Influencing is Currency: The Secret to a Successful Career in Fashion

What if your next viral TikTok could launch your career in fashion?

Today, influencers are doing much more than posting outfit links, dancing on your screen, or showing off their latest hauls. Influencers are creating trends, building loyal communities, and launching brands of their own.

Social media has made it possible for a personal brand to blossom into a professional brand. They have learned how to take what their followers already love about them and turn it into a widely successful fashion career.

The fashion industry is changing, and so is the traditional career in fashion. In the past, breaking into the industry often meant becoming a fashion designer, working in fashion merchandising, joining a design team, or finding a position within a fashion house.

Today, social media has opened the door to a new fashion world. Creators can promote marketing materials, attend major fashion shows, connect with retail partners, and build an audience before ever launching a product. The strong communication skills they develop with their followers can help them know what people want before traditional fashion buyers do.

Influence is no longer about having followers. It has simply become a form of currency.

How a Personal Brand Can Build a Career in Fashion

Before you can sell a brand, you have to make people care about it! Influencers have an advantage almost immediately, because many of them spend years curating a following and building a community before they ever sell a product of their own.

Think about your favorite influencer. You probably know their favorite beauty products, coffee shops, workout routines, and the places they travel, almost instantly. You may even recognize their kitchen or bedroom in their content without seeing their face at all! Each of these small details helps create their personal brand.

Think Brigette Pheloung! Brigette went viral on TikTok for showcasing her ability to use hair rollers to create beautiful, voluminous curls. Now, she's launched her own fashion brand, Phe Phe, and even brought the viral moment full circle by adding hair rollers to the fashion brand's product lineup, as seen on Phe Phe's Instagram.

Brigette's decision to bring hair rollers into her fashion line also builds on the trust she already created with her audience. When followers love an influencer's style, they often want to know where something is from or how they can achieve the look themselves. Just like Brigette, today's creators can begin to build a career in fashion by simply understanding what their audience already wants.

Influencers Influencing Fashion Careers

As seen on Amazon Fashion's Instagram post, influencers are the star of the show. Influencers are traditionally hired by brands for partnerships/promotions.

Now, influencers are becoming the brands themselves, and being featured by most fashion designers during one of fashion's biggest moments, New York Fashion Week.

The influencer to founder path has become one of the biggest shifts in social media. Instead of waiting for a brand to offer them a partnership, creators are now in a space to build their own brand. Behind every influencer owned brand is also a much larger production process.

Creators may have the idea, technical skills, and practical skills, but bringing that idea to life means working closely with a design team, manufacturers, and other professionals.

This shift is also creating new fashion jobs and changing the skills needed in the fashion industry. An influencer may take part in brand management, help guide the creative vision, or use digital marketing and social media management to reach consumers.

While traditional roles like a fashion stylist, creative director, or fashion merchandiser still play an important part in the industry, influencers are beginning to take on pieces of these roles themselves.

Paige Paul: The It Girl Who Turned Conversation Into Currency

When it comes to influencer owned fashion brands, the biggest name on everyone's lips right now is Paige Paul. Formerly known as Paige Lorenze, Paige has become one of social media's modern "It Girls" and has quickly made her mark in the fashion world.

As seen in multiple Dairy Boy campaigns, Dairy Boy has expanded into nearly every category you can think of: loungewear, skirts, dresses, sleepwear, robes, intimates, hats, accessories, you name it! The fashion designs are extremely detail oriented, practical yet trendy, chic yet wearable, and most importantly, wanted.

Before Dairy Boy, Paige was sharing pieces of her everyday life online. She grew up in Connecticut and spent time in Vermont, later moving to New York City. As her following grew, people became interested in her fashion, style, and instantly recognizable New England aesthetic.

Then came a simple conversation about milk, which launched the fashion business of her dreams. Paige shared her love for whole milk with her followers, which eventually inspired "Dairy Girl Summer," a phrase she put on hats that quickly showed her audience wanted more.

What started as a conversation grew into Dairy Boy, a full lifestyle brand. That's what makes Paige Paul's career in fashion so unique. Instead of brainstorming designs, launching a fashion brand, and searching for an audience, Paige already had a dedicated community and a clear creative vision.

That audience gave Dairy Boy something many independent labels have to work to build: consumer demand. Her personal style became part of the brand's identity, from its marketing campaigns, visual concepts, and into future collections. She didn't just give her audience clothes to buy; she gave them a way to buy into an aesthetic they already loved.

Twins Who Turned Tutorials Into Top Sellers

If you have spent time on the fashion side of TikTok, there is a good chance you have seen Brigette and Danielle Pheloung come across your feed. Brigette, widely known as Acquired Style, had viral hair tutorials introducing millions of viewers to her signature style, but the Pheloung story does not stop there.

Alongside her twin sister, Danielle, the two have built loyal social media communities around fashion, style, beauty, and their everyday lives. Together, they have taken their online influence beyond the screen and into the fashion industry.

What makes their story even more interesting is where they started. Before becoming full time creators and founders, Brigette had experience working in corporate fashion, while Danielle worked in finance at Goldman Sachs.

Those backgrounds gave the twins experience that could translate into business management, fashion retail, and understanding sales performance.

They eventually combined their different backgrounds, personal style, and loyal audiences to launch Phe Phe, their very own clothing brand, as seen on Phe Phe's Instagram page.

Instead of creating a brand that felt separate from their creative content, Phe Phe became an extension of what their followers already knew and loved about both of them! Their story shows how a career in fashion can evolve from more than one path.

From corporate careers and viral TikToks to the design process, ecommerce, and becoming fashion founders, Brigette and Danielle prove that influence can grow far beyond content that first made people pay attention.

Capitalizing on Curating Fashion Marketing

So what do Paige Paul and the Pheloung twins have in common? They know how to curate.

From their clothes and beauty routines to their homes, vacations, and everyday content, each creator has developed a clear personal brand. Their followers don't just come to them for products; they come to them for fashion inspiration, recommendations, and a sneak peek into a lifestyle they admire. This is where influencer marketing and personal branding begin to blend.

That may be one of the biggest takeaways for anyone interested in a career in fashion, whether that means fashion marketing, fashion styling, or graphic design. There are many popular careers within the fashion industry, but social media is changing what those careers look like.

Developing a clear point of view, understanding fashion trends, and creating a community can help build the foundation for future opportunities in the fashion industry, and ultimately turn that influence into currency.

Social media has changed who gets to influence fashion and where new trends can begin. The people sitting front row at luxury brands during Fashion Week or those invited to the Met Gala are no longer the ones deciding what is cool.

Social media has given creators direct connection to their audience, allowing influencer owned fashion lines to grow before they ever reach department stores, clothing retailers, or traditional retail buyers.

Sometimes, a fashion trend or business idea can start with a girl filming a hair tutorial in her bathroom or talking to her followers about the milk she likes. The content may be casual, but the influence behind it can become a career.

Key Takeaways: A New Career In Fashion

Influence has become more than popularity. Paige Paul turned conversations with her community and her recognizable New England style into Dairy Boy. Brigette and Danielle Pheloung turned viral content, fashion inspiration, and their shared personal brand into Phe Phe.

Different stories, same idea: they paid attention to what their audiences wanted.

Their success, as seen on both Paige Paul and Phe Phe's socials, shows that today's career in fashion doesn't always begin with a bachelor's degree in design or merchandising, or through the retail industry and commercial roles. Social media has created new ways for content creators to enter the fashion industry, create designs, market materials, and connect directly with consumers.

The most successful influencers understand something simple: people don't just buy products anymore. They buy into people, stories, aesthetics, and lifestyles. Paige Paul and the Pheloung twins were able to recognize that interest and turn it into something bigger.

So remember, when attention becomes trust, trust becomes influence, but most importantly, influence becomes currency.

🪽 Written by Claire Toohey