The Beauty and the Smokescreen: what fashion doesn't tell you about the cost of making it.
- erika
- Jul 6
- 5 min read
Fashion has a mental health crisis. The industry built it that way.
Day one of fashion school. First class. I walked in ready. Sketchbook, pencils, completely convinced I was about to begin building something real.
The professor looked at the room and said (and I am not paraphrasing) you are going to cry. And when you do, go cry in the bathroom. Because crying is a sign of weakness in this industry. And you do not want to be weak.
That was the welcome.
I thought it was preparing me. I sat through years of critiques after that. Watched people run out of the room. Watched talented, serious, hardworking people get publicly dismantled and told that their feelings about it were a liability. I thought I was building a thicker skin. I was actually just learning to normalize something that should never have been normal.
Here's what nobody tells you when you're a kid falling in love with fashion. The industry that produces the most beautiful things in the world is also one of the most brutal environments human beings have invented for themselves.
And the numbers if you actually stop and look at them are genuinely alarming.
People working in creative industries are 25% more likely to develop mental health disorders than those in other fields. Fashion workers are not the exception. They are the rule. And yet somehow this is still treated as a personal problem rather than an industry one.
The pressures are specific and compounding. The seasonality of work. The brutal critique culture that starts on day one of school, as I had just learned. The financial instability dressed up as "the dream." The way the industry seems to compare personal worth with professional output until you genuinely cannot tell where the collection ends and you begin.
I started watching documentaries about successful designers. People who had made it. The ones the industry holds up as proof that the dream is real if you just work hard enough.
And what I found over and over was that they were not okay. Alexander McQueen. Kate Spade. L'wren Scott. Brilliant, successful, celebrated people who were quietly falling apart while the industry kept asking for more.
Alexander McQueen stood on a stage and told a production team he was going to act as if he kill himself. And people thought it was incredible. They called it provocative. They called it art.
He was asking for help in the only language the industry had taught him was acceptable. And the industry applauded.
"The fashion industry will take everything you have and call it passion. It will take your health and call it dedication. It will take your boundaries and call it unprofessionalism. And it will do all of this with beautiful clothes on."
That was the moment my view of this industry shifted. I saw the rabbit hole clearly for the first time : where this path went if I kept following it without asking questions. And I decided I did not want to go there.
I want to be careful here because I'm talking about real things that happened to real people including people I know and love and I don't want to make it into content. But I also think the reason nothing changes in this industry is that nobody actually talks about it out loud. In plain language. With their name attached.
So. Plain language. Name attached.
I have watched colleagues fall apart under the weight of what the industry asks of people. I have sat with friends who built careers on extraordinary talent and ended up in places of genuine crisis partly because the culture of fashion has zero infrastructure for saying "I'm not okay" without that disclosure immediately threatening your professional standing.
So I went to sea.
Which is an insane response to burnout. Most people go to therapy or Tuscany. I got on a ship.
What I found at sea — and I mean this without irony — is that making things with your hands in the absence of an audience is a completely different experience from making things for an industry.
On the ship I sewed because I wanted to. Because it was satisfying. Because the particular peace of hand work on open water at midnight is something I will spend the rest of my life trying to describe accurately. Nobody was grading it. Nobody was deciding whether it was commercial enough, or derivative, or "not quite right for the direction we're taking the brand."
It was just fabric and thread and the ocean and me. And it was the first time in years that fashion felt like joy instead of obligation.
"Making things with your hands in the absence of an audience is a completely different experience from making things for an industry."
Here's where it gets hopeful. Finally, you're thinking. Yes. Here we go.
There is a shift happening. It's real, it's meaningful, and it is being driven —like most actual cultural shifts not by the institutions but by the people working around them.
The slow fashion movement. The visible mending movement. The resurgence of home sewing that grew during the pandemic and did not fully recede because it turns out that making something with your own hands is genuinely good for human beings in ways we apparently had to rediscover. The rise of communities built around craft rather than commerce. Designers talking openly about mental health. Small labels building slower, doing less, paying workers properly.
The growing cultural suspicion of fast fashion that is, very slowly, beginning to translate into actual behavior change.
It's not enough. Not yet. But it is something.
ELE exists, in part, as my version of participating in this shift. Not as a revolutionary act, I'm not that grandiose, at least not before 9am, but as a deliberate choice about what I want to build and what I don't.
I don't want to build something that asks people to be thinner to belong in it. I don't want to build something that treats craft as content and people as a market. I don't want to build something that burns its creators out chasing relevance on a quarterly timeline.
I want to build something that treats fashion as what it actually is. A human skill. A form of cultural expression. A practice of care and attention and making. Something that belongs to everyone who wants to learn it; regardless of background, body, budget, or how late they're starting.
I want to build a community where someone who is struggling; in their career, in their relationship with creativity, in the particular exhaustion of being a creative person in an industry that views creativity as a resource to be extracted, can find people who understand. And also learn how to do a French seam. Both things simultaneously. Life contains multitudes.
If you are someone who left the industry, or is thinking about leaving, or is currently in it and not okay: I see you. I have been you. The door out is real. And what's on the other side of it is not nothing.
It is, sometimes, an ocean.
And if you are someone who has always loved fashion from the outside , who buys secondhand and cares about who made your clothes and sometimes lies awake wondering about the supply chain; you are part of the shift too. Your attention is not nothing. Your choices are not nothing.
This industry changes when the people inside it speak up. And when the people outside it refuse to look away.
Come as you are. Explore as we go.
— Erika
Founder, ELE · Sewist · Ship person · Recovering vision board curator
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