Kathleen Fasanella, who runs the interesting blog Fashion Incubator, observes that the tv program “Project Runway” has led many people to pursue careers as designers–and that this is not the first time that such a phenomenon has occurred:
I’m troubled by the consequences of the fashion school bubble -350 designers at NY Fashion Week being but one sign of it- the blame for which we mostly attribute to Project Runway. A similar thing happened with the TV show LA Law, law schools were inundated with applicants and our legal system is burgeoning with excessive lawsuits as the logical consequence of lawyers needing to make their student loan payments. Simplistically speaking, these are trend careers.
Indeed, for young people who are making career choices there is a shortage of solid information about what various careers are really like and what they require in the way of preparation. Television tends to focus on a few specific fields–lawyers, doctors, nurses, cops, criminals–with occasional excursions into other areas like fashion design–but rarely provides any realistic sense of what day-to-day life in these jobs ight be like. This is understandable–screenwriter Robert Avrech oberved that movies are like real life, except that the boring parts are deleted–but means that these shows aren’t exactly reliable guides to career choice. High school guidance counselors rarely have any broad exposure to the world of actual work. College professors, even with the best will in the world, will tend to sell and perhaps oversell their own fields to talented students. Parents may or may not be useful sources of career information, depending on their own backgrounds and current situations; many will also have strong prejudices for or against certain fields.
Kathleen also observes that in her industry there is a real gap between the numbers of people who want to design the product and the numbers of people who want to have something to do with turning it into physical reality:
. There were, of course, a considerable number of nuclear-war-related novels published during the Cold War era…one of the last representatives of this genre is 
, written by William Prochnau and published in 1983.
. Apparently, for Jenny Diski, as for many of us, Humphrey Bogart was bigger than life. He died before I became a teen, but his old movies reran constantly on fifties’ television; when I started college, French directors, as Diski notes, led us back to him. I watched many yet again at Chicago’s Clark in the late sixties. Bogart merged with the heroes of hard boiled thrillers and then Camus as we started to take our intellectual lives more seriously.