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There is a gap between when a fashion house decides it needs someone and when it tells anyone. Right now, in September, we are sitting inside that gap.
Headcount for the 2027 intake is being signed off this month and next. Budgets get approved, requisitions get raised, and in teams this small a couple of names are already being mentioned by people who met someone at a conference or received a good email in September. The public posting comes weeks later, sometimes with a shortlist already forming quietly behind it.
Almost everyone applying is working off the wrong date. They are waiting for the posting. By the time it appears you are one of several hundred CVs in an applicant tracking system, screened against a keyword list by someone who has never had to explain the difference between a trade mark and a design right.
This issue is about the other route.
Why cold outreach works in fashion
The legal team at a fashion house is small. At a mid-size brand it is often one person doing all of it. At a large group you get a Group General Counsel, a head of IP, two or three commercial counsel, someone running brand protection, and that is the whole department.
Small teams have two properties that matter to you. They have real autonomy over who they bring in, and they are permanently overloaded, which means a well aimed email is useful to them rather than an interruption.
The same is true on the talent side. Early careers and campus recruitment at a fashion group is usually one or two named people, and they are far more reachable than the portal makes them look.
This is why a direct approach lands here when it would be ignored at a magic circle firm or an investment bank.
The three rules
Write to a person, not a department. careers@ is a bin. legal@ is a bin. You want a named individual with a real job title.
Three lines, no attachment. Who you are, the one specific thing about their work you actually followed, and one sentence asking whether they take interns or juniors. Attachments trip filters and nobody opens a PDF from a stranger. Put your CV behind a link.
Send it now, not in December. The useful window is roughly the next four to six weeks.
The rules are the easy part. Where everyone gets stuck is the address, because brands publish no legal team directory and LinkedIn shows you connections, not contact details.
That is a solvable problem, and here is how we solve it using one free tool called Apollo
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Step by step: finding the right person at any fashion brand
It takes a minute and needs no card for the free tier. Onboarding will ask about your company and your sales team. You do not have one. Put something sensible and keep going, the product works the same.
1. Search by company first, not by person. If you search a name you will find the wrong Sarah at the wrong company. Start from the brand and you get the actual shape of the team.
2. Filter by job title, and use the right vocabulary. This is where most people give up, because they search "lawyer" and get nothing back. The titles that actually exist in fashion:
Legal side: General Counsel, Group General Counsel, Legal Director, Head of Legal, Legal Counsel, Senior Legal Counsel, IP Counsel, Trade Mark Counsel, Brand Protection Manager, Head of Licensing, Legal and Compliance Manager, Company Secretary.
Talent side: Early Careers Manager, Campus Recruitment, Talent Acquisition Partner, HR Business Partner, Head of Talent.
Search two or three of these, never just one.
3. If the maison comes back empty, go up to the group. A single label under LVMH, Kering or Richemont may have no legal headcount of its own. The counsel covering it sits at group or division level. Search there instead and read which brands the person's title mentions.
4. Reveal the contact, then check the confidence flag. The platform marks whether an address is verified or inferred. Only send to verified. An inferred address bounces, and a bounce does nothing for you.
5. Cross check on LinkedIn before you write. Thirty seconds. Confirm the person is still there and still in that role. Databases go stale, people move, and nothing kills an email faster than addressing someone by a job they left in March.
6. Save your five, then write. One email each, sent across a week rather than in a single batch. Follow up once after ten working days, then stop.
The three lines, written out
Subject: IP internship, September start
Hi [name],
I am a final year law student at [university] working on design rights, and I followed [brand]'s opposition against [X] closely enough to write about it here: [link].
Do you take interns or paralegals in the legal team? Happy to send anything useful.
[your name], [link to your profile]
That is the whole thing. No paragraph about your passion for fashion. No attachment. The specific reference in the first line is what makes it read as a person rather than a mailshot.