School Teaches You the Craft. Nobody Teaches You How to Survive.

Fashion school is genuinely good at teaching you how garments are made. Construction, pattern making, draping, fabric behavior, the technical vocabulary of design. I am grateful for all of it, and I use it every single day when I am sewing a piece by hand in my studio. The craft education is real.

What school does not teach you is how to run a business. Not even close. Nobody sat me down and explained how to price a handmade garment so that you are actually paying yourself. Nobody taught me how to read a profit and loss statement, how to handle sales tax across different states, how to set up a Shopify store, how to write a product description that converts, or how to market a brand on social media without a budget.

These are not small gaps. These are the things that determine whether your brand survives. And the uncomfortable truth is that you can be an extraordinarily talented designer and still fail completely because you never learned the business side of what you were building.

School Teaches You Trends. Finding Your Own Aesthetic Takes Years of Real Work.

Fashion education is very interested in trend forecasting. What is coming next season. What the market wants. How to design within commercial parameters that will appeal to the broadest possible audience. That is useful training for working inside larger brands. It is almost the opposite of what you need when you are building something of your own.

Finding your authentic aesthetic, the visual world that genuinely belongs to you rather than to a trend cycle, takes time and experience that no classroom can manufacture. For me, it took years of cosplay work, years of working for other brands and knowing that something was missing, and eventually a very specific moment of clarity about what I actually wanted to make and for whom.

My aesthetic, the Barbiecore meets Harajuku street style world that became L. Royalty, did not come from a trend report. It came from a deeply personal love of Japanese Lolita fashion and a desire to bring it to Los Angeles in a modern, accessible way. That is not something you can be assigned in a project brief. It has to come from somewhere real inside you, and that takes living, not studying.

The designers I most admire all have an instantly recognizable visual world. You know their work before you see the label. That kind of coherence does not come from following trends. It comes from years of commitment to a specific point of view, and fashion school rarely teaches you how to find and defend your own.

School Teaches You the Dream. Nobody Warns You About the Grind.

Fashion school presents the industry as glamorous because glamour is part of what sells the dream of fashion education. What it does not show you is what the industry actually looks like from the inside: the long hours, the low starting pay, the creative compromises, the reality that most fashion jobs are not about expressing your vision but executing someone else's.

I started as an assistant to designers, which is unglamorous work. I worked as a toy designer on the Bratz line, which is genuinely interesting work but is nothing like the runway fantasy. I spent most of my career in technical design, which is behind-the-scenes, detail-oriented, and completely invisible to anyone outside the industry. None of those roles look the way fashion school makes fashion careers look.

And then there is the entrepreneurship grind, which is its own category of hard. I still work full time while building L. Royalty. I sew pieces by hand before and after my workday. I run the social media, manage the website, handle the customer service, source the materials, and do the bookkeeping, in addition to the actual design and construction work. Nobody teaches you how to do all of that at once. You figure it out as you go, and there are days when it is genuinely exhausting.