2022 Fashion

The Fashion sector continues its long, slow decline and has lagged well behind in both California and Los Angeles County creative economy employment since 2007. Los Angeles County has seen Fashion employment drop at almost an identical rate to that of California, which is due to nearly 64% of the state’s jobs located in the county. Although sector the stabilized after losing a significant number of jobs at the beginning of the Great Recession, employment started dropping again in 2014 and caused a contraction by over half at both the state (51.4%) and county (57.1%) levels between 2007 and 2020.

Comparatively, the pandemic had a more modest effect between 2019 and 2020, with job losses of 14.4% and 17.3% across the state and in Los Angeles County, respectively. Both contractions overwhelmingly affected salaried workers, and job losses among self-employed workers between 2007 and 2020 amounted to only about 450 statewide. As a result, the composition of the workforce shifted, with the share of self-employed workers in the sector nearly doubling from 6.1% to 11.7% in California and more than doubling in Los Angeles County from 3.6% to 7.9%.

For more information on the Fashion sector, please download the 2022 Otis College Report on the Creative Economy.