Metadesign analysis of self-communication practices for fashion design career seeking

The fashion industry is a hypercompetitive sector, with more graduates coming out every year from universities, than job openings arising in fashion companies. Most often, however, they don’t have a clear idea of the necessities of the job market, and how to best communicate themselves able to solve them. The problem can be in part attributed to a glamourization, and false idealization, of the industry, but mostly to a lack of training on the matter. This seems also due to a general lack of comprehensive bibliography that is not highly influenced by the authors’ biased opinions, like self-branding and portfolio guidebooks. The goal of this thesis is therefore to understand tools that can help fashion graduate to best identify the ideal communication strategy for their own professional goals, merging available knowledge on the matter from specific research of certain aspects of the career seeking process, interviews of fashion professionals, and a series of opinion articles from business oriented online newspapers, mostly Vogue Business, Business of Fashion and Harvard Business Review. This will help to create a metadesign framework that graduates, and institution wanting to start courses on the matter, can use as a starting point for their own design exploration. At the same time, it tries to research fashion-careers specific topics that can be useful to fashion graduates designing their own self-communication design strategy, in particular: the mapping of the job positions available for fashion students, the most common skills required in the fashion industry and the list of tools and channels used by fashion recruiters to evaluate candidates.