large? What were those questions?
Alexa: They were super wide-ranging, depending on who we were talking to. Throughout our research, we've spoken with just over 190 people. Around 20 of those people were industry professionals, anyone from stylists, designers, and journalists, to people who have something to do with policy, like labor lawyers and hiring recruiters. I talked to various hiring recruiters at the companies where I co-oped. We asked questions ranging from what you are looking for in an intern to why do you think it’s necessary to pay interns? When talking to labor lawyers, we posed questions ranging from how does unionizing work to are interns even recognized as employees with rights under the law? When speaking to industry professionals, the questions were person-specific, but always rooted around their background, experience, and perspective surrounding the unpaid internship structure. Essentially, the root of all of our questions was to gauge the industry around us. The remainder of our pool was composed of other fashion students and fashion professionals that we pulled through Instagram and formalized surveys. This resulted in documenting over 230 unique fashion internship experiences.
Elie: We carried out this research generally to answer questions about why these internships persist? Why are they the norm? Do they advance people's careers? Do they lead to paid roles if they get these brands on their resume? We also wanted to address the underlying issues of trauma in the industry due to unpaid internships. We wanted to explore where that was coming from.
Shonagh: How did you define internship and intern?
Draven: When we first started looking at it, we did a quick Google search, which led to an interesting discussion. The word intern has two definitions. The first is participating in a paid or unpaid experience, often for academic credit. But there's also a second definition that means to confine someone as a prisoner. It felt like the second definition applied more to our experiences. Our report highlights that an internship should be a 50/50, mutually beneficial, experience and an extension of the classroom; that's how it's proposed to us. Internships should be outside learning experiences that you can bring back and apply to your studies. While doing an internship, we're not getting the learning component, and we're not getting the financial component. So what is it? It's exploitation, it's free labor, and it's not mutually beneficial.
Shonagh: You draw attention to the primary beneficiary test used to measure the intern and employer relationship. What is this?
Alexa: It is a test established by the Fair Labor Standards Act to gauge how mutually beneficial the relationship is. Essentially, what it's asserting is, if the intern is receiving 51 percent or more of the benefits, they don't necessarily have to be paid. But if the employer is the primary beneficiary, then they should be paying the intern. What is grievously wrong with the primary beneficiary test is that it is hugely ambiguous and very much up to interpretation. It also doesn't give any explicit kind of governance as to how an intern should be valued. We assert that all interns should be respected and therefore paid a livable wage.
Shonagh: In the report, you talk about financial resilience; what do you mean by that?
Alexa: It is essentially livelihood. Are you fully covered? Are your needs met? Better yet, are your needs exceeded because everybody runs into unexpected obstacles and issues.
Elie: In the report, we talk about this on the individual and brand levels. We explore whether individuals in an associate designer position can be financially resilient and whether brands have a sufficient budget with a contingency to cover unexpected costs.
Alexa: We assert that if a brand is unable to pay its interns, but they have interns, they should look again at their financial resilience. We ask that they explore whether they could contribute in a more meaningful way, if they can't financially, that is not detrimental to an intern.
Shonagh: In your research, what did you find were the main tasks interns were doing in the space of fashion?
Alexa: We specifically noticed the recurring usage of the terms "busy work" and "bitch work" across paid and unpaid experiences. We also found that during unpaid experiences, interns were made to perform expert level, skilled tasks with zero support or instruction. Often, they might be the only person who can perform those tasks out of all of the employees.
Elie: I can elaborate on this, some unpaid interns, like myself, were making samples for New York Fashion Week shows. Inversely, some paid interns sat behind a computer, adjusting flats and other tasks they felt they were overqualified to do. There isn't a clear line drawn between the unpaid intern doing unpaid work versus someone that's paid doing work that warrants pay.
Draven: I think that's why the internship is so elusive because the range of tasks is so extreme, whether it's getting coffee or working on designing things that will walk down the runway. We uncovered in the responses from a lot of the survey respondents that fashion can manipulate this beneficiary test because fashion is so good at illusion. Alexander McQueen made Kate Moss into a hologram with peppers ghost, which is quite literally an illusion. You think you're walking into a company that has their shit together. You think they have a system. You arrive, and it's two people. There is no system, there is no structure, but they have such a huge Instagram following and so much clout that you were duped. A lot of guilt and shame follows. You think, how could I have been so stupid? How did I not put the puzzle pieces together? But how could you? Fashion is designed to trick you into doing free labor.
Shonagh: You so perfectly sum it up; fashion is illusory; its business is to trick us. What effects did you find those unpaid internships had on people? And who was most affected?
Alexa: The first is that multiple negative factors of unpaid internships disproportionately impact Black, indigenous, and people of color, and especially those that are female. If you read the testimonials, they show that there is prolific racism and exclusion. The coveted fashion "dream jobs" are limited to affluent white people. And that is a fact.
Elie: There's no regulatory body, and that's the case for many industries, but this allows the fashion industry to go unchecked. There's a mindset that people within the fashion industry have; they think I did an unpaid internship, and it's okay—it got me to where I am. There is even the opinion that you're lucky to be here. I think that allows a lot of people to get away with mistreating their interns and co-workers.
Alexa: One in five interns report experiences from sexual harassment to rape. Only one in five interns report being paid a livable wage. Only one in three report gaining relevant skills to achieving financial sustainability. And 4 out of 5 report feeling devalued, shamed, and/or ashamed having been a fashion intern.
Draven: Outside of the many “isms” that fashion falls into, something that we point out in the report is we believe that if you enforced regulation of unpaid internships, this would positively affect the supply chain. Fashion uses low-paid labor outside of internships, as we're aware of; for example, The Children's Place just canceled their orders with the manufacturers they engaged in the wake of COVID-19. The people working to make the clothes were making $26 a month, reduced to $10 since March; they are incredibly underpaid and undervalued. If we start addressing unpaid labor in offices, then that has to trickle down to address unpaid work in the factories that fashion uses.
Shonagh: As you said, your findings show that the people who are most affected by unpaid internships are women of color.
Draven: Yes. Being a woman of color and pursuing a career in fashion, I can speak to that. What has been entirely evident, fashion being so illusionary, it preaches diversity, but we are only seeing it on a runway and barely in the advertising campaigns. In the first couple of pages of the report, we mention Marni's recent accessory campaign. They exploited a Black Brazilian photographer to shoot the campaign, offering a disproportionate fee for that type of advertising work. Much the way the industry embraces sustainability diversity and inclusivity is just marketing; it's still so surface level. We're not seeing positive effects of diversity and inclusion in the intern pool; it does not translate to the junior or senior designer or VP positions. If we go to the tippy top, it's not representative, which is why these incidents keep happening. If more Black and Brown people were involved in these decisions, we wouldn't have to keep reengaging with this trauma through the imagery that fashion is putting out.
Elie: We know the story of diversity to be false because of the data that we collected. First off, only 24.5% of our survey respondents agreed that their unpaid workplace was racially diverse. How could brands ever be diverse if they're gatekeeping these opportunities from people that are not only lower-income but don't have access to generational wealth like I do as a white woman?
Shonagh: You have a detailed graph included in the report that breaks down how much money students will spend on internships during their studies. What did you find?
Alexa: It depends on what length of time you're looking at, but on average, our survey respondents spend a little over $2,000 a month and per internship spend about $7,500. And these are conservative estimates.
Draven: As DAAP students, most of our fashion internships are in New York, LA, and other large cities, as that's just where the jobs are. When we broke down the numbers, our class over the five-year program was each going to spend an average of $37,000 on internships. If we add that up, all 55 students, together, we're paying over $2 million by the time we graduate. That became a second prompting question of what could we do with $2 million? How many of us could start brands by the time we graduate? How many of us could have created fun, positive initiatives? We could run SFI forever!
Shonagh: Where did this money come from?
Alexa: Generational wealth, the majority, at just under 80%, said they rely on parents or other family members as their primary source of income. The next highest number was personal savings, which is directly connected to familial wealth; if you're able to save, that is good, but it is a privileged position. Everyone else gets loans and therefore has lifelong debt. Our research found two people who had taken out $15,000 loans to undertake an internship experience. The $2,000 a month figure is the average; but again this is a conservative average.
Alexa Ream by Jessica Keightley
Draven: The average was lower because we are a school based in the Midwest, where people can take a few opportunities with local craftsmen and artisans, which does make it less expensive. When we're talking about the traditional "fashion dream," we're talking about the major cities where your costs are going to spiral exponentially.
Shonagh: You mentioned the shame associated with carrying out this unpaid work. In the report, you found that many people in the fashion industry carry shame. Can you tell me about these findings?
Alexa: A massive motivation for talking about this amongst our DAAP cohort is that shame seems to be an isolated experience. We are all female as of this year. There are only 55 of us; we all know each other pretty well; however, what was lacking was an understanding of this exploitation and shame and how it’s directly linked to feminized labor. I think there was a lot of siloing, and it shows in the report; the responses that we have received since publishing the report is that people, women specifically, were not aware that shame is a common and widespread issue throughout fashion. 80% of participants said that they have felt ashamed, or been made to feel shame, for pursuing fashion or working in fashion. From our perspective, as fashion design students within the wider DAAP program, there's a clear hierarchy, and we are at the bottom of it. And that is known, felt, and enforced, from administrators to students. It expands into the industry in the same way.
Elie: We decided to focus on it because when people internalize shame, it's not something that drives people to take action and change things. Usually, it results in self-preservation and not collective justice. We wanted to address that so that people could see it was a common thing, and it wasn't something they needed to feel guilty about. They will see that it is a problem indicative of the whole system and then change that.
Draven: Shame is a driving force in fashion. It's the reason why consumerism is so chaotic; it's the reason why we can't have these conversations and why fashion's so far back in the sustainability conversation. Part of this process is addressing shame, and fashion is still in the denial phases. We wanted to make it as public as possible; this is not an isolated experience; it is an extremely common experience that we all bond over. Fashion tends to turn that shame and guilt to envy; then, we just don't get anywhere. Being transparent about people's feelings and finances was the goal of this report.
Alexa: In our 'Fashion is Female' section; we highlight the reason fashion is underpaid and can feel shameful is that it's historically associated with women's work. Women's work has never been deemed worthy of mastery or worthy of valuation.
Shonagh: I found it incredibly powerful reading the report because I went back and addressed my shame in working in positions where I have been underpaid and undervalued. To ignore these experiences and feelings leads to a cycle of abuse, which is very common within the fashion industry. Having explored these feelings as a group, I assume, has led to boundaries for how you will work in the industry. Do you think that your "fashion dream," therefore, has been altered?
Elie: Yeah, at the beginning of this, I think I saw this issue as some bad apples I needed to watch out for in the industry. After doing this research, I realized it's widespread. Now I would say I don't have an idea of my dream job in fashion. There are experiences and projects that I want to be a part of, and things personally that I'd like to go for, but overall, the "dream" is shattered. It's not something I feel sad about because I wouldn't want to be grinding for and indebted to an industry that doesn't care for me.
Alexa: I feel a similar way. We all cite Liz Rickett's class 'Industry Theory and Practice' in our freshman year as a pivotal moment in our education; it was a sobering class. She's the only professor who was honest with us and communicative of how the industry works and how we should expect to function within the industry. From there, continuing our research and finalizing this report, my ideas have been restructured. What I thought would be the dream job after graduating, I don't even know now. For me, the answer is I want to do more work like this. I still love fashion. I still love creating. I've been sewing since I was a kid. My grandmother taught me to knit and embroider when I was young. I'll always love craft. Fashion is uniquely tied to society, expression, and emotion. But I think my role has transitioned from designer to researcher and possibly educator. I want to be on this side more, challenging and providing solutions to harmful norms. A position that restructures what it means to work in “fashion.” That, I would like to see.
Draven: I would agree. We are the Project Runway generation; the media was so persistent, which drove us to choose fashion as our university degree. Liz's class, as well as a lot of other factors, pretty much nipped that dream in the bud pretty quickly. I just couldn't sit with the idea of being frivolous within my creativity when too many other things are happening. As far as my future, I don't dream of fashion in the way I used to. I dream of it more as an anthropological method for analyzing these issues and making them digestible to people, so we can have these conversations and create change. Maybe that would be a position I would be interested in, something we're going to have to make.
The report has shown that the three of us are not isolated in not dreaming of fashion anymore. That's what we're trying to preach. The industry needs to recognize that it will lose all of the people who make up your free labor, all the people who are going to your workforce, all the people who are going to become the new era of designers. If everyone's leaving, why would I stay? Or better yet, why would I start? We want to say with the report that Gen Z and other future generations prioritize being financially successful, having a work-life balance, and being happy. Fashion doesn't make me happy, and it doesn't make most people who work in fashion all that happy, so why would I put all this money and time into an industry that doesn't work?
