Memo to Laura Craik: Tell us something we don’t already know! In today’s Evening Standard, Ms C has professed that internships are “only for the wealthy now.” Err, really? ‘now’, you say? Not, ‘always-have-been-and-will-continue-to-be’, perhaps? While Craik is precisely en pointe in principal, this ain’t just a new trend and to link it to the influence of The Hills is disingenuous and fundamentally, well, wrong.

Oh, to lick a fashion cupboard floor… Those sacred opportunities within the ivory towers of Conde Nast, Natmags, IPC et al. The Publishing School of Real Life where you’ll learn such skills as fetching the right latte, calling-in a million lilac blouses for none to be used on shoot, hiding your alcoholic boss’ vodka and so on and so forth. One would think that the time spent here is where one really needs to prove themselves, to go out-of-their-way to impress with the coffee fetching, but no. Quite simply, eventually getting offered that masthead job is determined not by how hard you slog it out there but how long.

Do the math: to sustain working for nothing for an age with no help from ma and pa is not doable. TRR has licked many-a fashion cupboard floor over the last decade (indeed, the above task examples were all anecdotal) however these internships were stolen months whilst at still Uni either kipping on friends-of-parents’ floors or renting a 60-quid a week squalid room in Walthamstow and sneaking off to the Job Centre every fortnight to sign on. In short: fucking tough and thoroughly unsustainable.

When wealthy student peers won masthead roles because their financially blessed parents could bankroll them whilst they played the waiting game until said magazine eventually caved in and hired them, it inspired not jealousy, but utter frustration, resentfulness and contempt towards the industry’s schema of only allowing the wealthy to advance by default. But thems the brakes and alas, that’s how it’ll always be. Internships have, are, and evermore shall be for those auspicious enough to be monetarily propped up. To the un-finically blessed London outsider: good luck with that.

Posted on January 20, 2011 at 9:48:25 by The Real Runway