For Paul Mescal, playing a dad was the ‘greatest dress rehearsal’ for being one today.
Fashion designer and entrepreneur Paul Mescal has quit the fashion industry so he can focus on his family and helping young people learn how to make their own. He says the industry has helped him succeed in a way it was never intended to.
“The industry has done a great job of designing my life,” he tells Yahoo Finance. “I can focus on doing something for the benefit of my kids. They see that I’m a happy, well-adjusted guy they see that I’ve made good choices.”
Mescal has two children and was raised in the fashion business. He’s now on a mission to help young people get started in creative fields by teaching them about money, business, and personal finance.
While the internet is supposed to make life easier and the consumerist culture is supposed to make life easier, that’s really not the case.
Mescal is one of many that think that’s not the case. And he’s not the only one.
“I would go back to my childhood and I would say’man, I wish I had been more conscious of the risks that were being run because of poor choices I made,'” he says. “A lot of times it’s an unconscious thing that’s happened to us. As a result we have very poor financial literacy which has the effect of keeping the economy in a state that is far less than full employment.”
Yahoo Finance spoke to several other people from the fashion industry that have gone through similar experiences — and some of their stories are a bit funny and a little tragic. These are their stories about making their most important decisions:
Paul Mescal: When I was 17 I was the youngest kid in my family and I started wearing dresses and I got a lot of attention. This goes way back to when I was a kid. I think I was maybe 12,13,and I was wearing dress and people were coming up to me and I was like, ‘Wow, how old are you?’ They’d say, ‘Young enough to shave your legs’ or something like that.