If You've Got It... then what?

I wonder what to do with my passion for shopping and fashion.

My problem is names. I have a very hard time immersing myself in the fashion industry because I can never keep up with the designers, their firms, the editors or their magazines, or the models and which face is whose. This is terrible of me, I know, but I have always had a hard time with the people in my classes who I see every day. I'm the kind of person that has a moment of apprehension when she walks into a gathering because there's undoubtedly going to be one situation of speaking to someone for 45 minutes and being unable to place their name or how she met them. Except, for me, it's twelve people, not one.(People with three names are the worst. Having to remember all three of those names is, yknow, the reason I can't do math.)

This is why all you bloggers I read (some found at right) amaze me so much. How do you do it? Mine will never be that type of blog. I could write about clothes all day long, but never people. I get really, really excited when I see a designer's face and their name automatically pops into my head. Or in public when I see a skirt I just saw on a site or in a store and remember the source. I got excited the first time I watched Zoolander and understood some of the more subtle industry humor that other people watching it with me didn't get, for heaven's sake.

I feel as though one solution to this might be magazine subscriptions. Which is why I plan to spend my tax return this year on subscriptions. Feel free to suggest your favorites! I like solid articles and fantastic photo editorials better than celebrity gossip and quizzes, mind you. I enjoy shopping magazines, but mostly only for traveling, when I can't actually go online or to a store immediately and try to spend my limited, hard-earned money. Besides, Lucky, for example, is waaaay too expensive for me and it can be a wee bit depressing. Shopping magazines for those of average allowances would be a blessing. (I think that's called H&M's new 'zine-brochures, heh.)

My mother went to Syracuse for her MFA in Fashion Design after doing visual arts at NYC's High School of Performing and Arts. But I think that she, like me, appreciated the art of fashion more than the industry of fashion, and now she runs a graphic design company instead. It's a good mesh of interests, but I would still like to incorporate more fashion into my life than just aesthetically. This is also the reason my love of fashion was so latent. I rejected my love of clothes for a long time because my mother liked fashion, the same way that I still refuse to consider law school, even though I believe I'd be good at it, because my father is a lawyer.

Yet, at this point, now that I've embraced my interest, I am the one everyone in my family comes to for shopping buddies, outfit opinions, or beauty advice. I know what earrings go with your facial shape, okay? But what was your name, again?

I'd love to do what some of the ladies on television are doing, for example. But I think there are certain qualifications I simply don't possess. I already accost people on the streets and the subway to comment (sometimes just in my head) on what they should or shouldn't be wearing, like Stacy London, but I don't think anyone's jumping in line to pay me for doing it. I could easily sit on a judging panel like Janice Dickinson and be bitchy and maybe blitzed and probably unstable, but, again... we can hardly ever be paid for doing what comes naturally. And then there's Katinka from Zoolander. Okay, she's fictional, hinderance number one. And I don't really know what she did in that movie except attend Muragatu and go to runway shows and hobnob with the fashion hoity-toits, but if I can run around in pleather and be evil and still be immersed in fashion culture, I'll take it.

In the real world, there are realms of fashion consulting, personal shopping, and fashion writing/editing I can do with my English degree that would fulfill my interests without running up against the wall of my handicapped memory capacity. It's something that I'm going to have to consider now, as I go into the adult world of Real Jobs and try to get paychecks that make it so that I don't have to wait for my tax return to afford magazines.

But when you have a love for something, or a talent for it, I believe you follow the white rabbit and see where it will go for you.

If you have/want a career involving fashion, fashion writing, beauty, or shopping, feel free to let me know about when you knew you wanted it, how you went about it, or what your plans are for the future.