Two Interns Left After Three Days.

Two interns joined us this summer, 2026 and they left after three days.
It has never happened to me before, so I wanted to reflect on this.

They were fashion design students. They applied for on-site exhibition support at Preview in Seoul 2026, and then our participation was cancelled for reasons outside our control. We told them before the internship began, and the work became marketing and social content creation instead. Three weeks over the vacation period, unpaid, lunch covered.

I started my career as a fashion designer and I believe in the power designers have. I have worked in this industry for over ten years across several countries. So I wanted the three weeks to leave them with something they could take away. Their work could go into a portfolio. The rest was meant to be an understanding of what ESPR is actually for, from the position of a fashion professional.

Although I was mid deadline on several national R&D projects, I built the onboarding with a presentation made for them, on ESPR and DPP, tailored to what a designer needs to know. Their tasks written out, one post per person per day with direction, Day 1, Day 2, a daily routine, with feedback on each piece of work as it came in.

So when I heard from the CEO that they had found it hard, that it was not what they expected, and that they had decided to leave on the third day, which was the Friday, my first reaction was the ordinary one. You could not stay three weeks. And that is fair enough on their side. The exhibition never happened, so the internship they applied for was not the one they got.

And honestly, it was better for us. I worked until 5AM the night they quit. We were stretched too thin that week to supervise anyone well, and I would not have been able to ask them to step away myself. Someone can still leave in three days, but the thing I keep returning to turns out not to be about them.

I said it, and it did not land.

I told them one of our clients is a company they would very much like to work for one day. I said that the people who will have to design garments under the EU's ESPR, and under the Korean version now being built, are designers. So this is the thing worth learning now, before it arrives. And I think it still read as unrelated admin. Something to get through on the way to the real thing.

Which is the argument I have been making for years, arriving back at my own desk. Knowing a thing and being touched by it are not the same event. Disclosure does not move anyone. Telling the truth about how a garment was made, what it took, what it leaves behind, changes almost nothing on its own. People act when the harm gets close to the body. When it is theirs. Every transparency regulation I work on runs into this, and then I built an onboarding deck and expected information to do the work that information has never done.

Fashion sells surface, and it teaches on the surface too.
Most fashion education leans toward what looks ‘Cool’. Silhouette, colour, image. The other side doesn't get taught. What the material cost to make, what went into it, which hazardous substances are in it, what that leaves behind in people's health and in society, what happens once the garment's use life is over, who ends up carrying the result. And where it is taught, it's a separate course with one extra word in front of the name. So when two students who studied design met the back side of this industry at a desk in our office, I think it may not have read as their field. It might have looked like some other job that happens near clothes.

That is not a story about young people who do not care.
The industry teaches people where to look, and the teaching works. It worked on them precisely as designed.

The unpaid part belongs here too, plainly. Without a wage there is no floor under the arrangement. Nothing holds anyone in the room except whether the value is visible from the outside on day one, before any of it has paid off. That is a high bar and I did not clear it. Money was not doing the persuading, so everything else had to.

What would have worked is probably not more explanation. Something closer to the hand. Take a garment they already own and trace it. Take a brand they like and check what it claims against what it can show. Put the consequence inside something that is already theirs. I argue this about the people who wear the clothes.

So the question I am left with is not what is wrong with the people arriving. It is how you make work feel worth someone's three weeks when you cannot pay them, when their training has taught them to look elsewhere, and when the thing you are asking them to care about will not touch them personally for years.

I do not want this to happen again. Not because no one should ever leave, but because I would like what we are building here to be somewhere people are eager to stay. That is its own work, and I am only starting it.