THE EDIT Issue 14
September is almost over. The fall hiring window isn’t.
And if you haven’t been paying much attention to job postings lately, I get it. September is busy. Fashion Month takes over. School starts. Fall internships begin. Work gets busy again after summer. Somehow you look up and October is around the corner.
But I’ve been watching what’s happening on fashion career pages lately, and I keep seeing opportunities.
Spring internships are starting to open. Assistant and coordinator roles are popping up. So are associate and specialist roles for people who already have some experience behind them. There are openings across marketing, merchandising, buying, e-commerce, communications, operations and plenty of other functions.
If you’re looking for an internship, your first job, or your next job, this is a good time to get a little more serious about your search.
If your instinct is to spend three hours on LinkedIn tonight applying to everything with the word “fashion” in it, please don’t.
You’ll get much more out of this window by getting yourself into a position where, when the right opportunity does show up, you’re ready for it. One of the things I see all the time is people waiting until they need something before they start looking.
Your internship is ending, so now you start thinking about the next one. Graduation is getting close, so now you start looking at full-time jobs. You’ve officially had enough of your current job, so now you’re checking LinkedIn every morning.
I understand it. Most of us have approached a job search that way at some point, but it makes the whole process so much harder than it needs to be.
There’s a much easier way to do this.
You start paying attention before you urgently need the opportunity. You learn which companies hire for the kind of work you want to do. You figure out what they call those roles. You notice when certain teams seem to be hiring. You keep your resume ready. You build relationships while you have the luxury of time.
Then, when something opens that makes you think, wait, I actually really want this one, you’re not starting from zero.
You’re ready to move. And right now is a very good time to start.
When Do Fashion Companies Actually Hire?
This is probably one of the questions I get most often, and I wish there were a neat answer like, “Every September, fashion companies start hiring.”
There isn’t.
Fashion doesn’t have one universal hiring season.
Internships may follow a more predictable calendar, especially at companies with formal programs. Full-time hiring is different. A team loses a coordinator and needs another one. A department gets approval for a new position. Someone gets promoted. A business grows. A company suddenly needs a person who can start within a few weeks.
That means opportunities can appear anytime throughout the year.
But there are periods when you start seeing more activity, and fall is a particularly useful time to have your eyes open.
Spring internship recruiting begins. Holiday hiring ramps up. Companies are back from summer. New full-time openings continue to hit career pages. And if you’re graduating in May, this is when you can start doing the groundwork that will make your job search much easier later.
While you don’t need to know exactly when your dream company is going to post your dream job, you want to be ready when they do.
And that’s really what I want to help you do with this week’s Edit.
So, What Should You Be Looking for Right Now?
This depends a little on where you are in your career.
If you’re looking for a Spring 2027 internship: Start now. Some spring opportunities are already open (check some out here), and more will continue to appear throughout the fall. There isn’t one magical day when every fashion company posts its internships, so I would much rather see you checking consistently than waiting until November and doing one giant search.
And please don’t assume that because an application has a deadline three weeks from now, you have three weeks to apply. Companies that review applications on a rolling basis may already be looking at candidates while that posting is still live.
If you’re graduating in May: I am not telling you that you need to have a full-time job lined up eight months before graduation. You can exhale.
In my experience, many full-time fashion roles are filled around a more immediate business need. If a company posts a Marketing Coordinator position tomorrow, they may be looking for someone who can start much sooner than next June.
But there’s plenty you can do now.
This is when I would start figuring out which companies you want to watch, what they call the roles you’re interested in, who you already know at those companies, who you might want to know, and what experience you still have time to build before graduation.
Think of this as getting everything into position so you’re not starting your job search from scratch in April.
If you’re looking for your first full-time fashion job: Widen your search beyond the exact title you have in your head.
Fashion job titles can be all over the place. One company’s Marketing Assistant might look a lot like another company’s Marketing Coordinator. Something you expect to find under E-commerce might sit under Digital. Assistant, coordinator, associate and specialist can mean very different things depending on the company.
Search by function. Search by skill. Search the companies themselves. Read the job descriptions.
You may be qualified for more than your current search terms are showing you.
And if you’re already a year or two into your career and thinking about what’s next: You have an advantage that you probably didn’t have during your first job search.
You probably have a much clearer idea of what you do and don’t want from your next company, which means your next search can be more targeted than your first one instead of simply repeating it with a slightly more senior job title.
And no matter which of these sounds most like you, I want you to start doing one thing differently: stop searching only for jobs and start watching companies.
If you search for “fashion marketing coordinator jobs” every few days, you’ll see whatever happens to match that search at that moment.
But if you know the 15 or 20 companies you’d genuinely be excited to work for, you can start noticing what’s happening inside them.
Are they posting several roles at once?
Is one department suddenly hiring?
Are internships appearing?
Do you keep seeing similar skills across their job descriptions?
Are there titles you hadn’t thought to search for?
This is how you start getting better at reading the market instead of waiting for an algorithm to hand you the perfect opening.
And you can start doing this right now.
Open a note, spreadsheet, Google Doc, whatever you’ll actually use, and write down 10 companies you would be genuinely excited to work for.
Then go directly to their career pages. Don’t apply to anything yet. Just look.
What are they hiring for? Which departments seem active? What words keep showing up? What experience are they asking for? Are there roles you didn’t know existed?
You’re going to learn a lot more from doing that for 20 minutes than you will from another hour of scrolling through hundreds of vaguely relevant LinkedIn jobs.
And once you have that list, we can turn it into something much more useful.
Let’s build your 30-day fall hiring plan.
Knowing when companies hire is helpful. Knowing that spring internships are opening is helpful. Having a list of companies you want to work for is a very good start.
Now we’re going to put all of it to work.
For paid subscribers, I’m breaking down exactly how I would approach the next 30 days: how to build a target-company watchlist that actually works, what hiring signals I pay attention to, how quickly I would move when an opportunity opens, how to network when there’s a real role involved, and what I would do each week so the job search doesn’t become another full-time job.
If you’re ready, let’s get to work.