Luxury precarious workers

In the luxury fashion industry, jobs are often precarious, rewarded with few or no wages. Based on an ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Paris, this paper deals with the particular case of interns in this industry. It illustrates that possessing a certain economic status is necessary to pile up numerous precarious jobs experiences, in the hope of eventually obtaining a stable position. It also examines the role of international fashion schools in the publicization of internships and the normalization of precarious work in a flourishing sector financially. It emerges that in the luxury fashion industry, the compilation of internships is a luxury that only economically and socially privileged students can afford.