My name is on a Japanese fashion magazine “FASHION NEWS” !

　　

What happened to me? The answer is what I did during the summer vacation.

KONNICHIWA (hello)! I am Asahi, an international student from Japan.

My major is fashion merchandising, and I interned at INFAS publications for two and a half months. The company publishes WWD JAPAN, which is a weekly paper, although WWD is a daily paper in the United States, and FASHION NEWS, a collection magazine published soon after each season collection ended. I belonged to the editor division and worked for both magazines. My office hours were about seven hours a day, five days a week.

My daily routine:

• Cleaning a room for the editorial department when other employees go to a different meeting room.
• Answering telephones and connecting editors. Most phone calls were from the PRs of companies including Prada Japan, Chloe Japan, Dior Japan or sometimes from designers.
• Opening the mail (About 200 envelopes a day!) and distributing them to each employee.
• Making a schedule sheet with Excel for the upcoming events and exhibitions.
• Picking garments that will be used in a shooting or returning them to each brand.
• Putting the back numbers of WWD JAPAN in order.

They may seem to be chores, but I could be in the office with editors who write articles for WWD JAPAN (which I love reading!) and I was excited about doing my tasks that could help them.

Men’s fashion week in Paris, Milan, London and Florence was held from end of June to first of July. Kaname Murakami, the editor in chief of FASHION NEWS, came back to the office from his business trip for the fashion shows and asked me to help to make the 2014 S/S menswear issue.

My job for the FASHION NEWS was…

1) Making phone calls to about 150 brands’ PRs to ask whether they would cooperate with us and answer some questions about the shows or not.

2) Mailing surveys to each PR, including some brands’ PRs whose companies are located in London.

3) Collecting the surveys from PRs by the due date.

4) Putting the survey answers on a server as well as printing them, so all the editors in the office could see them.

5) Calling some PRs who had not sent back the surveys. I called them several days before the due date to urge them to mail to me as soon as possible because their brands could not be in the magazine if they missed the date.

6) Making the content pages below. In this task, I needed to be careful that I spelled everything right!

7) Making the reference pages, including the brands’ names and telephone numbers of the customer centers and PRs.

During these jobs, I continued working for WWD JAPAN.

Finally, I finished all my jobs for FASHION NEWS, and my name is on it! I was so surprised! My favorite part about the internship was meeting the editors who work for WWD, and being able to keep in touch with them. If you are interested in an industry, I recommend you try to intern with people working in the real world. You will have a lot of good opportunities! I am very proud of my experience.

If you want to read these magazines, WWD japan or Fashion News, let me know!