13 Fashion Peeps Who Studied Something Else In College

For fashion people and school people alike, September is an important month. As students across the country head back into the classrooms, fashion tastemakers will be descending on New York, London, Milan, and Paris for Fashion Week.

Some of those students sitting in lecture are undoubtedly daydreaming about careers in fashion — and wondering how they can get there. Everyone knows that some of fashion’s biggest names came out of F.I.T., Parsons, and Central St. Martins. But does that mean the rest of us are doomed to sit on the sidelines forever if we don’t want to study fashion in school?

The answer, of course, is an emphatic "no." As Eva Chen, former Lucky editor-in-chief and current head of fashion partnerships at Instagram, often advises, “You should study what you love and intern in what you want to do.” (She was pre-med and then an English major at Johns Hopkins.) For your inspiration, here are 13 fashion heavyweights who didn’t major in the expected (design, fashion, fine art, or art history) — and what they chose instead.