Why Fashion Struggles to Attract Young Craftspeople Despite Growing Interest in Trades

Luxury brands have no choice but to invest heavily in training craftspeople now, or face losing irreplaceable skills that will die with retiring masters and cannot be recreated by AI.

Summary of Can Fashion Sell a New Generation on Trade Jobs?. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:00:41 — Tailoring employment in the U.S. has declined roughly 30% over the past decade, with Nordstrom operating as the largest employer of tailors in North America with nearly 1,500 specialists.
• 00:02:30 — When LVMH and Kering acquired independent couture houses in the late 1990s and early 2000s, manufacturing was offshored to Asia while offices remained in Western countries, and the industry failed to train the next generation of craftspeople.
• 00:03:03 — The decline in craftspeople stems partly from offshoring and partly from cultural shifts that pushed young people toward college degrees and office jobs rather than skilled trades, which were rebranded as consolation prizes.
• 00:07:53 — Fashion’s training programs are highly localized in regions like Tuscany and Somerset, making them inaccessible to potential students in places like Atlanta or Minnesota who don’t know these opportunities exist.
• 00:13:26 — Entry-level training like a 150-hour haute couture embroidery course costs nearly 10,000 dollars, and reaching mastery at top houses like Chanel requires 30 years of experience, creating a commitment far longer than most young people expect.
• 00:14:48 — In the U.S., tailors and custom sewers earn approximately 45,000 dollars annually on average, which is modest considering the decades required to reach higher salaries and expertise.
• 00:15:45 — Nordstrom reframes tailoring as involving creativity, styling, and sustainability focused on extending garment life rather than just hemming, and positions the role as a potential entry point to other careers like styling, product development, or store management.
• 00:17:52 — Sustainability requirements and potential fines are creating new job opportunities in garment repair and textile maintenance, which fashion should market as meaningful roles rather than just framing sustainability as environmental compliance.
• 00:25:29 — Luxury brands risk permanently losing manufacturing capabilities if they don’t invest in training now, as restarting suppliers and specialized skills is nearly impossible once craftspeople retire and knowledge disappears.

In depth

How the pipeline actually broke

Sheena Butler-Young pushes Dan Hastings past the obvious observation that fashion lacks skilled workers and asks him to explain the mechanism. His answer starts with a specific historical hinge: the wave of LVMH and Kering acquisitions of independent couture houses at the turn of the millennium 00:02:30. Before that, the petites mains who built the great Saint Laurent and Dior gowns were largely women who had come up through apprenticeships rather than design school, and they were poorly compensated even then 00:02:37. When the conglomerates took over, Hastings argues, manufacturing was pushed offshore to Asia while corporate headquarters, flagship stores, and creative teams stayed concentrated in Paris, London, and New York 00:03:14. That geographic split meant the West kept the glamorous, visible parts of the business and exported the part that actually trains hands-on skill, so an entire cohort of would-be artisans simply never got recruited 00:03:21.

Layered on top of that structural choice is a cultural one. Hastings and Butler-Young both describe growing up in an era, in France and the US respectively, when trade schools were treated as an admission of academic failure rather than a different kind of competence 00:05:39. Fashion compounded this by building its own mythology around the creative director as a rock star, while production work was treated as unglamorous by comparison, even though Hastings personally finds ateliers fascinating to watch 00:04:03. The result, visible on factory floors today, is a workforce skewed heavily toward people in their 60s and 70s with almost nobody in their 20s, 30s or 40s to replace them 00:02:06.

What’s left unresolved is whether this is a problem fashion actually wants to fix at the pace required. Hastings notes brands have built their own academies and modules, but concedes this doesn’t undo decades of underinvestment in a single generation 00:03:37. The gap isn’t a talent shortage so much as an incentive shortage that goes back thirty years.

The academies exist, but nobody knows about them

A recurring theme is that fashion’s response to the shortage — funding academies and apprenticeship pipelines — is real but poorly distributed. Hastings points out that training programs cluster around existing luxury manufacturing hubs: Hermès sits in Pantin, outside Paris, and Mulberry’s leather apprenticeship is based in Somerset, nowhere near London or Bristol’s cultural gravity 00:09:10. A recruiter Butler-Young interviewed, Yvonne of Spot on Minds, made the case that proximity itself creates enthusiasm — a young person in Tuscany who watches a relative do embroidery work absorbs pride and visibility that someone in Atlanta or Minnesota simply never encounters 00:08:15.

The scale of interest, when people do find out, suggests demand isn’t the constraint — awareness is. Hastings cites Mulberry’s leather craftsmanship apprenticeship, which reportedly drew its highest-ever number of applicants once postings went out, precisely because it filled a niche need with a clear name attached 00:09:54. Nordstrom’s own tailoring program received close to 200 applications for only 15 spots 00:11:42. Both examples argue that when the opportunity is legible, young people apply — but that legibility is the industry’s biggest gap. Hastings is blunt that most information about scholarships, bursaries, or open cohorts spreads through personal networks rather than public channels, meaning access depends heavily on already knowing someone in the industry 00:10:23.

This localization problem intersects with cost. Fashion design degrees at schools like Central Saint Martins already run into the tens of thousands of pounds before students even fund the graduate collections needed to be noticed by buyers or prize committees 00:10:49. So the trades path isn’t just geographically narrow — it competes with a design-school pathway that is expensive but at least widely marketed, leaving craft training doubly disadvantaged in visibility and reach.

The economics don’t match the pitch

One of the sharpest tensions in the conversation is between how these careers are marketed and what they actually cost, in time and money. Butler-Young flags that many training programs are pitched as short — a four-week or six-week course — which reads as an attractive contrast to a four-year degree, but Hastings insists that framing is misleading because true mastery takes decades, not weeks 00:12:36. His example is the École Lesage embroidery course in Paris: 150 hours of instruction costs nearly ten thousand dollars, but that only qualifies someone as a beginner, and reaching the top tier at a house like Chanel — the premier atelier — requires roughly thirty years of accumulated experience 00:13:26.

Butler-Young supplies the wage data that makes this arithmetic sting: US tailors, dressmakers, and custom sewers earn about $45,000 a year on average 00:14:48. That’s not a starting salary that improves quickly — Hastings notes recruiters report salaries have become more competitive, but only at the senior end of the pipeline, for people twenty or thirty years in 00:15:17. For a generation used to instant feedback loops and algorithmically-served gratification, as Hastings puts it, a two-decade runway to a livable craft salary is a difficult sell, no matter how the entry point is dressed up 00:14:11.

Neither speaker offers a clean fix here. Hastings’ closest suggestion is transparency — being upfront that this is a twenty-year game rather than disguising it as a quick vocational alternative to college — but he doesn’t claim that transparency alone will fill the pipeline. The economics remain a genuine structural obstacle, not just a marketing problem.

Reframing the job: sustainability, mobility, and second acts

Given the economics can’t easily change, much of the discussion turns to how brands are trying to reposition these roles rather than raise their pay. Nordstrom’s approach, described by its styling program lead, recasts tailoring away from hemming and toward creativity, styling, and sustainability — extending a garment’s usable life 00:15:49. Hastings connects this to broader luxury consumer behavior, where buyers increasingly think about resale value and want assurance a brand can repair or refurbish an item years later, meaning repair work becomes tied to a growing service economy rather than being seen as menial 00:16:42. Butler-Young is openly skeptical that Gen Z’s stated environmental values will actually convert into career choices, but agrees the fines-driven urgency around sustainability targets is likely a stronger real-world driver than sentiment 00:17:52.

A second reframing strategy is presenting craft roles as a career on-ramp rather than a lifetime sentence. Nordstrom explicitly tells recruits the tailoring track can lead to styling, product development, or store management, and checks in with staff regularly about where they want to go next 00:19:15. FIT’s president is quoted using an internal phrase — that students will essentially wear themselves out draping — signaling that hands-on training is treated as foundational skill-building rather than a fixed destiny 00:18:51.

Hastings raises an unresolved tension here: if the pitch is “start here, then move on,” that risks recreating the very churn problem the industry is trying to solve, since replacing craftspeople every few years doesn’t fix a labor shortage 00:20:14. His alternative suggestion — recruiting career-changers rather than only chasing young talent, citing a French program that fully funded a former restaurant worker’s fashion design retraining — broadens the applicant pool beyond the assumption that only school-leavers are the answer 00:20:59.

Why brands may have no choice — and where AI cuts both ways

Toward the end, the conversation shifts from optimism about rebranding to a harder argument: brands will be compelled to invest in training regardless of whether it works as a marketing story. Hastings compares the craft shortage to Bulgari’s chairman describing the watch industry’s supplier problem — a brand can pause and restart, but a specialized supplier, once shut down, is effectively impossible to rebuild 00:25:52. Applied to fashion’s ateliers, the logic is that if luxury houses keep charging premium prices on the promise of craftsmanship, they cannot allow that expertise to simply expire with a retiring workforce, so continued investment in training isn’t optional 00:24:55.

Butler-Young is more skeptical about the source of momentum, arguing bluntly that regulatory fines, not brand goodwill, will be the real forcing function pushing money into training pipelines 00:17:52. Hastings agrees brands are being pushed rather than volunteering, which softens some of the earlier optimism about reframing strategies working on their own merits.

AI enters as a double-edged element rather than a clean solution. Hastings argues AI cannot replicate haute couture embroidery or feather work, pointing to Lesage’s practice of embroidering a strand of hair into a bridal gown for luck — a detail meant to show why hand craftsmanship retains irreplaceable value 00:27:15. But he also concedes AI may automate parts of pattern-making, and Butler-Young notes AI-driven anxiety about white-collar jobs could ironically be the very thing nudging young people back toward trades 00:23:25. Neither speaker predicts a fast turnaround; both land on the conversation’s most repeated caveat — this will be a slow drip of change, not a sudden resurgence, and fashion is starting later than other trades already benefiting from renewed interest 00:23:20.

Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.