Gaps In Your Fashion Retail CV

In my search for advice and guidelines on finding and applying for fashion jobs I though I'd look at CVs and how best to write them. CVs are often a challenge for people to write, trying to fit everything in can be hard, but something that is often overlooked is gaps in your CV. When writing mine there are periods of time where I have been traveling in Europe, but this doesn't translate well on to a CV as gaps just don't look good. Whilst trawling through articles on CV tips for store manager jobs (where the theme was experience, experience, experience!)
to more creative roles, there wasn't much on the problem of CV gaps; although I did find some advice, so here it is!

The key seems to be tailoring every gap in your work experience or jobs timeline to make it positive. I spent time traveling in between working in retail and doing work experience for a few fashion houses, and was worried that I would appear disloyal when applying for a few assistant manager jobs recently. However this time spent traveling I feel furthered my knowledge of European fashion trends and some of the more unusual prints and styles on the continent, so why not include this traveling stint on my CV? What must be avoided of course is lying on your CV, as legally it is grounds for dismissal, so you must be careful when embellishing anything you include and be careful not to try and stand out too much by being dishonest.

However, there seems no reason why gaps in a CV should necessarily be bad thing, a few of the jobs I've had in fashion retail have been interspersed with University, and in my case I switched the retailers I was working with purely because of my educational circumstances. As for my time traveling, this is something I no longer feel is a gap in my CV, but rather a point of interest and something I can talk about in interviews. www.pro-cv.co.uk is one resource I found really useful and would recommend it to anyone, and I no longer feel my CV has gaps, they're now junctures in my career and education that I can use to show I'm a well rounded person, as well as a candidate, hopefully at least!