How to Build Your Personal Brand

If you visited the career office of a fashion school in the past decade, you were probably given some familiar nuggets of advice: build a varied résumé, don’t be too choosy about your first internships, network as much as possible through the channels provided to you — cold LinkedIn outreach, alumni networks, and university career fairs — and do not work for free (or at least, without school credit) because unpaid labor is both illegal and unfair.

All of these maxims are reasonable, if not highly recommended, but they’ve also become the baseline. In response to our current hiring economy — in which entry-level applicants vastly outnumber roles and applications are increasingly standardized with the use of AI — a new pillar of career advice has emerged: building your own, recognizable, “personal brand” is the most reliable way to stand out.

In today’s world, young people no longer need to physically get their work across the desk of a prominent buyer — Instagram, the fashion world’s favorite discovery tool, has turned the barrier to entry upside-down. However, fierce competition from within the attention economy makes it hard to get noticed and build a following today.

Osman Ahmed, a writer and British Vogue contributing editor, entered the industry during the blogging era, which was still “marked by elitism and closed doors”. She built her career by assisting old-school editors (she recalls once asking her editor what to wear to a show and being snapped at: “No one is looking at you, dear”), filing breaking stories “diligently and quietly” from unglamorous newspaper newsrooms, and copywriting for brands to pay the bills, all the while growing a portfolio of physical clippings and quietly building a personal brand on social media.

Ahmed, who now publishes a Substack newsletter of her own, believes aspiring fashion creators and writers should use today’s platforms to their advantage: “I don’t think it’s essential to have a social media following. But at the same time, it would be stupid not to make use of platforms where people can discover your work.” She notes that when she was commissioning writers herself, she would scan Twitter for potential contributors: these didn’t need to be fully formed writers, just “someone with good ideas, who [is] open to learning.”

Briah Taubman, the designer behind emerging New York label Briah Artemis, knows the power of social media visibility. Taubman is a Parsons School of Design graduate, with internships at Anna Sui, Proenza Schouler, Eckhaus Latta, Batsheva, and Mirror Palais under her belt, and started her independent label in 2025. She’s had some major moments in recent years: Charli XCX wore her custom “Miss Should Be Headliner” printed sash dress at Coachella 2025, and Kylie Jenner posted in a Briah Artemis dress in June 2026.

Taubman’s page, which caught Jenner’s team’s attention, is a tightly curated portfolio, directionally influenced by her knowledge of editorial styling (Taubman is a freelance stylist). On her personal Instagram, which is still public, Taubman is social — posting funny pictures and going out with friends. “I realized [not to post freely] on my brand account because people do care, people do judge. You need to be thoughtful if you’re trying to send a message.” It paid off: months of shaping the visual language of her socials translated directly to media recognition from editors and creators: “I feel like I’m taken more seriously… A lot of fashion people tell me, ‘You are approaching having a new brand in an old-fashioned way, and we really respect it.’”

If laboring over one Instagram post sounds like a waste of time, know that the people hiring you may be considering your social media as an unofficial portfolio supplement. “For better or worse, [Instagram is] very revealing — the choice of what you put up there is your point of view,” says Amy Smilovic, founder and creative director of Tibi. “There’s no getting around it. Even if you’ve overly curated it to try and be non-committal, then that is a point of view at the end of the day.”

At Diane Von Furstenberg, VP of design Morgan Hill says she uses Instagram “as a personality litmus test,” after looking at a candidate’s portfolio. “I’d much rather just see someone partying with friends or hiking with their dog (nothing that has to do with fashion), than a home-economics-live-laugh-love-looking ‘fashion’ feed,” says Hill. Her colleague Kaelin Kost, DVF’s director of print design, agrees: “You can’t teach taste. Your Instagram doesn’t have to follow any specific aesthetic, but it can be a good lens into how you present yourself and your work to the world,” says Kost. Kost also recommends showcasing a defined point of view, rather than generalized “adaptability”, because “you will have the rest of your career to placate to commerciality,” she says.

“Early on, I think it’s more important to focus on developing your own distinct hand.” For DVF, specifically, both Hill and Kost like seeing candidates who are comfortable with print and color. “Bonus points if you have a sense of humor,” says Hill.

Those trying to shape their personal brand and build a following should keep in mind that sameness is a turn-off for Gen Z. Per 2025’s Vogue Business and Archrival report, 70% of Gen Z agree that “influencers are basic; they all have similar aesthetics, POVs, and ways of communicating,” and the report finds that Gen Z is moving into more intimate, membership-based spaces like Substack. “There are obviously so many voices saturating social, so in order to make yours heard, you need to find a form of delivery that feels unique to you,” says Dylan Kelly, a former magazine editor who has now found a successful career as a fashion creator making short videos about the fashion industry, and is a recurring figure covering shows, films, and fashion events.

“Every byline helped me find my personal brand,” says Kelly, who, instead of writing 1,600-word reported features, now distills stories into 160-word scripts resulting in a one-minute Reel. He stresses that the presentation of your ideas needs to be different based on the platform/format in which you’re sharing them, whether that’s an online article, a short-form video, or a 10-slide photo carousel. When you find your vertical, don’t give up until something hits: “Repetition is crucial for recognition in a social media landscape drowning in content,” he says.

Annie Doble, whose namesake brand Annie’s Ibiza has grown into the de facto eveningwear brand for women on the international party-girl circuit, has run Annie’s Ibiza social accounts since before she had budgets for models, using her clients as models instead. Despite now having three brick-and-mortar locations, she still runs the Instagram account herself, curating videos from a “content phone”, which collects each day’s footage from her stores in New York, London, and Ibiza. “It’s very, very important to define your taste, because that authenticity shines through,” she says, adding that her personal style “flows through everything [she picks], because everything either is curated by me or designed by me.” She finds that trusting her own taste is commercially minded, too: “I tried once; I designed something I didn’t like. It never sold, and everything I know I love sells immediately,” says Doble.

If you’re stumped by trying to define your taste, you’re not alone. Smilovic, who started Tibi nearly 30 years ago with no formal training, admits that honing your point of view is a process that takes work. “Even after starting Tibi, it wasn’t easy to sharpen the focus — because you have all the noise from stores or magazines telling you what you should create, who you ‘should be’. It truly wasn’t until I tuned them all out that I was able to sharply define my style and live it. Every day,” she says. Her method is an exercise that anyone with a body of work can practice: lay out the pieces you love, that you’re proud of, or that you (or your customers) wore all the time, and make a separate pile for the items you created that you didn’t love, soured on, or “worst of all” that no one wore, she says. When you put them side by side, correlations will emerge. In the case of Tibi, Smilovic and her head of design landed on three adjectives they knew needed to be present in their work: “chill, modern, classic.” As it turns out, “we were describing our personal style,” says Smilovic.

Julie Gilhart, founder and president of Gilhart & Co. and former fashion director of Barneys New York, is known for identifying talent: she was an early champion of Rick Owens, and bought Proenza Schouler founders (and now Loewe creative directors) Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez’s Parsons senior thesis collection for Barneys before the duo launched their brand. Even before social media, Gilhart believes that personal branding has always helped identify breakthrough talent, even if it wasn’t always called that. “It was never just the work,” says Gilhart. “The designers who break through have a certain energy, a very clear point of view and a strong sense of who they are.” That was the case, at least, when she first met the young Jack and Lazaro: “Their work, the way they spoke, and the world they wanted to create all felt completely aligned.”