I meet with a lot of girls who reach out to me and tell me, with a steely conviction, “I want to work in fashion”.

I ask them the same question every time.

“Cool. Doing what, exactly?”

Quite often, they look back at me blankly, almost as though I’m supposed to give them the answer and hand over a perfectly mapped career roadmap with their whole life story laid out in front of them.

There’s also a flicker of disappointment when I explain that I don’t spend Monday to Friday swanning in and out of an office in fabulous clothes, sitting front row at runway shows and directing campaign shoots.

Don’t get me wrong. There are fabulous clothes. There are fun PR events. There are campaigns and designers and very fun rooms to find yourself in.

But those things are part of my world because I do lots of different things. I’m a lawyer. I write. I run events for other girls who love fashion, creativity and art. I have a lot of different side quests and hobbies (and an unhealthy addiction to caffeine!). There isn’t one magical job called “working in fashion” that gives me access to all of it.

Fashion is an industry. It is not a job.

The clothes are the product. Behind them is an enormous business.

Particularly in Australia, fashion is deeply intertwined with retail, e-commerce, consumer goods, technology, logistics, warehousing, manufacturing, property, marketing, employment, data, finance and supply chain.

Someone has to negotiate the lease for the beautiful flagship store.

Someone decides whether to order 500 black dresses or 5,000.

Someone builds the website you bought the dress from at 11:47pm.

The fashion industry doesn’t just need “fashion people”.

It needs business people who understand fashion.

So if your CV currently screams more “accounting”, “consultant”, “marketing” or “tech” rather than “Chanel”, the question isn’t necessarily how you throw away your career and start all over again.

It’s how you translate what you already know into fashion.

Here are five places I’d start.

1. You’re a lawyer

Your fashion career: Legal, business affairs and brand protection

When people hear “fashion lawyer”, they tend to immediately think of intellectual property. Someone has copied a dress, a logo looks suspiciously familiar, cease-and-desist letter, fin.

IP is absolutely part of fashion law. But the legal function inside a fashion, beauty or retail business can touch almost every part of the company.

There are commercial contracts, trade marks, licensing arrangements, designer collaborations, influencer agreements, celebrity ambassadors, manufacturing agreements, supplier disputes, employment issues, privacy, data, e-commerce, consumer law, advertising claims, retail leases, technology contracts, investigations and crises.

That means there isn’t one prescribed legal background that unlocks the door.

Commercial lawyers are useful. IP lawyers are useful. Employment lawyers are useful. Privacy and technology lawyers are increasingly useful. Corporate lawyers understand transactions and growth. Property lawyers understand retail footprints. Litigators know what to do when everything has already gone wrong.

What you could actually do

Search for titles like Legal Counsel, Senior Legal Counsel, Corporate Counsel, Commercial Counsel, IP Counsel, Employment Counsel or Privacy Counsel.

And don’t restrict your search to companies with “fashion” in the description. Look at luxury groups, department stores, beauty companies, jewellery businesses, e-commerce platforms, sportswear companies, consumer brands and major retailers.

What you already have

If you’ve spent years negotiating contracts, advising executives, managing disputes or giving commercial advice, those skills don’t disappear because your client is now selling handbags instead of financial services.

What you’re probably missing

Industry literacy.

Knowing the law isn’t enough. You need to understand how the business makes money, where its risks sit and why the commercial team cares about something in the first place.

Learn how licensing works. Understand wholesale versus direct-to-consumer. Understand influencer marketing. Learn the basics of manufacturing, sourcing, e-commerce and retail operations.

You don’t need to arrive already knowing everything about fashion.

But you should be able to demonstrate that you’re genuinely interested in the business of fashion, not simply that you enjoy online shopping.

How I’d start

Read fashion-business news alongside your legal news. Follow the major fashion groups and Australian retailers. Look at the legal issues affecting the sector and start developing a point of view on them.

2. You’re in marketing

Your fashion career: Brand, PR, strategic partnerships and e-commerce

If you’re already working in marketing, particularly in FMCG, beauty, hospitality, media, technology or another consumer-facing industry, your jump may be less dramatic than you think.

Fashion marketing is not just making Instagram posts.

Major fashion businesses have teams responsible for brand strategy, PR, communications, partnerships, influencer and talent marketing, CRM, loyalty, performance marketing, e-commerce, social, content, events and customer acquisition.

What you could actually do

Look for Brand Manager, Brand Marketing Manager, Partnerships Manager, PR Manager, Communications Manager, Influencer Marketing Manager, CRM Manager, E-commerce Manager, Performance Marketing Manager, Social Media Manager and Customer Marketing roles.

What you already have

You probably already understand customers.

You know how to position a product, build a campaign, manage budgets, work with agencies, interpret performance data and convince someone to buy something they weren’t necessarily planning to buy five minutes earlier.

Those skills are highly relevant.

What you’re probably missing

Fashion requires cultural literacy alongside commercial capability.

You are selling what carrying that particular black handbag communicates about the woman holding it.

Fashion is identity, aspiration, status, belonging, taste and culture wrapped around a physical product. Understanding those signals matters.

So study brands beyond their Instagram feeds. Why is one label suddenly culturally relevant? Why did another lose its cool? Why does one collaboration sell out while another feels painfully corporate?

That’s the work.

How I’d start

Pick three fashion brands you admire and analyse them like a marketer, not a customer.

Who is their customer? What’s their positioning? How do they acquire customers? What channels do they use? What does their pricing communicate? Who do they collaborate with and why?

You already know how to market.

Now learn how fashion markets itself.

3. You work in tech, data or insights

Your fashion career: Digital product, e-commerce, data, AI and trend forecasting

This might be the most underestimated route into fashion.

Some of the people who will have the greatest influence over what we wear and how we buy fashion over the next decade may never set foot inside a design school.

They’ll be engineers, product managers, UX designers, data scientists, consumer insights specialists and trend forecasters.

Because think about how you actually discover and buy clothes now.

Search. Recommendations. TikTok. Social commerce. Marketplaces. Personalisation. Digital payments. Online returns. Virtual try-on. AI shopping assistants.

And increasingly, data isn’t only being used to understand what we bought. It’s being used to anticipate what we’re going to want next.

That’s where trend forecasting gets particularly interesting. Trend forecasting isn’t simply having good taste or predicting that everyone will suddenly start wearing capri pants again. At its most sophisticated, it’s about interpreting huge amounts of information across consumer behaviour, search data, social media, retail performance, culture, economics and technology to identify the signals that could shape what consumers want next.

Fashion has always been about predicting desire. Technology is changing how quickly, and how accurately, we can do it.

What you could actually do

Look for roles like Digital Product Manager, E-commerce Product Manager, Product Designer, UX/UI Designer, Data Analyst, Data Scientist, Consumer Insights Analyst, Trend Forecaster, Trend Analyst, Foresight Strategist, CRM Technology Manager, Digital Experience Manager, Marketplace Manager, Retail Technology Manager and AI/Product roles.

And don’t assume all of these jobs sit inside fashion brands themselves. Trend forecasting agencies, retailers, e-commerce platforms, consultancies and consumer intelligence businesses all sit within the broader fashion ecosystem.

What you already have

If you can build digital products, analyse customer behaviour, identify patterns in data, conduct consumer research, manage platforms, design user experiences or implement emerging technology, you have skills fashion businesses increasingly need.

The same applies if you already work in research, insights or strategy. Trend forecasting is ultimately about connecting seemingly disparate signals and translating them into something commercially useful.

A fashion business doesn’t just want to know that a trend is happening. It wants to know: does this matter to our customer, how long will it last and what should we actually do about it?

What you’re probably missing

Retail economics, fashion cycles and cultural literacy.

A technically beautiful feature is useless if customers don’t use it, it kills conversion or creates a returns nightmare downstream. Likewise, a beautifully presented trend report is useless if nobody can translate it into a product, merchandising or marketing decision.

Understand the customer journey from discovery to checkout, fulfilment, returns and loyalty. Learn how buying and merchandising cycles work. Pay attention to the difference between a micro-trend that will disappear in three weeks and a deeper consumer shift that could reshape a category for years.

And pay attention to what AI is doing to both sides of this equation.

Recommendation engines are becoming more sophisticated. AI-assisted search is changing product discovery. Agentic commerce could fundamentally alter the relationship between consumers, brands and platforms. Virtual try-on continues to improve. At the same time, brands have access to more signals about consumer behaviour than ever before.

Fashion’s next battleground isn’t only the runway.

It’s the interface, the algorithm and the ability to predict what we’ll want before we’ve even decided we want it.

How I’d start

Start looking at fashion websites as products rather than shops, and trends as data rather than aesthetics.

Why does one checkout experience feel effortless while another makes you abandon your cart? How is personalisation being used? What is the recommendation engine showing you? What information might reduce returns?

Then start looking at trends differently. When you notice something suddenly appearing everywhere, ask why now? What cultural, economic or technological shift is sitting underneath it? Is there search or social data supporting it? Is it translating into actual purchasing behaviour?

Follow established trend forecasting and consumer intelligence businesses and look at the backgrounds of the people working there. You’ll quickly realise that fashion forecasting isn’t populated exclusively by fashion design graduates.

Then work out where your existing technical, analytical or research skill set intersects with those problems.

4. You’re a consultant

Your fashion career: Strategy, operations, transformation and sustainability

Beneath the beautiful campaigns, fashion companies have some incredibly unsexy problems to solve.

Should we enter China?

Should we open another 20 stores or invest that capital into e-commerce?

Should we introduce resale?

Should we acquire another label?

How do we reduce inventory without losing sales?

How do we make our supply chain more resilient?

How do we grow without destroying the exclusivity that made people want the brand in the first place?

Suddenly that PowerPoint deck doesn’t seem so far removed from fashion.

What you could actually do

Look for Strategy Manager, Corporate Strategy, Business Development Manager, Transformation Manager, Commercial Strategy Manager, Operations Strategy, Sustainability Manager, Circularity Lead, Customer Strategy and Corporate Development roles.

What you already have

Consultants tend to be good at taking messy, ambiguous problems and turning them into something executives can actually make a decision about.

That is extremely useful inside a fashion company.

You may already understand market entry, pricing, operating models, transformation, customer strategy, supply chain, M&A or growth.

What you’re probably missing

Again, industry context.

Fashion businesses have unusual economics.

Seasonality matters. Inventory matters. Markdown matters. Brand equity matters. Wholesale and direct-to-consumer models behave differently. A strategy that maximises short-term revenue can damage desirability over the long term.

You need to understand why.

How I’d start

Read the annual reports of listed fashion and luxury businesses.

Look at revenue by geography, margins, store growth, inventory, digital sales and strategic priorities.

Then start asking yourself what you would advise management to do.

Congratulations. You’re already thinking like a fashion strategist.

5. You work in HR

Your fashion career: People, talent acquisition and employee relations (ER)

Fashion companies employ people.

Sometimes tens of thousands of them.

A large fashion or retail business might have corporate employees sitting in head office, designers and product teams, hundreds of retail workers, warehouse employees, sourcing teams, technology teams and executives spread across multiple countries.

That creates enormous people and workforce complexity.

What you could actually do

Search for People & Culture Business Partner, HR Business Partner, Talent Acquisition Manager, Employee Relations Manager, People Operations, Organisational Development, Learning & Development, Remuneration and Benefits, Workforce Strategy, Workplace Investigations and Health & Safety roles.

What you already have

If you’ve managed employee relations, recruited senior talent, advised leaders, built workforce strategies, run investigations or managed organisational change, you already understand the underlying problems.

What you’re probably missing

The workforce dynamics of retail.

A fashion company’s people issues can look very different from those inside a bank or professional-services firm. There may be large casual workforces, weekend trading, seasonal hiring, warehouses, stores spread across the country and very different employee populations operating under one brand.

Learn the operating model and the industrial framework sitting underneath it. Understand which modern awards apply to different parts of the workforce, whether the business has an enterprise agreement and how those instruments interact with rostering, penalty rates, overtime, classifications and minimum engagement periods.

How I’d start

Don’t just search fashion companies for jobs with “fashion” in the title. Search their corporate career pages for your existing profession.

Look at who currently holds those roles. Where did they work before?

You may discover the Head of People at the fashion company you idolise did not begin her career in fashion either.

Please don’t throw away the boring corporate stuff

This is the part I particularly want women who have already spent five or ten years building careers to understand. You may not need to start over.

In fact, your corporate background might be the thing that makes you interesting.

Fashion businesses don’t only need people who understand clothes.

The fashion degree you don’t have might matter far less than the professional judgement you’ve spent the past seven years developing.

That doesn’t mean you’re automatically entitled to walk into a senior role in an industry you’ve never worked in. You still need to do the work. Learn the sector. Understand its economics. Build genuine relationships. Be able to articulate why your experience is relevant.

But don’t confuse changing industries with erasing your career.

Because the question isn’t so much: “How do I throw away my corporate career and start again in fashion?” It’s: “How do I take everything I’ve already built and make myself stand out"?”

Last week, a junior lawyer posted a TikTok about the realities of working as a junior lawyer: the long hours, the deadlines, the lack of flexibility, the pressure and the sheer monotony of it all.

Then she went viral.

Then she got fired.

According to Lawyers Weekly, Natali Curukovski was three weeks into her job at a Melbourne law firm when she posted a TikTok about her experience as a junior lawyer. The video now has amassed around 638.7k views (at the time of writing). Curukovski subsequently said she was asked by her employer to remove it, refused, and was terminated.

It escaped LawTok and made it all the way to a 7NEWS segment, where Billi Milovanovic, co-host of the Wine Chats Podcast who was asked to weigh in on the situation, quipped: “I don’t think she should’ve posted that video if she was serious about being a lawyer, but it seems to me that she seems more serious about being an influencer”.

My first thought upon hearing that was: ouch.

I also couldn’t stop thinking about that line, because it captures something slightly strange about the way we think about lawyers who have the audacity to also exist on the internet.

Could the law and ‘influencing’ ever peacefully co-exist?

The rise of the lawfluencer

My algorithm has apparently decided that my two defining characteristics are lawyer and woman who likes clothes, which means I am now force-fed a truckload of legal lifestyle content on the daily.

There are some of my favourite recurring faces: Charlotte Wilkie, Devina Diaries, Katrina Jarrous, and, across the Pacific, Tiff the Lawyer documenting life in and around BigLaw in New York. There are also lawyers like Denise Katidis, whose love of colour and Manolos was profiled by the Australian Financial Review.

And I eat. It. Up.

GRWM for work. What I wear as a BigLaw attorney. Morning Pilates. Coffee. Elevator selfie. Skyline views of Sydney Harbour Bridge. Taking a firm-expensed taxi home at 11pm. Rinse and repeat.

Is this an accurate representation of practising law?

Obviously not.

Do I particularly care? Not really.

I have lived the BigLaw life. I know what happens during the other eleven hours that didn’t make the reel.

But I consume “LawTok” content in the same way I consume a silly 90s chick flick like The Devil Wears Prada or 13 going on 30.

It is fantasy. Romanticism. Escapism. Light and frothy and fizzy, like a glass of champagne that disappears almost immediately after it hits your tongue.

It doesn’t need to mean anything.

And yet, the comment section on this kind of content inevitably summons the spiritual fury of a senior partner desperate for everyone to know that when he was a junior, he survived entirely on document review, vending-machine coffee and sheer terror.

“This isn’t what being a lawyer is really like.”, he screams into the void.

Yes. We know.

And we’re tired of hearing about it.

Will somebody PLEASE think of the law students?

The more interesting criticism is that lawfluencers are selling prospective lawyers a fantasy.

What about the impressionable 19-year-old who watches a beautiful 25-year-old lawyer go to reformer Pilates, buy a skin tint from Mecca at lunch and swan into a client event and concludes: wow, this is the career for me?

Cue the pitchforks: will somebody please think of the children?

Relax.

More importantly, I think this criticism misses what lawfluencing actually gives law students.

Hope.

When I started law school in 2016, it was peak King Kylie and Snapchat era. TikTok didn’t exist. There were law-school YouTubers like Eve Cornwell and LilyLikeCom, whose videos I devoured, but something curious tended to happen.

They documented law school. Applications. Getting the coveted grad job.

Then they became lawyers.

Silence.

The camera disappeared. The profession swallowed them whole.

Or, a few months later, you’d get the ominous upload: I LEFT BIGLAW.

Cue the comments: What a waste!!! Why???

As a wide-eyed law student, I also wanted to find lawyers who looked like me. Young ambitious women of colour. Women building serious legal careers.

So when clerkship season arrived, I would literally go onto firm websites, open the Partners page and trawl through the headshots looking for women that looked like me.

That was my version of representation. My shining beacon of hope, if you will. Much like Nigel in The Devil Wears Prada, who describes Runway as “a beacon of hope” for the young boy growing up in Scarborough, I found mine scrolling through the “Our People” pages of top-tier law firms.

But even when I found them (and it took a LOT of digging), they were 20 or 30 years ahead of me. They had already reached the supposed finish line.

What I couldn’t see was the climb.

And that is what lawfluencers have changed.

You can watch someone get the clerkship, graduate, survive their first year, buy the designer handbag, change firms, get promoted, burn out, leave BigLaw, go in-house or build something completely different.

For an industry historically guarded by family connections, elitism, clerkship rituals and about 400 unwritten rules nobody bothers explaining until you’ve broken one, I think that matters.

Too glamorous. Too honest. Pick one.

Which brings me back to Curukovski.

There is something almost comical about the contradiction.

When junior lawyers show the beautiful bits, they’re accused of glamorising the profession.

When a junior lawyer shows the ugly bits, apparently we’ve gone too far in the other direction.

So what exactly are young lawyers allowed to say?

Mel Storey makes the counterargument very well in her Counsel Media piece, “So You’ve Accidentally Gone Viral?”. Lawyers aren’t ordinary employees with unlimited freedom to post whatever occurs to them before bed. Employment agreements, workplace policies, professional obligations and reputational considerations are real. Storey’s advice is essentially: understand what governs you before you post, not after the internet has decided to make you famous.

But Storey makes another observation I find more interesting: employee-generated content is potentially an enormous organic marketing channel for professional services firms, yet the profession’s instinct is often control.

There is a difference between saying lawyers need judgment online and saying junior lawyers shouldn’t have public personas.

And perhaps the profession hasn’t quite worked out that difference yet.

What will the future lawyer look like?

All of this is happening while AI is quietly forcing us to reconsider what actually makes a lawyer valuable.

Research. Document review. First drafts. Technology can already augment enormous amounts of the technical work junior lawyers were traditionally trained to do.

So what becomes more valuable?

Judgment. Communication. Commercial intuition. Creativity. Relationships. Understanding brands, customers, reputation and culture.

And, dare I say it, taste.

The businesses of the future won’t always need someone who can produce the most technically immaculate 14-page legal advice. They will need lawyers who understand the legal risk and understand the business well enough to say what they should actually do about it.

Lawyer + strategist + communicator + cultural translator.

At least for now, those distinctly human qualities are considerably harder to automate.

Which makes that 7NEWS line rather strange: maybe she should consider a path in influencing instead.

But when a partner builds an audience, publishes articles, speaks at conferences and becomes known for their ideas, we call it “thought leadership”.

When a young woman does it on TikTok, we call her an influencer.

So perhaps, the problem was never influencing. It was who we thought had earned the right to have influence in the first place. And I think it’s about time we put the spotlight on people who look a little more like us.

I've spoken with countless lawyers, writers, founders, editors, creatives and in-house counsel working in the fashion and retail industry over the past twelve months. It is surprising how many people have been willing to say yes to a cold DM and a hot coffee. The fashion industry is much smaller than I ever expected, and after a while I noticed the same names and faces kept popping up.

After countless coffee chats and a fully-fledged caffeine addiction later, I started noticing the same career archetypes appearing over and over again. Humour me for a second, but I genuinely think they can all be explained by the four women from SATC. So, which one are you?

The Trusted Adviser (Private Practice) - Miranda Hobbs

She works at a law firm and has somehow managed to carve out a niche or practice area within the firm where fashion brands and retailers actually come to her for advice.

If someone is looking to build a brand, expand overseas or scale internationally, she’s the first point of call.

She reads The Business of Fashion, Fashion Law Journal and The Fashion Law before she’s even opened Outlook. She keeps up to date with executive movements on Ragtrader like other people keep up with celebrity gossip.

She’s spent years trying to convince the partners at her law firm that ‘yes, fashion law is a real thing’ and, yes, it is actually a lucrative industry. They’re still waiting for her to prove herself.

She’s had to draft the business case.

She’s also had to deal with the firm politics over origination credit, even though she was the one who brought in the client because the client specifically wanted to work with her.

She usually works in commercial law, intellectual property or corporate M&A.

She understands trade marks, influencer agreements, master services agreements, licensing arrangements and brand protection like the back of her hand.

Coffee order: Two almond flat whites before 9.00 am.

Go-to exercise: Hyrox.

Pet peeve: Not being taken seriously within a conservative law firm and having to prove herself over and over again.

Working hours: Variable. Officially 9.00 am to 5.30 pm. Realistically somewhere between 9.00 am and 11.00 pm.

How hard is it to get here? ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Years: Usually 6-10 years.

The Confidante (In-House Legal Counsel) - Charlotte York

She works in-house at a fashion brand or retailer. She’s sympathetic, always there to lend an ear and somehow knows exactly what’s going on in every corner of the business. She knows who’s resigning before LinkedIn does, who’s about to launch a new collection, and which campaign has been sitting in legal for two weeks because marketing still hasn’t approved the copy.

Stakeholders love calling her because she doesn’t just answer the legal question.

She asks the questions nobody else has thought to ask.

“What’s the commercial objective here?”

“What problem are we actually trying to solve?”

“Could we explain this to the ACCC?”

“If this ended up on TikTok tomorrow, would we be comfortable with it?”

The founder has called her at 9.30 pm because they’ve already run a contract through Claude or ChatGPT and just want her to “bless it quickly”. She opens the document to discover the AI has cited legislation that doesn’t exist, invented a case, referred to the company by three different names and somehow changed the governing law to Indonesia.

She sighs.

Starts Track Changes.

Again.

Half her job is legal.

The other half is translating legal advice into plain English so nobody panics.

She’ll spend an hour debating whether a campaign should say “sustainable”, “consciously made” or “lower impact” because she’s already thinking about greenwashing before anyone else in the room is.

She knows next season’s campaign six months before it launches.

She gets excited when the PR team drops a campaign deck into her inbox.

She’ll happily spend twenty minutes discussing the shade of the packaging before reminding everyone that, yes, they still need a privacy collection notice.

She probably works for a fashion, beauty, retail or e-commerce brand where legal sits alongside marketing, HR, product and leadership rather than in a completely separate corner of the office.

Coffee order: Iced long black.

Go-to exercise: Hot mat or reformer Pilates.

Pet peeve: Being looped into a campaign the day before launch with the words, “Legal, this should be a quick review.”

Working hours: 8.30 am to 5.00 pm... unless the founder has another “quick question.”

How hard is it to get here? ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆

Years: Usually after 3-7 years in private practice.

The Multi-hyphenate - Samantha Jones

This girl is everywhere.

Australian Fashion Week? She’s there.

PayPal Melbourne Fashion Festival? She’s there.

A random emerging designer’s runway show in a warehouse in Collingwood on a Sunday night? She’s already posted a TikTok about it.

She knows everyone. She’ll pull you aside halfway through a conversation and go, “Wait... have you met...?” before you’ve even taken a sip of your martini. Twenty minutes later you’ve somehow been introduced to the Head of Brand at L’Oréal, a Vogue editor, someone from MECCA and a founder you’ve been trying to get in touch with for six months.

She’s a superconnector.

She genuinely wants to see everyone around her win.

Every time you check LinkedIn she’s added another job title.

Lawyer. Writer. Founder. Brand strategist. Lecturer. Consultant. Content creator. Host.

You’re honestly not really sure WHAT she does because she seems to do everything.

Somehow she’s built a portfolio career where all of those things make sense together.

She either got her law degree and realised practising law wasn’t actually what lit her up, or she got halfway through her graduate program before thinking, “Hang on... I actually enjoy building brands more than I enjoy reviewing contracts.”

She realised her communication skills, networking ability and event management skills were probably better suited to PR, journalism, marketing or brand strategy.

And she backed herself.

She has over 100,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram. She has brand deals with L’Oréal and YSL Beauty.

She carries a tripod and ring light everywhere she goes because you never know when content opportunities are going to present themselves.

She’ll somehow film three pieces of content, interview a founder, attend a runway show and negotiate a partnership, all before dinner.

Meanwhile you’re still trying to clear your inbox.

Coffee order: Piccolo on the go.

Go-to exercise: Honestly... walking between events probably counts.

Pet peeve: Women not lifting other women up.

Working hours: Completely all over the shop. She sleeps until 11 am, starts working at 1 pm and somehow finds herself replying to emails at 1 am.

How hard is it to get here? ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

There isn’t really a roadmap.

Half the jobs she’s doing didn’t even exist five years ago.

She’s built the career she wished existed.

The Creative (Lawyer by day, who knows by night) - Carrie Bradshaw

She is working as a lawyer...(I think)? But I couldn’t tell you what practice area she is in, or what firm she works at.

You ask her, “How’s work?” and she sighs: “Same old, same old.”

For her, the law is simply a means to an end.

It’s paying the bills while she quietly builds the life she actually wants.

She’s building her own fashion label on the side.

Or taking drawing classes after work and telling her boss she’s doing French language classes because that somehow sounds more palatable.

Or doing retail shifts at Scanlan Theodore on the weekends because she genuinely enjoys helping women find clothes they feel good in.

Or she’s volunteering backstage at Australian Fashion Week just because she wants to be in the room.

For her, law isn’t an identity - it is there to pay the bills. Her eyes glaze over halfway through reading a supplier agreement. Mention the Christian Dior Fall 2026 Couture collection by Jonathan Anderson and suddenly, her eyes light up.

She’ll happily spend forty-five minutes explaining why the collection mattered, what it means for the future of Dior and why fashion history is repeating itself.

She has a Notes app full of business ideas she’ll probably never start.

A camera roll that is 80% outfit inspiration and screenshots from Pinterest.

She reads Vogue like other people read the news.

She tells herself she’ll leave law one day.

Maybe.

Eventually.

Right after she’s paid off the HECS debt. Or bought the Chanel slingbacks.

The golden handcuffs have a funny way of getting tighter every year. But until then, she’s perfectly happy living her double life.

Coffee order: Matcha latte with oat milk.

Go-to exercise: A long walk with a podcast (Style-ish, or Aspire by Emma Grede).

Pet peeve: People telling her to “just pick one career.”

Working hours: Officially 9.00 am to 5.00 pm. And then 6.00 pm until she falls asleep with her laptop open.

How hard is it to get here? ⭐⭐☆☆☆

Honestly? You could become The Creative this weekend.

Take the drawing class. Start the Substack. Message the designer. Buy the ticket to the fashion event.

This is Chapter 02 of Fashion Law Files, a recurring series for anyone who can’t choose between The Devil Wears Prada and Suits. In each chapter, I’ll be decoding the careers, people, businesses and legal issues shaping the Australian fashion industry, and exploring the many different ways to build a career where law meets fashion.

The chasm between twenty-five and thirty feels like a weird place to be. It stretches so far.

You see the flitting highlight reel of high school friends getting married, as if you are on a moving train with no set destination, watching scenes from the train window.

Images of your closest friends buying their first (or second) home. Having chubby, cherub-faced babies. Former colleagues moving across the world.

And you are plagued by a running train through your mind that is always churning.

Chug. Chug. Chug.

When is my next stop? Am I meant to get off now? Did I miss my stop?

Sofia Coppola once said, “I’m interested in people trying to figure out who they are.”

Perhaps that’s why her films feel less like stories and more like mirrors.

You are no longer crying over a boy, half-drunk on your friend’s cold bathroom floor, but you are also not quite settled into the life you thought adulthood would be.

You are somewhere in between.

Old enough to know that heartbreak passes. Young enough to still feel that your whole life might change on an ordinary Tuesday if you were, to say, book a one-way flight to Paris.

You have a job, a routine, perhaps a mortgage pre-approval sitting unread in your inbox. You know how to make small talk at weddings. You have learned to bring a bottle of wine when invited to dinner.

And yet there are still moments when you feel strangely untethered.

Like Charlotte wandering through Tokyo in Lost in Translation, you can be surrounded by movement and still feel as though your own life has paused. Like Priscilla, you can wake up inside a life that looks beautiful from the outside and quietly wonder whether it was ever chosen by you.

Coppola understands that this period of womanhood is not dramatic in the way adolescence is dramatic.

There are fewer slammed doors. Fewer mascara-streaked nights. Fewer declarations that everything is over.

The uncertainty is quieter now.

It lives in the tabs left open on your laptop. In the weddings you travel to. In the apartments you inspect and do not apply for. In the question that follows you home after dinner.

Is this it?

Or perhaps more frighteningly:

Is this supposed to be it?

So, here are five ways to live your late twenties, according to Sofia Coppola:

1. Romanticise the in-between. (Lost in Translation)

When I was younger, I always thought Lost in Translation was a film about loneliness. Now I think it’s about permission.

Charlotte arrives in Tokyo at a point in her life that feels strangely familiar to anyone in their late twenties. She’s married, educated and, by most measures, doing exactly what she is supposed to be doing. Yet there is a quiet restlessness that follows her from one hotel corridor to the next. She wanders through temples, bookstores and unfamiliar streets, not because she is searching for anything in particular, but because she no longer knows what certainty is supposed to feel like.

Lesson #1: Lost in Translation quietly rejects the idea that every season of life needs to have a destination. Sometimes becoming the person you are meant to be looks less like making a five-year plan and more like wandering through a city with nowhere in particular to be. There is a freedom in allowing yourself to exist in the in-between, rather than constantly trying to escape it.

2. Beautiful things are never superficial. (Marie Antoinette)

Beauty, in Coppola’s world, is never decoration. It is language.

Marie Antoinette is remembered for its pastel Ladurée macarons, silk slippers and impossibly beautiful dresses, but beneath all that excess is a young woman who has almost no agency over the life she has been given. The rituals of dressing, of choosing ribbons or shoes or fabrics, become some of the only moments that belong entirely to her.

Lesson #2: It made me realise that perhaps beautiful things have always served a greater purpose than we give them credit for. Fresh flowers on a Wednesday. A linen tablecloth, even if you’re eating dinner alone. The dog-earred book you carry in your handbag on the train to work, because today might be the day you catch the eye of a handsome stranger holding the same book. None of these things change your life. But they change the way you move through it.

3. Build an interior life no one else can see. (The Virgin Suicides)

The Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides are remembered almost entirely through the projections of other people. The boys spend years trying to understand them, convinced that if they collect enough memories, photographs and stories they might finally solve the mystery of who the girls really were.

They never do.

I sometimes wonder if we’ve forgotten how to be unknowable ourselves. We document holidays before we’ve unpacked our suitcases. We photograph dinners before we’ve taken the first bite. We narrate our careers as they are happening, leaving so little untouched by other people’s gaze.

Lesson #3: One of the greatest luxuries now is having a life that exists entirely outside the internet. Books no one knows you’re reading. A journal no one will ever open. An afternoon spent wandering a museum that never appears on Instagram. Not everything meaningful needs to become content before it has had the chance to become a memory.

4. Don’t confuse someone else’s story for your own. (Priscilla)

Priscilla is, in many ways, a story about what happens when your identity is slowly built around somebody else’s life. Priscilla spends years becoming exactly who everyone else needs her to be, only to discover that there is very little room left to ask herself what she actually wants.

I think your late twenties are filled with versions of that same question, just dressed differently.

One friend gets engaged. Another buys an apartment. Someone announces they’re moving to London. Someone else is freezing their eggs. Every milestone arrives looking so certain that it begins to feel like a timetable rather than a series of individual choices.

Lesson #4: If you couldn't share any aspect of your life, would you still choose it? If nobody knew who you woke up beside every morning. If nobody saw where you worked, where you travelled, what handbag you carried, what suburb you lived in or what title appeared beneath your name on LinkedIn.

Would you still choose that partner? Would you still choose that job? Would you still choose that city? I think Priscilla quietly asks us whether we’re building a life that feels good to live, or one that simply looks good to perform.

5. Leave room for beautiful accidents.

One of the things I find myself longing for most in Sofia Coppola’s films is how unhurried they feel.

People linger over breakfast. They sit in hotel bars for a beat longer than necessary. They browse bookstores without buying anything. Entire afternoons disappear into conversations that don’t appear to have a purpose beyond existing.

Our lives have become so carefully engineered towards outcomes that we’ve forgotten how many of the best things happen by accident. The exhibition you almost didn’t go to because you were tired after work. The conversation that continued long after everyone else had left the table. The city you booked on a whim and somehow still think about years later.

Maybe that is what living a Sofia Coppola life really means. Not recreating the frames from her films, nor collecting ballet flats and vintage Vogue magazines in the hope that they’ll make your life feel cinematic. It is believing that a beautiful life is rarely built through optimisation. More often than not, it is built through unhurried moments. It is in those unhurried moments that life still has the ability to surprise you.

When I was 16, my year level was forced to undergo a dreaded ritual bestowed on most soon-to-be high school graduates in Australia: the Year 12 retreat.

You know the one.

A remote campsite. A cabin. A bunk bed. A campfire. A vague promise of personal growth.

On the last day, we were told to do one final activity: write a handwritten letter to our future selves, 10 years from now.

The teachers would collect the letters and mail them to our parents’ house a decade later. It was bad enough trying to forget your high school boyfriend, let alone your naive career aspirations at 16, back when you had no idea how the real world worked. But alas, I picked up the pen and participated along with my other equally clueless classmates.

I knew I wanted to be a lawyer. I had a mood board above my desk, with meticulous cut-outs from Pinterest and Tumblr (yes, I grew up in the era of Tumblr). I had pasted images of sandstone law school libraries, Elle Woods, city girls in pencil skirts, and books piled on top of one another.

I loved English. I loved Legal Studies. I loved writing.

I was resolute.

Even when my guidance counsellor would talk my ear off during our career sessions about how his family lawyer had apparently screwed him over in his divorce.

“Okay…”, I remember thinking. “What does that have to do with me? I’m going to be a corporate lawyer”.

In my head, this meant wearing tailored matching suits, heels, and looking like the women in The Devil Wears Prada (but in a courtroom), of course.

I also knew I loved fashion.

I read Vogue and Dolly Magazine like it was my bible. I had a fashion Tumblr. I was obsessed with clothes, magazines, campaigns, styling, editorials, the whole fantasy of it. So I wondered if there was a way to combine the two.

Law and fashion.

I remember thinking at 16, surely fashion brands got into disputes. Surely customers sued them. Surely, they needed lawyers.

I looked down at the blank page and began:

Ten years from now, I will be a fashion lawyer.

I had absolutely no idea what a fashion lawyer was.

But I wrote it down anyway.

Then I sealed the envelope, handed it in, and did not think about it properly again for almost 10 years.

Ten years later

Fast forward to 2025.

I was working as a Senior Associate at a top-tier national law firm. I had done the law degree, the clerkships, the graduate program, and somehow gone from clerk to Senior Associate by 25. Five more years until I was 30 years old, and it was 10 years since my high school graduation.

One night, as I was working late, as you so often do in private practice, a thought crept into my mind: Almost 10 years have passed and you are still not a fashion lawyer.

Which then led to the obvious follow-up question:

What even is a fashion lawyer?

I had been quietly researching it for years.

At the firm, we had done some work for luxury clients and fashion brands. Some of it was genuinely fascinating. One of the highlights of my time there was working on an employee misconduct matter involving an employee at a prestigious auction house who had tried to auction off a vintage Louis Vuitton trunk that contained real elephant ivory, which was highly illegal and raised all kinds of import and regulatory issues.

Those were the matters that lit something up in me.

But there was not really a “fashion law” practice group at my firm, at least not as far as I knew.

To be fair, I was working in Brisbane. And I knew, even then, that if there was a fashion law market in Australia, it was probably going to be in Sydney or Melbourne.

So I thought: now is as good a time as any.

I packed up my apartment and moved to Melbourne to hunt down these so-called “fashion lawyers” and find out what they actually did, how they got there, and what the fashion law market in Australia really looked like.

What fashion law really looks like in Australia

When people hear “fashion law”, they often picture something much glossier than the reality.

A lawyer sitting in a Parisian atelier, reviewing a contract for a creative director. Someone protecting a Dior handbag from being copied. Someone doing glamorous IP litigation while wearing a very good coat.

That kind of work exists, but not really in Australia.

The big legal decisions for brands like Chanel, Dior, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Gucci and Hermès usually sit overseas in Paris, Milan, London, New York, Singapore and Hong Kong.

In Australia, fashion is mostly retail. What I mean by that is, we have department stores like David Jones, e-commerce businesses like THE ICONIC, and retail headquarters like Country Road Group, Cotton On Group and L’Oréal.

We have fashion brands. We have beauty brands. We have activewear brands. We have jewellery, lifestyle, luxury retail, e-commerce and FMCG businesses.

But we do not really have the global legal headquarters of the major luxury houses.

Australia is a local market.

That does not mean there is no fashion law here. It just means fashion law looks a little different.

It is less “advising a maison on a couture collection” and more “advising a fashion, retail, beauty or lifestyle business on the legal issues sitting behind products, people, stores, suppliers, customers, data, marketing and brand reputation.”

I currently work as an in-house lawyer at a national retail, logistics and e-commerce organisation. One of the more enjoyable parts of the role is that I get to work with Australian and international fashion brands on partnership agreements, marketing campaigns and commercial contracts.

My day-to-day work mainly involves advising on employment, safety, privacy and consumer law (e.g reviewing campaign and marketing materials) as well as advising on operational issues.

And by operational issues, I mean questions like: who is responsible for moving a heavy carton of clothing up a flight of stairs, the retail store staff or the delivery driver, when the safety regulator’s position is that, frankly, neither party should be doing it because it creates a serious risk of injury? Very glamorous (not).

Fashion law in Australia is mostly retail law, consumer law, employment law, IP, privacy, leasing, supply chain and commercial contracts applied to fashion, beauty, lifestyle and consumer brands.

Debunking a core myth: every fashion brand has an in-house legal team

This was probably my biggest misconception at 16.

I assumed fashion brands must have lawyers sitting somewhere in-house, just behind the showroom, reviewing contracts and stopping everyone from being sued.

The reality is much more mixed.

A lot of fashion brands in Australia do not have large legal teams. Some do not have an in-house lawyer at all.

Many smaller and emerging brands rely on external law firms for discrete pieces of work. They might brief a lawyer for trade marks, a major contract, a dispute, a retail lease, a shareholder issue or an employment problem.

Some founders do a surprising amount themselves. They use templates. They Google. They ask friends. They use AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude to get themselves 80 percent of the way there, then call a lawyer when something becomes too technical, too risky or too ugly.

Is that ideal? Not always.

Is it happening? Absolutely.

The size of a legal team usually depends on the size, risk profile and maturity of the business.

A small independent fashion label may not have a lawyer. A larger retail group with stores, employees, suppliers, e-commerce, customer data, marketing campaigns and international operations is much more likely to need legal support.

So if you want to work in-house in fashion, you need to target brands that are actually big enough to justify having legal.

So where are the real fashion law jobs?

The real jobs are not always advertised as “fashion lawyer”.

You may need to search for the following terms of LinkedIn - because trust me, you will get close to zero results if you simply put in “Fashion Lawyer”:

• Legal Counsel, Retail

• Legal Counsel, Consumer

• Commercial Lawyer

• Employment Counsel

• IP Lawyer

• Privacy Counsel

• Legal Counsel, E-commerce

• Legal Counsel, Marketing

• Corporate Counsel

• Commercial Counsel, Consumer Brands

Fashion law often wears a boring job title.

Do not be fooled by that.

In Australia, the most relevant in-house legal opportunities usually sit inside fashion, beauty, retail, lifestyle, jewellery, activewear, e-commerce and FMCG businesses.

In Melbourne, the companies that come to mind include:

• Country Road Group

• Cotton On Group

• KOOKAÏ

• Mecca

• lululemon

• L’Oréal

• David Jones

• Forever New

In Sydney, think:

• THE ICONIC

• H&M Group

• Zimmermann

• fashion PR and media-adjacent businesses

This is not an exhaustive list, and legal team structures can change. But as a market map, the general point stands.

What law firm should you work at if you want fashion clients?

A lot of students ask this. The answer is that there usually is not one perfect “fashion law firm”. If there was, I’d imagine they would have a million girls knocking on their door.

In Australia, fashion clients are usually serviced across ordinary practice groups. One firm might advise a fashion brand on employment. Another might advise on IP. Another might advise on a corporate transaction. Another might advise on leasing, privacy, advertising, consumer law, disputes or supply chain.

So the better question is not:

Which firm does fashion law?

The better question is:

Which team will give me skills fashion companies actually need?

The big commercial firms are a sensible place to look, but you need to be specific about what “fashion work” actually means.

Mallesons, for example, advised Milan-based private equity sponsor Style Capital on its investment in Zimmermann, one of Australia’s most internationally recognised fashion brands (see here).

Johnson Winter Slattery is more explicit about fashion as a sector. It has a dedicated fashion page and says its fashion team includes specialists across private equity, brand, IP, employment, consumer, retail, supply chain and ESG issues. Its IP team also says it is active across media, FMCG, retail, fashion, life sciences and tech (see here).

Allens is another example. They advised the shareholders of Zimmermann on the sale of a majority stake to Style Capital, and had previously advised Zimmermann on General Atlantic’s minority investment. Allens also publishes on retail M&A trends, including deals involving Zimmermann, Bondi Sands, Aesop and David Jones (see here).

There is no one ‘go to’ law firm in Australia that does all the work for one fashion brand. Brands will often go out to a panel of firms, or approach a few firms they trust, and ask who can provide the right advice at the best price.

What you can start doing now

If you are a student or junior lawyer, you do not need to wait for permission to build a fashion law profile.

Start now.

• Read fashion business publications - The Business of Fashion is one of my favourites.

• Follow retail news.

• Learn about the Australian Consumer Law.

• Understand trade marks and design rights.

• Follow ACCC updates on greenwashing and misleading claims.

• Look at job ads for legal counsel roles in retail, beauty and consumer brands. Work backwards from the requirements.

• Connect with lawyers who work in-house at fashion, beauty, retail and FMCG companies, via LinkedIn.

• Write about fashion law topics for publications like the Fashion Law Journal.

• Go to industry events - Vogue Australia hosts fabulous events including Vogue Codes (held in Sydney every year in June) where you can network with other fashion, creative and tech industry professionals.

• Interview fashion designers to understand how their business works and what is involved in building a brand.

But for many people, fashion is not simply aesthetic expression. It is a form of longing.

I had always thought of fashion as a language. The first one that my mother and I ever shared.

I grew up in a sleepy suburb in Brisbane, in a house where English was always hard for my immigrant Chinese mother to speak, as if each word had to be slowly pulled free, softened and shaped before it could be spoken.

My mother spoke it well, but there was always a slight pause before certain words, as though she were reaching for them across a distance.

Fashion required no pause.

There is a photograph of us at Surfers Paradise. The light is harsh, the sand almost white. My sister and I are small, squinting into the sun. My mother stands behind us, smiling, her face partially hidden behind oversized Christian Dior sunglasses.

For a long time, I thought that photo was about us. Now I see it differently.

She looks so young. Almost unfamiliar. And there is a moment, when I look at it, where I realise she was not always just my mother.

She was twenty-five, newly arrived in a country where the language did not yet belong to her, raising two young daughters in a place that must have felt both vast and uncertain. She was someone with her own interior world, her own tastes, her own quiet desires.

She was just a girl who loved beautiful things.

Fashion was how she expressed that, even when words were harder to find. And without realising it, I learned to understand her through it. Through textures, silhouettes, brands that felt like symbols rather than objects.

When I was thirteen, she began bringing home books and films with glossy covers, leaving them out for me to find when my friends came over for sleepovers. The Devil Wears Prada. Confessions of a Shopaholic. Sex and the City.

We would watch them late into the night, the television casting a soft glow across our teenage faces, the room dim except for that flickering light.

On screen, women moved through cities with purpose, their lives unfolding against a backdrop of clothes, moving through glass offices in heels, speaking quickly into their phones, a quiet urgency following them from room to room. There was always something in their hands (a Rolodex, a coffee, a phone pressed to their ear) as if their lives were perpetually in motion, always just beyond reach.

And, like every other teenage girl, I wanted to be one of them.

I watched them over and over again.

Not for the plots, though I could recite them by heart, but for the feeling they left behind.

It was the rhythm of it. The sense that somewhere else, life was happening more quickly, more deliberately. That there were women who knew exactly where they were going, who moved through the world with a kind of certainty I could not yet name.

I thought I was watching something foreign. Something aspirational.

But what I did not understand then was that I had already seen a version of it, much closer to home. Not in glass offices or city streets, but in the quiet rituals of my mother’s everyday life.

In the way she stood in front of the mirror before we left the house, adjusting a strap on her shoulder, smoothing the fabric at her waist. In the way she chose certain things over others, not because they were practical, but because they felt right.

There was a kind of intention in it, a quiet authorship over how she moved through the world.

For someone whose English required effort, fashion became a different kind of fluency.

Clothes allowed her to say what language sometimes could not. They travelled easily across borders, across cultures, understood without explanation.

In a country that was not hers, fashion offered a way of belonging that did not depend on perfect grammar.

And I think of her, younger than I ever knew her, standing at Surfers Paradise in those oversized Dior sunglasses, the light too bright, her smile held gently in place, as if it were steadying something just beneath the surface.

A woman learning how to live in a language that was not yet her own. And choosing, quietly, another way to be understood.