The Business of Fashion Podcast

In 2023, Christopher Kane did what no independent designer ever wants to do. He closed the label he had spent 17 years building with his sister, Tammy Kane. This was the man who put rubberised lace on the runway, who cut up saddle leather on a domestic sewing machine, and who found his ideas in the least obvious places.

This Sunday, Kane returns to London Fashion Week as Mulberry’s creative director of womenswear.

It's an unlikely pairing. Mulberry means Somerset leather, country houses and the bags everyone remembers from the brand’s buzzy Alexa Chung years. Kane’s world has always been more subversive: Catholic school uniforms, the strong women who raised him in Motherwell and the "bad, cool girls" who have run through his work for two decades. 

But Mulberry needs something new. Two years ago, it was fending off a takeover bid, cutting nearly a quarter of its corporate roles and seeing sales slide. Under chief executive Andrea Baldo, Mulberry is rebuilding itself around Britishness and craft, and there are early signs it's working. Sales rose 23 percent in the first quarter of this financial year. 

Kane’s first fashion show is the next and most visible test of that strategy. He sees the job as an extension of his idiosyncratic design sensibilities.

A few days before the show, Kane sat down with BoF's editor-at-large, Tim Blanks, who has followed his work since the beginning. They talk about the axe in his Instagram teasers and what his years away from fashion has taught him.

Key Insights:

• Pruning your work as a design philosophy: Kane has been posting images of an axe chopping a tree ahead of the show — a reference, he says, to arboriculture and to his own process. "I have been editing heavily and pruning, as you would say, to fine-tune this really clear message, but also having a blade-like precision," he says. "I think I've learned over 20 years in the business, of really having a heavy edit and just always trying to be precise."

• Mulberry’s mix of Britishness: Mulberry was never a status bag where Kane grew up; it was a football casual brand. Long before Alexa Chung and the brand's golden moment, Kane knew Mulberry as one label among many worn by football casuals in Motherwell. "Mulberry was definitely present when I was growing up, but it wasn't the obvious bag," he says. "It was the rugby shirt or the football T-shirt" — worn alongside labels like Burberry as "an amalgamation of street culture, youth culture."

• A failed business teaches you things a successful one never will: Kane is candid about what the two years since his label's closure gave him. "That time off really gave me perspective into what I really wanted in life," he says. "The highs are there, but they're very short-lived. And the lows are there, and they're also short-lived." He's blunt, too, about an industry that rarely acknowledges its casualties: "No one ever sees that, what designers and creatives go through, because it's a tough game, but for some reason we're truly addicted to it and we love it."

• Every collection is autobiography: Kane says the Mulberry collection carries the same personal references that defined his own work — Catholic school uniforms, the "bad, cool girls" of his Motherwell childhood, the women in his family who raised him. "Every collection I've done has always been a bit of an autobiographical look to my life or my childhood," he says. 

Additional Resources:

• Is London Fashion Week Back in Action? | BoF
• Christopher Kane Joins Mulberry to Power Ready-to-Wear Relaunch | BoF
• Mulberry Quarterly Sales Jump 23% as Turnaround Gathers Pace | BoF

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Behind every luxury handbag, bespoke suit and couture gown lies an intricate value chain powered by skilled artisans. But as master craftspeople retire without successors, fashion faces a growing shortage of skilled workers — US tailoring employment has fallen roughly 30 percent over the last decade. Nordstrom, North America's largest employer of tailors, is funding tailoring programmes at FIT and Seattle Central College with another planned at ASU FIDM. The effort is aimed at   rebuilding that pipeline at a moment when skilled trades more broadly are enjoying  renewed interest from young people questioning the value of a four-year degree.

In this episode, Sheena Butler-Young is joined by BoF Commercial Features Editor Dan Hastings to explore why fashion’s skilled-trades pipeline has thinned,  what the industry is doing to rebuild it, and whether rising tuition costs and anxiety around AI have created a new opportunity to sell young people on these careers. 

Key Insights:

• As Hastings sees it, today’s shortage reflects decades of consolidation and the shift of more luxury manufacturing outside traditional fashion capitals. In his view, the industry failed to invest enough in training the next generation of skilled craftspeople, leaving many expert artisans nearing retirement with too few successors in the pipeline. The industry, he says, "kept the offices in the West... but we didn't really train that next generation of handicraft people.”

• Fashion has long heralded  the creative director while overlooking the production side. Hastings argues the industry " venerates the creative director" as its "rock stars," while the people making the clothes remain invisible — a visibility gap that can be compounded, particularly in more junior roles, by pay that doesn’t always reflect the skill required.

• Apprenticeship programmes tend to cluster around established luxury hubs, leaving many young people unaware these careers are even an option. Hastings argues that interest is there when people know where to look: “It all comes down to knowing that these programmes exist.” But information about apprenticeships, scholarships and bursaries doesn’t always reach prospective workers.

• Short courses can make trade careers look deceptively fast to enter, but true mastery takes decades. Hastings notes that at some fashion houses, reaching the highest levels can require decades of experience, warning that for a generation “raised on instant gratification,” the long runway between entering the trade and reaching real earning power can be a tough sell.

• While AI may automate some patternmaking functions, Hastings insists it can't touch the artistry of haute couture. He recalls the tradition of embroidering a strand of hair into a Chanel wedding gown for good luck — “that kind of magic doesn't really happen with AI” — arguing luxury houses will have no choice but to keep investing in training if they want to justify their prices on craftsmanship.

Additional Resources:

• Can AI Ignite a New Generation of Fashion Tradespeople? | BoF
• Fashion's Craftsmanship Challenge | BoF
• Facing a Shortage of Luxury Artisans, LVMH Seeks Apprentices in the US | BoF

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Colleen Allen learned to sew sitting on her grandmother's lap, holding the fabric while her grandmother worked the pedal. Growing up in the Midwest, far from the industry, she found her way in through magazines, fashion blogs and old McQueen shows on YouTube.

Allen studied menswear at Parsons, moved to London for a semester abroad at Central Saint Martins and asked to stay on to complete her degree. She landed her first job designing menswear at The Row but then something shifted. She decided to venture out on her own and create a womenswear label in 2024. Since then, Allen says the business has grown by triple digits year over year, with no outside investment and no full-time team other than herself. So how did she do it?

This week on The BoF Podcast, Allen joins BoF founder Imran Amed to talk about the making of a womenswear label, the discipline behind self-funded growth and what she's building next. This conversation was recorded ahead of the LVMH Prize final in Paris, where Allen was one of nine finalists.

Key Insights: 

• A blog-era education: With no connections to the industry, Allen taught herself fashion through magazines, hand-me-downs and, later, fashion blogs. She describes Alexander McQueen's Plato's Atlantis livestream as a formative moment: "It just totally blew my mind that there was still something to be discovered and something new and something transformative."

• Advocating for herself at Central Saint Martins: After a single semester abroad, Allen asked to stay at CSM and was told no. "I thought, no, I'm going to figure it out. I'm going to find a way to stay," she says — and by the end of the year, the head of menswear invited her to remain in the programme.

• Leaving menswear to design for her own body: After years designing menswear at The Row, Allen realised she had "no connection to my femininity, to my body" — and that the only way to process that was through her own work. "The only way I was going to be able to create that space for myself and my sort of own becoming into myself was to be creative, to work through fashion," she says.

• Disciplined cash flow management : Entirely self-funded, Allen has grown her business by only working with retail partners willing to pay a deposit upfront — even if it means turning some away. “We are really only working with people on a deposit basis. Otherwise it's impossible. And so I'm very grateful that within the current retail clients, people have been accommodating for those terms because it's the only way it works.” she says.

• Building a world, not just a product: Looking ahead, Allen wants to reinvest wholesale revenue into her direct-to-consumer business while continuing to expand the creative universe around the brand — campaign imagery, casting and, eventually, a runway show. "It's about bringing people into the world and creating more than just the product, but like who our woman is," she says. 

Two Books Colleen Allen Recommends: 

• Red Comet by Heather Clark 
• Gods and Kings by Dana Thomas 

Additional Resources:

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For many shoppers, fashion is now experienced primarily through a screen — discovered on social media, watched on runway livestreams and purchased from a product photo. Fashion critic Eugene Rabkin argues in his new book that this shift has left the industry prioritising a garment's image over the garment itself, hollowing out creativity and quality along the way. At the same time, as AI generated imagery floods the feed, a counter-movement is emerging: luxury brands are commissioning painters and illustrators, hosting phone-free dinners and building hands-on experiences designed to pull customers back into the physical world.

In this episode, senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young is joined by Diana Pearl, BoF's US Editor, and Marc Bain, BoF's UK Editor and technology correspondent, to discuss whether this renewed emphasis on human creativity and craft is a meaningful response to fashion's image-first culture — or just the next trend cycle.

Key Insights:

• As consumers increasingly interact with clothing through small screens rather than in person, Bain explains that subtler markers of quality have lost their power to communicate value. "As we interact more with clothing through imagery rather than the physical garments themselves, the logo becomes more important... Now the logo is just the easiest thing to identify. And that has become the most important thing on a garment."
• Drawing on a concept borrowed from French theory, Bain says  the gap between a product's online image and its physical reality has left some shoppers disillusioned — a dynamic he says extends well beyond fast fashion. "It doesn't just apply to Shein..Eugene Rabkin's argument is that it's come to apply to a whole lot of fashion, including luxury fashion... There's been this decline in quality over the years."
• Bain says and Rabkin are  careful not to cast technology as the villain, noting that AI's impact depends entirely on how brands choose to use it. " Technology is amoral. It's a tool..And it's really how it's used that is more important."
• Pearl points to a wave of luxury brands hiring painters, illustrators and sculptors as a direct response to overly polished, perfected imagery that technology has made ubiquitous — a trend only accelerated by AI. e. "Being perfect and having just this picture-perfect imagery is no longer seen as aspirational. It's actually seen as, ‘slop’ … having that human-made art... is what feels now aspirational and special."
• As brands pull back from influencer-driven content blitzes in favour of intimate, phone-free events, Pearl says the playbook for measuring success has changed. . "It's all representative of this bigger shift that we're seeing away from volume and just get as much content as possible... towards the depth of connection."

Additional Resources:

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In the summer of 2007, BoF founder Imran Amed landed in Tokyo for the first time. A young American writer named W. David Marx took him on a menswear tour of the city's back streets of Shibuya and Harajuku. That trip would eventually lead Marx to become BoF's first contributor — apart from Amed himself.

Nearly 20 years on, Marx is still in Tokyo, watching a city that experienced three of fashion's biggest shifts before anywhere else: luxury as a middle-class product, the rise — and now retreat — of streetwear and menswear as a global obsession. Marx is the author of three books on Japanese and global culture. The first, “Ametora,” is about how Japan absorbed, and then improved, American style. The most recent, “Blank Space,” is a cultural history of the 21st century, arguing that something has gone missing from the way we make culture today.

Amed sat down with Marx in Tokyo to discuss all of this and more in what is a fascinating conversation about the state of global culture and global fashion today, and how Japan’s place in it has changed. 

Key Insights: 

• Japan taught the luxury industry that luxury could be a mass-market business.  Marx traces Japan's luxury boom back to the 1970s, when newly wealthy Japanese travellers began bringing home souvenirs from Paris. He argues Japan is where brands like Louis Vuitton first learned that "luxury could become a middle class market," building duty-free stores in airports rather than relying solely on flagship boutiques for old-money customers — a model since exported across the world.

• Tokyo Was the Origin Point of the Global Streetwear Boom: Marx lays out how Bathing Ape's underground Tokyo stores became a phenomenon so outsized it reshaped how the rest of the world thought about streetwear. He recalls a Stüssy veteran saying, "Bathing Ape blew streetwear out of the water."

• Luxury's growth problem is structural, not cyclical. Marx argues luxury goods are fundamentally different from something like an iPhone, because "for every additional handbag you sell to a new consumer, you do decrease the value of the handbag that you sold originally." That tension between scarcity and growth, he says, “is at the root of the industry's current slump”.

• Culture Has a ‘Blank Space’ Where Invention Used to Be: Marx’s  central argument is that value shifts, not a lack of talent, have pushed culture away from art for art's sake. He points to hip-hop and graffiti as movements built by outsiders pursuing invention for its own sake, contrasting that with today's incentives: "If you are making things to get attention, if you're making things to make money, it's just very unlikely that your strategy's going to be to be the most inventive as it could possibly be."

Three Books W. David Marx Recommends

• Fashion is Spinach, by Elizabeth Hawes 
• On Human Finery, by Quentin Bell 
• For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, by Jean Baudrillard

Additional Resources:

• Streetwear’s First IPO, Explained | BoF
• How Big Luxury Is Rewiring for the Future | BoF
• How BAPE Kept Its Cool for Decades | BoF 

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Beauty has long been one of the industry’s most reliable growth engines — fragrance boomed post-pandemic, prestige beauty held up better than other categories, and value-driven brands like e.l.f. proved that sharp pricing and marketing could keep consumers spending. But a slowdown that began last year and has only become more pronounced since has challenged that thinking.

In this episode, senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young is joined by BoF senior beauty correspondent Daniela Morosini to unpack the first half's earnings across the beauty conglomerates — from Estée Lauder and Shiseido to L'Oréal, Beiersdorf and E.l.f. — and identify what’s still driving growth and what’s stalling, as well as what investors will be watching for next.

Key Insights:

• Selective Spending, Not Shrinking Wallets: Consumers haven't stopped buying beauty — they've become pickier about where they spend and what they’re purchasing. "People are just getting a little bit more selective," said Morosini. Shopping itself is shifting, too: "Maybe it's not always Sephora and Ulta. Maybe it's TikTok Shop."

• Skincare Results, Injectables and the Price-Value Equation: Affordable, results-driven skincare brands are outperforming, while medical aesthetics are surging in parallel. Morosini points specifically to "the derm-backed skincare brands or the dermatological brands, the more affordable ones like CeraVe and La Roche-Posay, alongside the growing pull of the lasers and the injectables."
• Hair's Unexpected Boom: Hair has emerged as one of the biggest bright spots this earnings season, driven equally by innovation and a cultural shift around hair loss. Morosini notes, "hair loss has just become so much more of a hot topic and I think a lot of stigma has been removed," while also crediting brands like K18 and Olaplex that “have increased what we expect hair products to do for us."

• Estée Lauder's Momentum Question: Lauder posted a 17 percent stock jump on its first results under new leadership, but Morosini cautions the win may be borrowed. "The question is how much has Estée Lauder improved its brand's desirability and how much has it benefited from a rising tide," she says, adding that stripped of Amazon Prime Day effects, US growth was closer to "about two percent."

• The Danger of the One-Hero Brand: From E.l.f.'s reliance on Rhode to Beiersdorf's dependence on Nivea, this earnings season exposed how a single hero product can mask underlying weakness. "When that's basically all concentrated around one brand, that makes investors a little bit nervous," Morosini says, noting the read-through for M&A: “At a certain point you have to buy the growth."

Additional Resources:

• Beauty Is Growing. Not Everyone’s Benefitting. | BoF
• Can Estée Lauder Turn a Moment Into Momentum? | BoF
• Beauty Is Betting on Fragrance. Why Isn’t Shiseido? | BoF

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Earlier this month, A Ma Maniére — one part of James Whitner's The Whitaker Group — was named one of BoF's Best Fashion Stores in the World, our definitive global list of retailers with the most distinctive edits and experiences.

Whitner has spent twenty years building an independent retail business that operates more than 20 stores across 16 US cities — many of them in Black neighbourhoods that mainstream retail had overlooked — based on the feeling he got hanging out in barbershops and sneaker spots growing up in Pittsburgh.

“The best things happen in the barbershop — the most interesting conversations on the block are in the barbershop,” Whitner says. “And once I got some money, going shopping … [was about] how you were serviced, the relationships you had with those people and how good you felt entering and exiting the space. The social currency tied to looking good was about feeling good.”

Back in February 2025, James spoke to me about the discipline behind the business, how he's built brand partnerships that actually last, and why he believes community development, not just retail, is where he needs to head next. 

Key Insights:

• Learning to Operate Before Chasing Scale: Whitner is candid about the unglamorous groundwork behind Whitaker Group's growth — five years learning to operate, and then another five building brand partnerships. "You have got to understand how to keep costs down, how to build an infrastructure while keeping costs down," he says.

• Brand Partners Who Play the Long Game: Whitner is blunt about who he'll work with. "If you want to work with brands who want to be for everybody, that means you're for nobody," he says. On scaling a business built on cultural credibility: "This is an industry that you can scale, but it's not built for scale."

• Nike and the Trust in Storytelling: Whitner credits an authentic relationship with Nike for the Whitaker Group's most successful drops. "Nike loves us because we're uniquely us for them... nothing scales better than a great story," he says, previewing a tighter, more intentional distribution strategy.

• From Retail to Real Community Development: Community development has become central to Whitner's business, with completed projects including Social Status Detroit — a $5.5 million redevelopment on the city's east side — and The Collective on Tuckaseegee, a ten-space retail compound in Charlotte. "At some point, realising that we needed to be the developer that helped shape the community," he says. “It's more important for us to drive connections and just try to help people who want to help people."

Additional Resources:

• The Best Fashion Stores in the World | BoF
• The Independent Retailer Built on Prioritising Black Buying Power | BoF
• The Whitaker Group Expands With New Women-Centric Retailer Jaide | BoF

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For a long time, upcycling sat on the fringes of the fashion industry, a tactic used primarily by small independent designers, niche sustainability labels and in one-off capsule collections. That's changing. At Paris Couture Week this spring, Swiss designer Kevin Germanier closed the season with a collection made entirely from excess inventory across seven LVMH-owned brands. Coach is turning used denim into new bags, and Uniqlo is remaking unsellable and used garments under its RE label.

In this episode, senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young speaks to senior editorial associate Shayeza Walid to explore why upcycling brands are increasingly marketing upcycling through creativity and individuality rather than sustainability alone, and what's really driving the shift from new EU regulations to a changing consumer mindset.

Key Insights:

• Selling Creativity, Not Just Conscience: Walid points to a fundamental shift in how upcycling is marketed. It's no longer framed primarily as an environmental fix, but as a source of design distinction and story. "It felt like the term was becoming ubiquitous across marketing," she says, noting that upcycling has moved from something "relegated to a certain type of consumer or a certain type of brand" to being claimed by some of the industry's biggest names.
• Regulation Is Quietly Doing the Heavy Lifting: Walid connects the timing of the boom to the EU's ban on the destruction of unsold goods, which came into force in July. She notes that Kevin Germanier's LVMH-backed couture collection was deliberately built from unsold stock, not deadstock fabric — a distinction he emphasised on stage. "It also means that they'll have to figure out sustainable and approved ways for using their excess stock, and upcycling is one of the methods for that."
• Deadstock vs. Textile Waste — Not the Same Debate: Walid unpacks a live tension among practitioners: using deadstock fabric is being challenged by some critics as not addressing overproduction, since it still puts commercial value on excess production. "With deadstock, it's the same as using new fabric in the sense that they're rolls of fabric... that's not necessarily what upcycling is about," while brands like E.L.V. Denim work directly with used, discarded garments instead.
• The Infrastructure Is Finally Catching Up: Sorting, collecting and sourcing — the industry's biggest upcycling bottleneck — is improving. Walid cites organisations like Fashion for Good working on AI-assisted sorting, and platforms such as Nona Source and The Materialist connecting brands to deadstock fabric. "There's a greater design interest in it now more than there's ever been," she says of the shift she's tracked through conversations with suppliers.
• The Consumer Wants Range, Not a Label: Walid argues the audience for upcycled product has broadened well beyond the sustainability shopper. "You could have an upcycled Miu Miu product today, and maybe that says that you like high fashion... but also you think it's cool that your product is from an upcycled material," she says, describing a consumer who wants variety in their closet rather than to be defined by one aesthetic or ethic.
• Scale Remains the Unsolved Problem: Despite the momentum, there are limits. Sizing and colour inconsistency frustrate wholesale buyers, the process is inherently slower than working with virgin material, and export bans on used textiles in countries like Bangladesh complicate sourcing. She also flags that upcyclers in the Global South — in markets like Kantamanto in Ghana — have done this sort of work for generations but remain largely excluded from the value chain brands are now building.

• Additional Resources:
• Why So Many Fashion Brands Are Upcycling | BoF
• Why Fashion’s Economics Work Against Sustainable Brands | BoF
• Can the EU Ban on Destroying Unsold Goods Actually Work? | BoF

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I've been interviewing Nick Knight for more than 15 years. This is our fourth in-depth, sit-down interview. At this stage, it's become something closer to a running conversation about how technology is reshaping fashion.

This time around, I wanted to know where Nick is focusing his energy now. It turns out, he is building his own AI datasets from scratch — photographing a model over and over so the machine sees the world only through his references, and never scrapes the internet for somebody else's. He takes his own still image and asks the AI to make it move, producing something that is neither a photograph nor a film. 

I also asked him for the advice he'd give to young image-makers starting out today, in the age of AI. This week on The BoF Podcast, Nick and I get into what happened to the metaverse, how Nick believes AI is creating an entirely new medium somewhere between photography and film, and what fulfilment really means to one of fashion's defining image-makers.

Key Insights: 

• The Metaverse Didn't Disappear, It Rebranded: Knight argues the concept never really went away, but was tainted by association once Facebook was renamed Meta.  He says, "I don't think it's necessarily drifted away. I think the term's been, to some degree, cancelled because it had too many bad connotations,” he said. "The metaverse is just a digital version of life, that's absolutely happening."

• Building Proprietary Datasets to Escape the Echo Chamber: Knight's studio creates its own AI models rather than pulling from tools trained on the wider internet, specifically to avoid reproducing past photographers' work. He explains the method: "We've done a conventional session where I photographed the model lots and lots of times, and lots and loads of clothes, et cetera, and that's my data set," which is then fed into the AI, "so it sees the world only through those references."

• Referencing Isn't Plagiarism, Copying Is: Knight pushes back on the idea that AI imagery is inherently derivative, arguing that all creative work draws on a subconscious library of influence — human or artificial. "When you walk around a museum, go around the V&A, you are taking in Botticellis, and you're taking in 20th century furniture... they go into your brain... so it's your frame of reference. AI does the same sort of thing." But he draws a hard line at direct imitation: "There's no satisfaction in copying an existing piece of work."

• Fashion Models Should Own Their Own Digital Likeness: Knight argues that AI could extend a fashion model's career well beyond its traditionally short, youth-focused span — but only if the model, not the agency or brand, controls the rights. "I think that fashion models need to own their own digital likeness. Now, I've spoken to a lot of model agencies and there is virtually nothing happening to make sure that happens," he says, adding that agencies have little financial incentive to invest in it. 

• Fame, Money and Power Are "False Goals": Asked what he's chasing if not happiness, Knight rejects the premise outright. "Fame is a false goal. Money is a false goal. Power is a false  goal. He locates his own fulfilment elsewhere: "My interaction with people in the studio, my interaction with my wife and my family... it comes from the human interaction with all people around me."

Additional Resources:

•  Nick Knight Says Heart and Mind are the Key to Fashion Imagemaking | BoF
• The BoF Podcast |  Inside The Future of Fashion Image Making with Nick Knight
• The BoF Podcast | Nick Knight on Why the Metaverse Is Fashion's Next Frontier | BoF

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For years, follower count was the clearest shorthand for a creator's value — more followers meant more reach, more brand deals, more money. But social media doesn't work that way anymore. TikTok's For You page, Instagram's suggested posts and other algorithmically curated feeds mean creators can reach huge audiences without those people ever following them. At the same time, affiliate marketing platforms like LTK and ShopMy are giving brands a much clearer picture of who actually drives sales, with smaller creators often outperforming bigger names. 

In this episode, senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young talks to BoF US Editor Diana Pearl about how brands and creators are rethinking the value of an audience, and where creator value is headed next.

Key Insights:

• A huge following no longer guarantees cultural weight. Pearl points to the gap between raw numbers and actual impact: "You look at someone like Dixie D'Amelio, who has almost 54 million followers on TikTok... but I would not say [she is] as culturally relevant as someone like Alex Earle, who has not even 9 million followers on TikTok."
• New platforms have made it possible to see exactly who is driving sales, not just who has the biggest audience. As Pearl explains, "ShopMy really changed that — they offer brands a lot more insight into which creators are actually driving sales, even if they're not running a paid partnership."
• TikTok's For You page and Instagram's suggested posts have done more than any other shift to break the link between followers and visibility. "Those are the two primary factors that have really diminished the importance of follower count," she says, "because you can have someone with 300 followers who goes viral."
• The single most important quality a creator can build today resists easy measurement. "Trust is the number one most important thing that an influencer or creator can curate today," Pearl says, "and that trust is not something that can necessarily be measured by metrics on a spreadsheet."
• Chasing every viral trend is a losing strategy — consistency is what builds a durable audience. "Playing the long game is really the best strategy," she says. "Staying true to who you are — that's how you build that community. That is how you built that trust in that community."

Additional Resources:

• Why Follower Count Matters Less Than Ever | BoF
• Not All Creators Convert. Here's How to Find Those That Do. | BoF
• From Hype to Discipline: The New World of Influencer Marketing | Case Study | BoF

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When the designer Kelly Wearstler was five or six years old, she made little drawings and small sculptures out of cans and cartons, laid them out on the table at family gatherings, and put price tags on them.

She grew up in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, raised by what she calls fiercely independent women who took her to thrift stores, flea markets and auctions. She got her first job at 13. She studied graphic design in Boston, apprenticed in New York with Milton Glaser, the designer behind the I Love New York logo, and then moved to Los Angeles where she waited tables at a Beverly Hills restaurant until one of her regulars became her first client.

Today her design studio runs to 60 people and six verticals — interiors, architecture, licensing, creative direction, a gallery and a Substack newsletter. And next month she launches a 29-piece collection with H&M Home: the first time the retailer has put furniture into a designer collaboration, and the first time it has worked with one designer across both home and fashion.

This week on The BoF Podcast, Kelly joins Amed to talk about advocating for herself before she had any track record, what waiting tables taught her about designing restaurants and how she is using AI inside her studio.

Key Insights:

• A Design Education Built on Flea Markets, Not Classrooms: Wearstler's earliest design instincts weren't taught — they were foraged. Without the money to buy expensive pieces, she and her family combed thrift stores and auctions for scarves, magazines and furniture. "I think that really kind of educated my eye in so many different elements of design," she says. "I love typography and I think that really came from the magazines and what really resonated with me and evoked an emotion."

• Advocating for Herself: Wearstler talked her way into designing her first hotel despite having no commercial design experience, on the condition she partnered with an architecture firm that had. Asked where she found the confidence to push for it, she traces it straight back to her upbringing: "It really went back to my childhood, like both my grandmothers worked. They were so independent... whatever you want to do, you can accomplish. It's hard work. It's not gonna be easy. And it has to be fuelled with passion and curiosity, period." She simply refused to let the "no" stick: "I just kept on going. I really wanted this project."

• A "Why" Rooted in How Spaces Make People Feel: Asked what drives her, Wearstler points to the emotional residue her spaces leave behind. "There's nothing better than to go into one of the lobbies of the hotels that we worked in," she says. "We used to see people coming back over and over again. And they always tell me how they love being in this space. It makes them feel so good."

• Fashion and Design as One Continuous Language: Wearstler doesn't separate how a home is curated from how a person dresses — both are storytelling. "It's like how you dress and your design, your home, your curation style really is a form of self-expression," she says. "I really don't see design and fashion living in separate rooms."

• Legitimising Mass Market Through Design Pedigree: For Wearstler, H&M's history of designer collaborations — not its price point — made the partnership make sense. "If you look just like in the past, I remember early 2000 when they did the Karl Lagerfeld collaboration ... They're really the pioneers of collaborating with designers," she says, citing Margiela's archival collection as another reference point. She argues scale and craft aren't opposed: "It's all in the economies of scale ... You have to really be a great designer, know how to take perhaps a humble material and make it shine."

Additional Resources:

• The Acts of Love Behind Milan Design Week | BoF
• BoF VOICES 2023: An Inflection Point for AI | BoF
• What Stood Out at Salone | BoF 

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For much of the last decade, fashion brands and retailers were fixated on making shopping as seamless as possible — endless product online, algorithmic recommendations, next-day delivery. But after years of digital sameness, something more analogue is starting to feel exciting again. That shift sits at the heart of BoF's new retail package, The Best Fashion Stores in the World — an insider's guide to 65 independent retailers spanning from Brooklyn's Ven. Space to Dongliang in Shanghai, Alara in Lagos and Dover Street Market. 

BoF retail editor Cathaleen Chen joins senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young to discuss why independent retailers are becoming more important to shoppers, brands and the wider fashion ecosystem, as well as why the ritual of engaging with fashion IRL is more important than ever.

Key Insights:

• Chen says the list's three pillars — curation, experience and partnership — were designed to reflect more than consumer taste. Partnership, she explains, addresses "the support and the responsibilities that all retailers have to the fashion ecosystem," at a moment when department stores have earned a track record for not paying vendors and multi-brand retail has been reshaped by the collapse of players like Matches and the struggles of Net-a-Porter.

• With e-commerce solving for intent-driven shopping, Chen argues stores now win on discovery. As she puts it: "If you know exactly what you want, you shop online. If you don't know what you want, you shop in stores." She adds that the best shopkeepers add value "not just discovery for new brands" but new ways of styling — an eye that "allows designers to sort of view their collection in new eyes" in a way social feeds may fall short, 

•  Per wholesale data from the platform Joor, independent retailers' share of transactions rose from 49 percent in 2020 to 62 percent in 2025 — meaning independents "now make up the majority of transactions in wholesale" on the platform, a significant insight even when accounting for the caveat that it reflects one marketplace.

• The list includes retailers in Ibiza, Hangzhou, Cairo, Cartagena and Kuwait City — a deliberate move beyond fashion's traditional capitals. Citing a conversation with Kallmeyer founder and chief executive Daniella Kallmeyer, Chen notes that regional boutiques may be " even more important than the larger international stores because they're able to penetrate these outer-tier markets," which represent white space for fashion, rather than lesser opportunity.

• The appeal of independent retail is fundamentally about a different mindset: casual discovery and "bopping around the neighbourhood," which Chen calls "the opposite of online shopping, where I know exactly what I want.”

• Asked to name the one quality that will define the best stores for the next decade, Chen didn't hesitate: "I think conviction is what makes these doors so special, and ultimately what makes them so successful today" — pointing to Ikram Goldman's boutique, Ikram, in Chicago, and her famously intimate client relationships as the clearest example.

Additional Resources:

• Why Independent Retail Is More Important Than Ever | BoF
• The Best Fashion Stores in the World | BoF
• The Debrief | Why Some Retailers are Ignoring the Internet | BoF

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Independent multi-brand retailers have long been among fashion's most influential tastemakers, introducing emerging designers, shaping customer discovery and building communities around a distinct point of view. Yet many have struggled in recent years as e-commerce, rising costs and industry consolidation have reshaped the retail landscape.

Despite those challenges, a new generation of boutiques is proving that physical retail can still thrive by offering something digital platforms cannot: thoughtful curation, personal relationships and memorable experiences. 

Among them is Brooklyn menswear store Ven. Space, founded by Totokaelo-alum Chris Green, which was recently named one of BoF's Best Fashion Stores in the World.

When Green opened his New York clothing store, he never wanted it to be everything to everybody. The self-funded menswear boutique in Brooklyn's Carroll Gardens neighbourhood carries no outside investment, offers no online checkout and has an average customer dwell time two and a half hours — an anomaly in an industry that has spent the last decade racing towards scale.

This week on The BoF Podcast, Green joins BoF founder and CEO Imran Amed to discuss building a business without outside investment, why independent retail shouldn't chase endless scale, and how creating the right feeling can become a store's greatest competitive advantage.

Key Insights: 

• The best independent retailers optimise for experience, not endless growth. After decades in retail, Green built Ven. Space around financial discipline and customer experience rather than rapid expansion. "Most people want to set no limits or boundaries on what they want to do," he says. "They're so obsessed with scale they lose a lot of what makes them special." For Green, the benchmark should be the experience and the service — not the size of the business.
• 
  
• Independence lets Ven. Space to grow on its own terms. Having watched Need Supply and Totokaelo close under a broader ownership group, Green built his next business to be immune to that pressure. "I'm fiercely independent. I don't have a backer. It's just self-funded. I want to keep it that way forever," he says. Staying self-funded, he argues, lets him make decisions based on the long-term health of the business rather than short-term returns.
• 
  
• Relationships, not transactions, are what build lasting retail businesses. For Green, a completed sale is the least interesting part of the exchange. The real value, he notes, lies in the conversations and trust that build before and after a customer leaves. "The true feedback is the interaction before and after the purchase," he says — the thing he believes physical retail can offer that online shopping cannot.

• Independent boutiques remain fashion's most important discovery engine. While major retailers increasingly optimise for efficiency, Green argues that boutiques provide emerging designers with something irreplaceable: passionate advocates who understand their work and can communicate it directly to customers. “It’s the care and effort that's going into the collection. If someone has something to actually say, that's super important to me,” he says.  “I identify with the care, the passion, the artistry.” For Green, success comes from backing brands because of their craft — not simply because they're guaranteed to sell.

Additional Resources:

• The Best Fashion Stores in the World | BoF
• Why Independent Retail Is More Important Than Ever | BoF
• How to Build a Fashion Store Worth Leaving Home For | BoF

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What makes a fashion or beauty company a truly desirable place to work? BoF’s second annual ranking of the industry’s most sought-after employers looks beyond brand recognition to examine what workers value — and where companies’ reputations do not always sync up with employee experience. 

In this episode of The Debrief senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young speaks with junior commercial writer Eoghan O’Donnell and commercial features editor Dan Hastings about the companies that topped the list, the factors shaping employees’ choices and the challenges facing employers today. They also discuss career development, leadership, workplace stability and how artificial intelligence is changing fashion jobs.

Key Insights: 

• The conglomerate stability draw: Amid market volatility, candidates are gravitating toward European luxury conglomerates and beauty giants. Chanel, Hermès and Dior topped the fashion list, while L'Oréal Paris led beauty, ahead of Dior Beauty and Charlotte Tilbury. Their appeal lies partly in perceived stability and career longevity. Founder-led brands including Charlotte Tilbury, Rhode, Victoria Beckham Beauty, Fenty Beauty and Rare Beauty also made the beauty top 20, driven more by product and creative vision than corporate scale.

• Prestige recruits, it doesn't retain: Iconic brand names remain powerful recruitment tools, but employees consistently rank pay, career progression and company culture as their top three priorities — even as prestige tops their stated reason for choosing a dream employer. The disconnect is measurable: only 28 percent of current workers say their employer's external reputation strongly aligns with their day-to-day experience, and among those who perceive a gap, 80 percent plan to leave within 12 months. "Prestige attracts talent, but it's not necessarily what retains it," says O'Donnell. 

• The ivory tower effect: Of all cohorts surveyed, C-suite and HR respondents were the least likely to say their employer's external image differed from internal reality — the group best placed to close that gap is often the most disconnected from it. A Glassdoor and Indeed review analysis (December 2024 onward) of the top 10 companies in both rankings surfaced consistent complaints about workload, benefits, and disconnects between store-level management and headquarters. "There is a [difference] between having a prestigious brand name and working for a brand that doesn't necessarily deliver a healthy workplace," says O'Donnell. "

• The generational AI divide: Sentiment on AI splits sharply by seniority, not by digital fluency. Workers over 40 are the most AI-optimistic cohort — not Gen Z, as employers might assume — while 39 percent of fashion workers and 35 percent of beauty workers say they want AI training they haven't received. A small but notable share admitted using AI at work without disclosing it to their employer.

• The "job lock" threat: Many employees are staying in roles for economic security, not satisfaction. "We know that some employees are staying in roles because of economic uncertainty rather than that sense of genuine satisfaction," says O'Donnell. Hastings sees the same pressure building from the other direction: "I don't think [Gen Z] are willing to sacrifice their [salary], paying the rent, and eating on the altar of working for a prestigious fashion or beauty company — and that will create a lot of friction within the industry."

• Women's health is the next battleground: In survey responses skewing majority-female, respondents voiced urgent, largely unmet demand for egg freezing, menstrual leave, and support through perimenopause and menopause — benefits nearly absent from current employer offerings in two female-dominated industries.

Additional Resources:

• The Most Desirable Beauty Companies to Work for in 2026 | BoF
• The Most Desirable Fashion Companies to Work for in 2026 | BoF
• The Debrief | Making Sense of Fashion’s Brutal Job Market | BoF

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When I sat down with Jonathan Anderson in his Dior atelier last December, he hadn’t shown a single couture look yet and nothing he'd designed  for the house had reached the shops. He was, by his own account, still working it out —  joking that every fitting felt like doing a PhD, learning an institution with its own rules, its own hierarchy, its own way of making. 

Jonathan’s first products landed in Dior stores on January 2nd. Six months later, this week's LVMH half-year results showed that the Dior turnaround is starting to bear fruit.

Listening to the conversation again now, you get a sense of how big a task he was undertaking.  

Key Insights: 

• Early in the job, Anderson scrapped the traditional 30-day couture turnaround and rebuilt it as a six-month cycle — a structural bet, not a creative one. "I cannot do a couture show in 30 days. I guess it's just impossible. So I was like, let's change it into like a six-month cycle," he says. Six months later, that's roughly the exact runway LVMH pointed to this week: Dior's return to growth landed on almost the same timeline he set for himself.

• Anderson describes the six-month cycle as "a lab" — a space to experiment with fabrics, hardware and techniques that later filter into bags, shoes and jewellery. "You might learn something through that and then go, actually, we've opened all these looms now, we might as well use that," he says. The jewellery line alone drew on meteorites and Roman cameos; the bags on centuries-old French textiles.

• Months before the collection showed, Anderson was already in China and the US, talking directly to Dior's biggest couture buyers. "I met someone in America and I have been working out who else I want to attract to the brand," he says — describing collectors motivated by occasion, by history, and by newer buyers just discovering the house. That ground-level client work sits underneath this week's headline: LVMH's fashion and leather goods division, and Dior specifically, outperformed on the strength of exactly this kind of high-touch, VIC-level demand.

• Anderson pushed the show itself toward a secondary role — "the silhouette, the idea, the fantasy, the dream" — while putting real weight on the private Villa Dior presentations and the free public exhibition that followed. "A photograph is never going to tell you that a dress took 4,000 hours. You have to see it," he says. It's a bet that depth beats virality — harder to quantify than a same-store sales number, but one LVMH's CFO gestured toward this week in citing renewed desirability, not just volume, as the driver behind Dior's turn.

• Asked about balancing instinct against a business this size, Anderson doesn't reach for a creative answer — he reaches for an operational one. "A fashion show is not just me. I am just the conductor," he says, crediting merchandisers, logistics and finance teams for making the vision sellable. 

Additional Resources:

• LVMH Fashion Sales Rise 1% as Dior Turns Corner | BoF
• Jonathan Anderson | BoF 500 | The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry 

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Fabric content used to be a niche sustainability conversation. Now it's a mainstream health one, driven by the same scrutiny shoppers already apply to what they eat and put on their skin — searches for "natural fibre" are up over 100 percent  in five years, and searches for "what is viscose?" have climbed roughly 5,000 percent  in the US over the same period. Gap found out just how fast that shift can turn into backlash when its nostalgic Zac Posen knit drop — 80 percent  polyester, 20 percent elastane — drew comparisons to fast fashion within days of launch, despite carrying a premium, above-$100 price tag.

In this episode of The Debrief, Sheena Butler-Young and Shayeza Walid unpack why natural fibres have become a health obsession rather than a values debate, why "natural" doesn't automatically mean sustainable, and whether polyester can ever really be dethroned.

Key Insights: 

• Health Is the New Driver: The conversation used to centre on durability and value; now it's about wellness. Walid explains that shoppers are "instead of just talking about durability and value... starting [to go]  more into this health conversation," adding that clothing has become "this final frontier" for the same scrutiny people already apply to food and skincare.
• Gap's Zac Posen Knit Became a Cautionary Tale: The backlash wasn't really about one sweater — it was about price and expectation. Walid notes the item retailed above $100, so "the disappointment was... doubled down on by the fact that this is supposed to be like a premium level of Gap." As she puts it, "people are [now] associating price with natural fiber."
• Natural Doesn't Automatically Mean Sustainable: Walid is blunt that the "natural equals good" framing oversimplifies things: "natural does mean that it might have a higher carbon footprint," she says, pointing to methane from grazing cattle for wool and the water intensity of cotton. Her summary: "anything that's derived from nature... naturally has a higher environmental footprint because it's from the earth."
• Different Generations, Same Shift: Motivations diverge by age, but the direction is the same. Gen Z shoppers are driven by "value signaling" around climate, Walid says, while older shoppers are asking "how can I live a healthier, better life?" Her takeaway: "you're seeing it across different age brackets, but the end result is this shift."
• Polyester Isn't Going Anywhere Soon: Despite the backlash, Walid says synthetics remain entrenched, especially in performance wear. "It's cheap... it is subsidized by... the oil lobby," she says, and its "malleable qualities are so unique to itself that it's very difficult to replace." Bio-based elastane is emerging, but only at pilot scale.

Additional Resources:

• Why Consumers Are Ditching Polyester for Natural Fibres | BoF
• Sustainable Fashion’s New Marketing Angle Is All About Wellness | BoF
• Wool Workout Clothes? The Demand Is Growing | BoF 

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As fashion is increasingly consumed through a stream of images, products and fleeting trends, Avery Trufelman, host of the award-winning podcast “Articles of Interest,” takes a different approach. Trufelman zooms in on her subjects to uncover the histories, systems and human stories woven into the clothes we wear.

“It’s crops, it’s the earth, it’s handwork, it’s culture, it’s society,” Trufelman says. “You tug on a thread and you get everything.”

In this conversation from our archive, Trufelman joins BoF founder, CEO and editor-in-chief Imran Amed to discuss her path into podcasting and why understanding the story behind a garment can transform our relationship with it.

Key Insights: 

• For Trufelman, clothing was one of her earliest forms of self-expression. As a teenager, she wore unusual thrifted outfits that made her stand out among her peers. “It just made me realise how powerful clothing was,” she says. “Dressing in this wild way sort of set me apart.” As she grew older and found other ways to communicate, her reliance on clothing changed, realising that fashion is closely connected to freedom, identity and the ability to express oneself.

• Creating “Articles of Interest” expanded Trufelman’s understanding of what fashion encompasses. She initially distinguished between clothes, which she considered real and universal, and fashion, which she associated with an artificial and potentially alienating industry. Her reporting gradually dissolved that distinction. “Now, it’s all about fashion because everything has fashion,” she says. “Buildings have fashion, cars have fashion, colours have fashion. Fashion is just taste over time.”

• Audio can encourage audiences to look beyond immediate aesthetic judgements. Trufelman learnt how to translate visual subjects into sound while working on the architecture podcast “99% Invisible.” By allowing listeners to encounter the history and ideas behind an object before seeing it, audio can complicate instinctive reactions about whether something is attractive, ugly or fashionable. “There’s something really potent about hearing the story first,” she says.

• The deeper Trufelman investigates clothing, the more complex it becomes. Stories about individual garments lead into questions about agriculture, natural resources, garment construction, labour, social conventions and political history. Learning to sew gave her another perspective on the skill embedded in clothing and the people responsible for making it. Rather than offering simple explanations, her work embraces fashion as a “bottomless well” of conflicting histories and emotions, she says.

Additional Resources:

• The BoF 500: Avery Trufelman 
• Exclusive: ‘Articles of Interest’ Podcast to Tackle American ‘Gorpcore’ Next | BoF 

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For decades, institutions like Central Saint Martins, Parsons and Institut Français de la Mode have launched some of fashion's most successful careers. But, today's graduates are entering a more competitive industry grappling with slower growth across the board, where AI is changing how work gets done and employers are reassessing the skills they need. AI is transforming how entry-level work gets done, while students are asking harder questions about the return on investment of a fashion degree. 

This week, BoF Careers features editor Dan Hastings joins Senior Correspondent Sheena Butler–Young to examine how fashion education is evolving alongside a rapidly changing industry—and whether those changes are enough to prepare students for today's job market.

Key Insights:

• Fashion graduates are entering a far more competitive industry. With thousands of graduates competing for a limited number of entry-level roles, breaking into fashion is arguably becoming even more difficult than it was just a decade ago. According to UCAS data, the UK alone now offers over 200 bachelor's-level fashion courses, with cohorts running from single figures up to roughly 50 at institutions such as Central Saint Martins and the London College of Fashion. That points to close to 5,000 new fashion design graduates a year, entering a job market that, in Hastings's words, “is not ready for that number of young graduates” — and competing not only with each other but with the backlog of graduates from previous years who haven't yet found work.

•  Financial barriers persist. Despite some progress, Hastings describes many fashion students continuing to work unpaid internships to gain much-needed experience while struggling to afford tuition, housing and other college expenses. It’s structure that, he says, often “excludes people from working-class backgrounds, even if now they have access to fashion degrees.” UK student loans widen access to the degree itself, but not to the unpaid work experience that increasingly follows it.

• Prestige still opens doors. Hastings says some of fashion’s most prestigious schools continue to open doors  to its most coveted roles – but not on name recognition alone. But on the unique and rigorous training and development they offer students alongside access to industry professionals who mentor and support. points to La Cambre, the Brussels design school which admits just 15 to 20 students into its first year, with further exam failures and dropouts narrowing the cohort as it progresses; this year's graduate show reportedly drew a headhunter from Louis Vuitton. IFM in Paris operates on the same principle, pairing intensely competitive entry with scholarship funding from major luxury houses. As Hastings puts it, “when you have a foot inside the door, you can really connect with really amazing people.” 

Additional Resources:

• Paris' New Super-School Aims to Rival Central Saint Martins | BoF 
• How Fashion Schools Court Industry Talent | BoF
• How Fashion Schools Are Tackling AI’s Blind Spots | BoF 

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Diversity and body positivity have been important themes shaping the fashion conversation over the past decade. Yet a gap remains between the industry’s ideals and its reality. Few people have experienced that gap – and pushed back against it – more visibly than Paloma Elsesser. She’s walked the biggest runways, landed the biggest covers and used her platform to challenge the industry’s standards around bodies, beauty and who gets to be seen.

Now, she’s taking that authority somewhere new: building a body care brand rooted in the rituals she grew up with.

“My mother’s African American. You don’t get out of the shower and not put lotion on. That’s crazy,” says Elsesser. “The central tenets of my work obviously are deeply rooted within the body, but I would love to see body care be personal and esoteric and ritualistic and beautiful,” she continues. “I think what’s so powerful about this expansive tapestry of beauty that we have today is that so many different types of people get to meet themselves and find belonging in those different brands.”

Elsesser sat down with executive editor Priya Rao on stage at this year’s Business of Beauty Global Forum to discuss staying true to herself amid the pressures of tokenism and why —  after a decade spent building other people’s brands — she’s finally thinking about building one of her own.

Key Insights: 

• The Commercial Aestheticisation of Movements: Elsesser reflects on how crucial cultural shifts, such as body positivity and DE&I, have been superficialised and flattened by the industry. She highlights that when movements are reduced to simple marketing visual palettes – like turning Pride into a mere rainbow motif – it strips away the systemic realities and precarity of the marginalised lives they represent.

• Navigating the Vacuum of Representation: Having inadvertently become the face of a movement, Elsesser addresses the complexity of corporate tokenism following the cultural reckonings of recent years. To sustain her personal equity and mental health, she detaches her individual worth from structural cultural swings, preserving her sense of self.

• A Strategic Pivot Into Ritualistic Body Care: Transitioning from image-maker to brand founder, Elsesser is launching a science-backed, premium body care venture centred around specialised personal care products. The strategic thesis moves away from mass-market saturation towards a highly curated, object-forward, niche aesthetic that mirrors premium apparel.

• Curation and Belonging Over Mass Scale: Rejecting a standard mass-market framework despite her high digital profile, Elsesser builds for a specific, highly engaged demographic looking for attainable luxury. She identifies beauty as a critical entry point for consumer belonging, where high-concept design on a countertop allows younger demographics to access prestige brand identity.

Additional Resources:

• Paloma Elsesser | BoF 500 | The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry 
• Embodying the Moment: Paloma Elsesser on Beauty, Bodies and Business | BoF 
• The Business of Beauty Global Forum: Our Place in Culture | BoF 

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In 2016, the global retail landscape was dominated by successful direct-to-consumer (DTC) disruptors like Everlane, Glossier, Allbirds and Outdoor Voices. Backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital, they prioritised rapid sales growth and hyper-aggressive social media customer acquisition over immediate profitability.

In this episode, senior news and features editor Diana Pearl joins senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young to explore  why the once-dominant  DTC formula ultimately unravelled  — and how a quieter, lesser-scrutinised class of brands, such as Doên, Hill House and Staud, built more durable businesses by taking a different path.

Key Insights: 

• A faltering DTC playbook faltered :  IIn 2016, fashion's direct-to-consumer boom was fuelled by venture capital. Well-funded startups spent heavily on creative agencies, polished brand identities and social media advertising in pursuit of rapid growth, while largely rejecting wholesale. But as customer acquisition costs climbed and digital marketing became less effective, many brands discovered that bypassing traditional retail wasn't the sustainable advantage it once seemed. 

• Brand before scale: Having a strong aesthetic is key to the equation. . “Being very defined with your aesthetic and your point of view, you can then take that and apply it to a bunch of different categories,” says Pearl Direct consumer selling can be a good way to control brand identity but wholesale remains a critical avenue for brand awareness and discovery. 'It’s not that direct- to-consumers can't work, you just need to build up that brand identity,” says Pearl. “I think a lot of these big 2016 names went wrong by raising so much money without [the brand identity].”

• The value of being small and growing slow  Limited capital forced many of these brands to stay disciplined with inventory, giving them time to understand what customers actually wanted before making bigger bets. While frequent sell-outs weren't ideal, they were often less damaging than excess inventory that required markdowns and eroded profitability. The result was a stronger feedback loop between brands and their customers and quicker pivots.“When products sell out, you get to see what your customers are really resonating with versus if you're just advertising on social media in order to grow sales,” says Pearl. 

• Community over customer acquisition : Rather than relying on expensive paid marketing, many of these brands built loyal followings through authentic relationships with creators and customers. Early influencer partnerships grew alongside the brands themselves, creating trust and awareness that proved more durable than simply buying reach through social media advertising.  “

Additional Resources:

• For These Brands, Resisting the DTC Playbook Paid Off
• Glossier’s New Strategy: Fewer Stores, Fewer Products
• The ‘Nap Dress’ Propelled Hill House to $110 Million. What’s Next?

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I missed couture season for the first time in years, but that made it even more valuable for me to catch up with Tim Blanks on everything that happened this week in Paris amidst a record breaking heatwave. 

At Chanel, Mathieu Blazy built his sophomore couture collection around a fairy tale he found in Gabrielle Chanel's own library.. Dior's Jonathan Anderson tore down the walls of the usual tent in the gardens of Musée Rodin, staging an open-air show inspired by the sculptor Linda Benglis. And Michael Stewart, an independent London designer debuted his very first couture offering, working obsessively to achieve his vision of craft through his signature beading technique.

This week on The BoF Podcast, Tim Blanks joins BoF founder Imran from Paris to break down the Haute Couture season that was.

Key Insights: 

• The Race for Over-embellishment:  The couture season exposed a risk of historic houses over-indexing on extreme metrics such as hours of labour or bead counts to project status over pure visual beauty. As Amed observes: "It's almost like in some cases, there's a race to create the most elaborate, the most extreme ... so that people can trot out these statistics and say, this took 17,000 hours or this took you know this many beads or whatever... People are just taking it to an extreme that strips the beauty away.”

• Chanel’s Fairytale Narrative and the Fluidity of the Body: Under Matthieu Blazy, Chanel rejected restrictive construction, deploying generous silhouettes, inspired by a book of fairytales, found in Gabrielle Chanel’s library. Highlighting his creative decision, Blanks notes: "Matthieu was thinking about fairy tales... He called it ‘Gabi and the Beanstalk.’ And then so the whole show. Meshed all these fairy tale elements, very integrated them really fully... just the story, like this is what Matthieu was talking about, the narratives that fashion can expand on."

• Dior’s Experimental, Open-Air Laboratory: Jonathan Anderson treated his sophomore couture collection for Dior as an evolving work-in-progress, literally taking down the physical walls of the venue to let the elements in. "He took down the walls of the tent and in the garden of the Musée Rodin where Dior always shows,” Blanks says. “The experimental quality of his work was very much on display in the Dior collection, which is a fascinating thing to see."

• Schiaparelli’s Subversion and the Call of the Void: Daniel Roseberry executed a calculated pivot away from the predictable, gold-plated hardware that has driven his recent commercial success, leaning instead into fetishistic latex and silicone.  "This show, he was talking about the call of the void,” Blanks explains. “Plunging into the unknown. The abyss. Latex and silicone, which always reminds me of Vivienne Westwood when she had her sex shop in the 70s. .. It immediately said subversion in a context like couture."

• The Rise of Independent Creators Outside Corporate Structures: Amidst a schedule dominated by megabrands, London-based independent designer Michael Stewart’s label Standing Ground demonstrated that couture's emotional resonance can still be achieved through pure artisanship. "Michael Stewart is David, and the fashion industry is Goliath,” Blanks says. “He just has this very pure idea which he realises in his tiny little studio in London ... Couture isn't just the huge spectacles and multi-million dollar extravaganzas ... you have to see obsession expressed in all these different ways in the face of the forces that are trying to extinguish wonder."

Additional Resources:

• Jonathan Anderson: The Ultimate Art World Fan Boy | BoF
• Matthieu Blazy Puts Enchantment to Work at Chanel | BoF
• Haute Couture’s Heroes in Training | BoF

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Mona Kattan has been collecting fragrances for most of her life. That obsession eventually became Kayali — a fragrance brand she built inside Huda Beauty, the global cosmetics company she co-founded with her sister Huda Kattan. 

In 2020, something shifted. Mona entered therapy and uncovered a pattern that ran through her entire entrepreneurial journey: she had never built anything entirely on her own. She began to ask herself what it would mean to do something, fully, by herself.

“I am a very collaborative person, but I don’t want to sacrifice my vision,” she says. “Sometimes, in a partnership … having to move both feet in the same direction doesn’t really work if you’re not able to decide on your own. That’s where I realised that if I want Kayali to survive and thrive, I need to create my own path.”

That path was made possible through a complex corporate carve-out that separated Kayali from the Huda Beauty group and brought in General Atlantic in as Kayali's new backer. 

Mona joined BoF founder and CEO Imran Amed on stage at The Business of Beauty Global Forum in Napa Valley, California, to pull back the curtain on that corporate split and dive deeper into the realities of building a brand within a multi-stakeholder ecosystem.

Key Insights: 

• The Operational Friction of Brand Incubation: While incubating Kayali within Huda Beauty provided crucial baseline resources, it created structural constraints. Kattan notes that operating within a shared family framework required sacrificing her distinct product and brand vision to ensure consensus across the broader group.

• Structuring a Mutual Corporate Carve-Out: The operational split was catalysed by the need to solve for private equity backer TSG’s eventual fund exit. Mona engineered a simultaneous solution: carving out Kayali into an independent entity with new investment, while allowing her sister Huda to take the flagship cosmetic business private again.

• Selecting Private Equity for Long-Term Value: As part of  the carve-out, Mona  secured backing from General Atlantic, intentionally prioritising non-monetary board dynamics over pure valuation maximisation. Key operational criteria included deal terms that preserved creative freedom, patient alignment on the long-term health of the brand, and seasoned founder-friendly board members.

• The Discipline of Multi-Year Operational Planning: To counteract the short-term pressures of the beauty landscape, Mona  emphasises the necessity of maintaining a rolling five-to-eight-year strategic timeline. This framework includes a definitive checkpoint scheduled for Q1 2028 to evaluate structural options between an initial public offering (IPO), a sale to a strategic conglomerate, or raising further capital.

Additional Resources:

• Controlling Your Destiny: How Mona Kattan Reclaimed Her Voice | BoF 
• Mona Kattan Is Enjoying Her Freedom | BoF 
• The Top Trends That Will Define Beauty in 2026 | BoF 

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The 2026 World Cup marked an unprecedented milestone for global football, expanding to 48 teams playing over 100 matches across the US, Canada and Mexico. In this special episode of The Debrief, Nike’s vice president of global brand management Helena Thornton joins BoFsenior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young and sports and fashion correspondent Mike Syke to discuss the strategy behind the brand's World Cup campaign, the expansive relationship between football, culture and commerce and what the tournament means at a pivotal moment for Nike.

The episode examines how Nike approached the sport's biggest stage, from the creative thinking behind its 'Rip the Script' campaign — which brought together elite athletes, pop culture figures and cinematic storytelling — to the challenge of building campaigns that resonate in an increasingly fragmented media landscape. Thornton also reflects on how the World Cup fits into Nike's broader brand strategy as the company works to regain brand heat.

Key Insights:

• Breaking beyond football fans requires becoming part of the broader cultural conversation. As brands compete for attention with creators, entertainment and other cultural forces, Nike designed its World Cup campaign to extend beyond the sport itself, bringing together elite footballers, athletes and cultural figures to appeal to both dedicated supporters and more casual fans. “Including the sort of that celebrity class alongside the elite footballers and the athletes, because I think that speaks to the more casual fan,” Thornton says. 

•  Long-term community building matters more than tournament marketing alone. Thornton says major sporting events should serve as a catalyst for brand storytelling and momentum rather than the entirety of the brand’s strategy.  You don't ever just want to be the shiny object that drops in for the weeks of the tournament and then you leave,” she  says. “We really want to make sure that people have unbelievable access to the game... that moment actually really ignites this huge love of the game.”  Grassroots investments, like Nike's ‘Toma’ platform, the street football movement,  help build deeper consumer relationships than short-lived tournament campaigns.

• Nike built its campaign around athlete instinct rather than a traditional sports marketing playbook.  Rather than relying on rigid creative formulas, the brand grounded 'Rip the Script' in conversations with professional footballers, embracing emotion, authenticity and intuition as the foundation for the campaign. “We spoke to hundreds of footballers who kept telling us the same thing,” Thornton explains. “They were …  just a bit sick of people telling [them] what to do... ‘we just wanna trust our gut.’” 

• Football creates moments of connection that few cultural platforms can match. The World Cup's global reach made it more than just a sporting event, creating a shared cultural moment at a time when people were looking for connection and optimism. “There's just a passion about the sport…there is just this larger unity right now that I'm seeing from people,” Thornton says. “I think the world just needed this thing to bring us all together and there is no other sport other than football really that truly, truly is the global game.”   

•  Innovation remains central to Nike's broader turnaround strategy. While campaigns like 'Rip the Script' are among the brand's most visible expressions, Thornton says major sporting moments bring together teams across the company to think beyond marketing. “We sit down across all of the different departments at Nike and we talk about these big sports moments, ‘what do we wanna do to totally change the industry again? What is the athlete problem that we're solving for? What innovation can we push to allow an athlete to do something they never even believed that was possible?’”

Additional Resources:

• Nike and Adidas Are Taking the World Cup to the Street
• The Strategy Behind Nike’s Colossal World Cup Bet 
• Nike’s World Cup Takeover Is Off to a Hot Start

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The boundaries between technology, wellness and luxury are blurring. Wearable technology is no longer just about tracking steps; it has become a sophisticated tool for lifestyle optimisation, personal health intelligence and a subtle statement of identity. Now, there are more devices than ever to help us in this pursuit, and at the cutting edge is Oura.

Under the leadership of CEO Tom Hale, who joined the company in 2022, Oura has grown from $220 million in annual revenue to $1 billion last year, achieving an $11 billion valuation. Last month, Oura filed for an IPO that could be one of the most significant public market tests for consumer health technology so far.

“We are a health intelligence platform that will redefine the future of healthcare,” says Hale. “Everyone's already got a supercomputer … on their body. There should be a machine intelligence that is personalised and customised to that individual, and a large physiological model that is making predictions about health outcomes in the short term and the long term based on your ground truth of biometrics.”

Hale joined BoF founder and CEO Imran Amed on stage in Napa Valley, California, during The Business of Beauty Global Forum 2026 to unpack how the company plans to build a “large physiological model” to redefine the future of the global healthcare and wellness landscapes.

Key Insights: 

• The Drivers of the Inflexion Point: Oura has sold 5.5 million rings as of last year, with roughly half of those sales occurring in the last 12 months. Tom Hale attributes this growth acceleration to three strategic moves: shifting focus toward underserved use cases in women’s health (which flipped the customer base to mostly female), entering physical retail to bypass the slow shipping-based sizing process, and becoming the first wearable eligible for pre-tax employee funds via HSA/FSA accounts.

• Hardware as an Onboarding Mechanism: Rather than viewing itself through the lens of jewelry or fashion, Oura defines its core commercial category as long-term behavior modification. Within this model, the physical ring functions primarily as the hardware mechanism that drives value and engagement for its subscription service.

• Subscription Revenue Benchmarks: Operating on a value-to-price framework tied to a £6-a-month membership cost, Oura achieves an 80 percent retention rate at year one and an increased 85 percent retention rate at years two and three. Factual benchmarks reveal this trajectory outperforms major content subscription platforms like Netflix and Spotify at the same milestones.

• Defending Market Share with IP and Clinical Credibility: To maintain its competitive advantage against new market entrants and lower-priced alternatives, Oura relies heavily on an intellectual property moat. Furthermore, the brand protects its premium position through scientific validation, noting that 11 percent of its current ring wearers are medical professionals.

Additional Resources:

• Building the World of Health Tech: Oura’s Tom Hale on its IPO and What’s Next 
• Can Oura Become a Forever Company? | BoF 

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For more than  a decade,  activewear shoppers largely looked to Lululemon  and Nike.  But as the post-pandemic boom cools and growth becomes harder to find, a new crop of brands is gaining traction.

Smaller labels like SetActive, 437 and Oner Active aren’t reinventing activewear. They’re winning customers through social media, creator-led marketing and a deep understanding of today’s fitness culture where consumers move fluidly through workouts like pilates, Hyrox and tennis on any given week.  

In this episode of The Debrief Podcast, retail editor Cathaleen Chen joins senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young  to discuss why these newer brands are resonating, whether their momentum is sustainable, and what their success reveals about the challenges facing industry leaders Nike and Lululemon.  

Key Insights:

• The era of Lululemon as a status symbol may be ending. "Lululemon in the past two decades effectively cornered the market on activewear as a status symbol," Chen says. "I do think the era of Lululemon as a status symbol is ending ... if you're not going to be a status symbol, what will you be?"

• Consumers are craving something new. The rise of brands like Set Active, 437 and Oner Active is being driven less by breakthrough product innovation than by a broader desire for novelty. "The answer that I got overwhelmingly from my reporting is that, honestly, we are just in this moment of desire for newness," Chen says. "People were like, ‘okay, I have Lululemon in my closet, what's next?’"

• Founder-led social media is helping challengers compete. Rather than relying on big marketing budgets, many emerging brands are building audiences through creator-style content — from behind-the-scenes glimpses into product development to founders who function as influencers in their own right. "What they have done incredibly well is build organic followings on social media and be able to capitalise on certain TikTok trends," Chen says. “They have the benefits of … the founder coming in every day, trying on the products herself... it makes a big difference in being visible to the customer”. 

• Activewear is entering its own version of the indie beauty era. As consumers build wardrobes around multiple activities rather than a single sport, the category is becoming more fragmented and open to new players. "What's happening in activewear is very similar to what happened in beauty a few years ago," Chen says. "Where the category was dominated by a handful of brands … but we reached this inflection point where people want something that feels new."

Additional Resources:

• The TikTok-Savvy Activewear Brands Stealing Market Share | BoF Professional 
• Why Every Fashion Brand Thinks It’s a Sportswear Label Now | BoF Professional 
• The Reign of Leggings Is Over. What’s Next? | BoF Professional 

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Fashion’s book obsession is no longer subtle. What started as the occasional literary reference has become a broader wave of book clubs, salon-style events, campaign imagery and products designed to signal that a brand — and its customer — has cultural depth. It’s all happening as reading rates are declining, but the image of the reader has never looked more fashionable.

This week on The Debrief, BoF reporters Haley Crawford and Shayeza Walid explain how books became fashion’s latest flex, and when the trend starts to look less like culture and more like marketing.

Key Insights:

• Books have become fashion’s new status symbol: Literature has always inspired fashion, but both reporters argue the relationship has become far more explicit. “We felt like books were being productised by fashion itself,” says Walid. In a world saturated by digital content, books now function as markers of cultural literacy and intellectual identity. As Crawford puts it: “You actually have to take the time to read a book from cover to cover. Fewer people are doing that today, so it is more of a flex to have read the book and actually understand the reference.”

• TikTok is fueling an analogue revival: Ironically, fashion’s literary turn is being accelerated by social media. Online subcommunities like BookTok have transformed reading into a visible identity and community marker for younger consumers. “Social media, the stores, the products you’re buying and this analogue signalling, are all coming together,” says Walid. “ I don’t think this is happening in a silo. I think it’s very interconnected to other forms of analogue connection that people are finding nowadays.”

• Not every literary collaboration resonates equally: Both reporters argue that the strongest examples are those rooted in genuine engagement with literature rather than surface-level branding. Crawford points to Prada’s collaborations with authors and literary scholars as examples of brands building deeper cultural worlds. Walid highlights Chanel’s funding of a library at a Shanghai art museum. “It was actually creating or funding something which allowed people to engage with books and literature,” she says.

• The trend risks losing its cultural power: Fashion using books as a cultural signal   is likely to lose some potency if every brand adopts the same strategy. “The ones that have been doing it for quite some time will continue to do so. But those that have maybe slapped a book name on a T-shirt or created a book tote might see less success,” says Crawford. “The second consumers start noticing the corporatisation of this trend, it is going to start to become stale,” adds Walid.

Additional Resources:

• How Books Became Fashion’s Favourite Flex | BoF
• When Taste Is All Over TikTok | BoF  

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Anoushka Shankar has spent three decades building one of the most distinctive bodies of work in contemporary music. She has taken the sitar — an instrument rooted in centuries of North Indian classical tradition — into completely new territory, blending the ancient Hindustani raga system with electronic, flamenco and Western orchestral influences.

At a time when we're bombarded — wars, looming AI risk, a constant churn of uncertainty — her music is a salve. It carries echoes of long road trips with my family, listening to her father, Ravi Shankar, play the sitar.

But this is not just nostalgia; Shankar’s music is rooted in her personal journey.  At BoF VOICES 2025, she explained how she has written from joy, from pain, from outrage — and in each case, the impulse to release something into the world is inseparable from the belief that it will matter to someone. Every act of creation is an act of hope.

“I believe that any creative act is a hopeful act, because we wouldn't send anything out into the void if we didn't have a hope and belief that it was gonna reach other people,” says Shankar. “By nature, it is about hope.”

Shankar spoke about how she found her way back to music after prolonged creative numbness following the pandemic, and what the ancient discipline of improvisation has taught her about adapting to a world in constant upheaval.

Key Insights: 

• Creativity is an act of hope: Shankar argues that to make anything is to believe it will reach someone. For her, the impulse to create is inseparable from the belief that it will matter. “I've written from a place of joy, from a place of pain, and from outrage about global events, but each of those times there is some shred of hope that means it's gonna make some kind of a difference to bother putting something out into the world,” she says.

• Small moments of presence can become a way through crisis: After the pandemic, Shankar entered a protracted period of creative silence, unable to write — caught, as she puts it, in “a period of very, very numb and debilitating pain.” The way back was not an act of will but a gradual process, beginning with a single moment in the garden with her children she kept returning to in the days that followed. "If I was truly present, not caught up in my head or in worries or thoughts, that I could really fully experience these moments of joy, even in the hardest of times, and they would give me the strength to move through."

• Hope is a choice made before certainty arrives: As Shankar moved into the second chapter of the trilogy, she began to feel that moments of solace were not enough. Against the backdrop of global violence and grief, including the devastation in Palestine, she says she had little faith that the world would change. The album How Dark It Is Before Dawn became her attempt to make music for that space: “I had to trust that things do eventually change, even if I’m in that moment where I can’t see it. I had to choose hope. I have to choose to hope in the moment when I don’t know it’s going to work, or that anything is going to happen. It’s an act of faith.”

• Tradition only lives when it is made current. In explaining Hindustani classical music, Shankar describes a form rooted in oral transmission, apprenticeship and improvisation, and links the discipline of improvisation to a broader way of navigating change. Having learned under her father from the age of seven, she sees the sitar tradition as both a weight of history and a space for freedom. “It is about … assimilating all this stuff that could be a weight – the history and how much there is to learn – but finding a way to have freedom within it,” she says. “It doesn’t really live unless it’s present as well. I have to make that tradition current and real to me in order for it to resonate with other people who are here with me today.”

Additional Resources:

• Anoushka Shankar: We Return to Light | BoF 
• BoF VOICES 2025: Live Your Best Life 

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The rise of GLP–1 drugs, such as Ozempic and Wegovy, is forcing fashion and beauty companies to rethink everything from sizing and fit to product development. With one in eight Americans having tried a GLP–1 medication, brands are grappling with how to serve consumers whose bodies may be changing more rapidly than traditional product cycles were designed to accommodate.

In this episode of The Debrief, senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young sits down with BoF senior news and features editor Diana Pearl and The Business of Beauty news and features editor Brennan Kilbane to discuss how fashion and beauty brands are responding to the GLP-1 boom — and why the industry's apparent willingness to adapt to these consumers is raising difficult questions about its long history with size inclusivity.

Key Insights:

• GLP-1s have turned into a fashion infrastructure problem: GLP-1 drugs are creating a new kind of consumer need — not just smaller sizes, but clothes and products that can accommodate rapid physical change. For fashion, this exposes the limits of systems built around relatively stable bodies, from fit models to inventory planning to alterations. As Pearl puts it, the industry may be talking more openly about fit, but real change will be slow because the underlying systems are deeply entrenched. “I don’t think it’s going to be a change that happens overnight or even in the next few months,” she says. “This is something that’s going to take years to fully address.”

• The best brand responses meet customers where they are: Brands such as Soma offer one model for how to respond: create products for bodies in transition without framing that change as something to fix. Pearl says that approach works because it centres practical need rather than aspiration or shame. “It’s really just making it about: ‘okay, your life has changed, your body has changed, let’s meet you where you are,’” she says. Kilbane adds, “It's possible that we’re going to continue to see more people fluctuating in their weight and it’s quite forward-thinking for a fashion brand to accommodate that changing body.”

• Beauty is already speaking more directly to the GLP-1 consumer: Beauty and wellness brands are moving faster than fashion in addressing the physical effects of rapid weight loss, from skin laxity to changes in facial volume. According to Kilbane, the category has to have a clearer product rationale for entering the conversation and respond to specific consumer concerns with products and treatments that feel practical. As Kilbane says, “I’ve talked to a lot of plastic surgeons and dermatologists and even some skincare executives. There are things that happen to your skin when you take these medicines,” he says. “I think especially beauty and wellness brands do need to talk to this customer differently, because they are going through a different transformation.”

• Fashion’s unresolved relationship with thinness: The GLP-1 conversation has provoked scepticism as plus-size consumers have long argued that fashion sizing is broken, yet the industry appears more willing to change when bodies are getting smaller. For Kilbane, this criticism is fair: “It’s hard to not see any of this as the fashion industry’s excuse to champion thinness once again,” he says. Pearl adds that the debate cannot be separated from fashion’s deeper history of exclusion. “On the surface, it’s about sizing, but you can’t talk about what’s going on and not talk about fashion’s history of championing thinness,” she says.

Additional Resources:

• How Ozempic Is Forcing Fashion to Rethink Fit
• Novo Nordisk Looks Beyond Weight Loss to Longevity and Aesthetics
• At Wellness Resorts, Ozempic Becomes Part of the Menu

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Born in the leafy enclave of Bedford, New York, designer Conner Ives, a self-professed “country mouse,” grew up in a household that taught him two things early: that quality is worth protecting, and ambition is worth following.

At 16, a connection through his mother's dental practice landed him an internship with Wes Gordon, and soon after he moved to London and set about becoming a designer.

In his first year on the BA at Central Saint Martins, a garment from a school project — a duchess satin duster coat adorned with swans — was requested and worn by model Adwoa Aboah to the 2017 Met Gala. The moment announced him to the industry before he graduated, but back at school, the reception was rather cool:

“I remember my tutorial after [the Met Gala], being sat down and told, ‘It’s nice that you can make dresses for people’ – reducing doing the Met Gala as a 20-year-old first-year BA student to that – ‘but school has to come first,’” Ives recounts.

Now, almost six years into building his label, the designer is navigating what it takes to turn creative instinct into a functioning business. His label began with one-of-a-kind reworked vintage pieces and deadstock materials — a proposition that gave the clothes their character, but was not always easy to translate into the wholesale system.

“We would do 1,500 T-shirt dresses and no two were the same. That was always the selling point of it, but that is a very difficult business pitch to get to a Net-a-Porter, let alone a Net-a-Porter buyer, or a Net-a-porter customer,” he says. 

This week on The BoF Podcast, Conner Ives joins BoF CEO and founder Imran Amed to discuss what it means to build an independent fashion business without losing the instinct that made the work resonate in the first place.

Key Insights: 

• Ives’ brand is built on an American idea of high-low dressing: Ives describes his label as shaped by family memory, American fashion imagery and a belief in clothes that can carry time. His mother’s care for old Frye boots and his father’s instinct for wearing things until they wore out helped form a design language that values both glamour and durability. “Things of quality have no fear of time,” he says.

• Central Saint Martins gave him confidence by forcing him to defend his taste. Ives arrived at CSM with a clear instinct for American glamour, spaghetti-strap dresses and debutante references – ideas that did not always fit the school’s preferred mythology. His “White Project” from his first year at the BA later became the basis for Adwoa Aboah’s 2017 Met Gala look, but the response from school was muted. “I think that struggle made me a better designer,” he says. “It made me also have to defend what I did so much more so.”

• “Protect The Dolls” worked because it came from instinct, not marketing. “My whole aversion to fashion being involved in politics sometimes is that it oftentimes can feel quite self-serving,” he says. Made the night before his Autumn/Winter 2025 show, the T-shirt only clicked when Ives moved from affection to urgency. “My love for trans people was not what was being threatened here right now. Their safety was being threatened,” he says. The final phrase – “Protect The Dolls” – was printed on at-home transfer paper, ironed onto a T-shirt, and went on to sell over 600 units in a day. 

• Ives’ advice is to trust the instinct before you overthink it. Looking back, Ives says the clearest lesson was learning not to override his own internal signal. “If you are a creative person, you are probably also a reactionary person,” he says. “That reaction is coming from somewhere really pure and really whole – so listen to it.”

Additional Resources:

•  Conner Ives | BoF 500 | The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry
• ‘Protect the Dolls’ T-Shirt Becomes a Fashion Symbol for Trans Rights | BoF 
• Unearthing the New at London Fashion Week | BoF 

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Carlos Nazario  has helped redefine how fashion media expresses subculture in a luxury context, making history along the way as the first Black editor to style a cover for American Vogue.

But he grew up in Queens, New York, in a big Puerto Rican family with no connections to fashion. His grandmother Efna was his earliest influence — a woman who understood, intuitively, the power of how you present yourself to the world and shared a key lesson with him.

That lesson has guided his journey as he left for Paris as a teenager, came home, worked his way through internships at W magazine and Love in London, and spent seven years as first assistant to stylist Joe McKenna. When he went out on his own, he built a creative world that looked like the one he'd grown up in — and started making images that put it at the centre of fashion.

This week on the BoF Podcast, Imran Amed talks to Nazario about the nightlife scene that shaped his creative identity, what it cost to break into an industry that wasn't built for someone like him, and why the pictures that endure are the ones made with heart.

Key Insights:

• The Insulated Class Barriers of Fashion Publishing: Historically, legacy publications relied heavily on unpaid labor that functioned as a class-based filter. "[It] inherently limits the pool of people who can actually apply for those jobs and sustain them,” Nazario said. 

• The Rigorous Technical Reality of Image-Making: Beyond perceived glamour, corporate styling is an intensive operation demanding physical labour, complex logistics and immense operational precision. People really underestimate the manual labour that's involved,” Nazario says. “You literally are schlepping a rail of clothes up a fucking mountain, or down a beach, or into a dynamic situation where it's 100 degrees or below zero."

• The Editorial Investment vs. Commercial Reality: Breaking through as an independent creative frequently required substantial personal financial risk and sacrifice. Nazario recalls, "I was making no money. I was doing all these editorials for i-D and for Vogue and flying myself to London and flying myself to Paris... and I was going into severe debt to build a portfolio and to build a name." 

• The Evolution of Modern Media Relevance: The fashion consumers today demand accountability and cultural depth from the publications they follow, rejecting the superficial curation of the past. "We have information at our fingertips, we can see every collection online ... so a magazine can't just be about shopping anymore,” Nazario says. “It has to be about a point of view, it has to be about a narrative, it has to be about a conversation that you're having with the culture." 

Additional Resources:

• Carlos Nazario | BoF 500 | The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry 
• The BoF Podcast | Ib Kamara: ‘Europe Is Not the Centre of Everything. Where You Come From Matters.’
• The Loudest Met Gala Yet | BoF

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This week, Chanel reported its annual results for 2025. Revenue rose 2 percent to $19.3 billion, defying a luxury downturn. 

But the number that caught the industry's attention wasn't the top line — it was the acceleration. In the second half, Chanel's sales grew by high single digits across every category and region, before designs by new artistic director Matthieu Blazy had arrived in stores. The excitement alone changed the trajectory.

The momentum has two sources. One is Blazy, whose runway debut last October sparked "Blazymania" — hour-long queues when his first collection landed this spring, instant sell-outs, and a level of excitement Chanel hasn't seen in years. The other is chief executive officer Leena Nair, who has invested heavily in Chanel's retail network, manufacturing and people, building the foundations that helped a creative spark catch fire.

All of which sent me back to BoF VOICES in November 2023, when Nair and Blazy appeared on our stage at Soho Farmhouse on successive days, in separate conversations. They weren't there together. Blazy was still leading Bottega Veneta, while Nair was two years into her tenure at Chanel. Listening back now, what strikes me is how clearly each articulated the values that would define their partnership.

Nair, an outsider from Unilever, spoke with me about what surprised her most about fashion: the human hand behind everything. The following day, Blazy, in conversation with Tim Blanks, described craft not as tradition, but as something more radical in his work at Bottega Veneta and Margiela.

Two leaders arrived at the same conviction: in an industry reshaped by technology and scale, the most valuable thing to protect is the human hand.

Key Insights:

• Nair brought an outsider's clarity to what makes luxury different from mass-market business. Coming from Unilever, where everything is industrialised and scaled for "physical availability and mental availability everywhere," she describes Chanel's opposite logic: preciousness, scarcity, hand work and objects designed to last for generations. That shift from volume to value has shaped her leadership approach.
• For Nair, responsible leadership means rejecting the "superhero leader" model. She argues that today's complexity makes collective problem-solving essential. "I really feel the days of the superhero leader who has all the answers is way behind us," she says, describing a leadership style built on listening, vulnerability and prioritising people over top-down control.
• Blazy's creative philosophy centres on addition, not subtraction. Rather than editing collections down to repeated ideas, he describes his instinct to keep adding — 80 looks with 80 different stories, no colour card, characters arriving from different horizons. "I'm not very good at editing in general," he said. "I like to explore more and more and more." It is an approach that prizes abundance over repetition.
• Craft, for Blazy, is not nostalgia — it is a "timeless technology." He draws a distinction between surface embellishment and technique embedded in the material itself. "I'm not adding a paillette on a silk dress. I'm trying to have the paillettes immediately already made in the fabric," he explains. At Bottega Veneta, this produced the leather trompe l'oeil Oxford shirt and jeans that became some of recent fashion's most talked-about garments.
• Both leaders share a conviction that the human hand is fashion's most irreplaceable asset. Nair speaks about preserving human creation and relationships in an era of AI. Blazy describes each artisan's hand leaving a different mark — variation that is celebrated, not discarded. Together, their perspectives offer a counterpoint to an industry drawn to technology and automation.

Additional Resources:

• Leena Nair | BoF 500 | The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry
• Chanel Returns to Growth as Blazymania Kicks In | BoF
• Matthieu Blazy | BoF 500 | The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry

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In May, sleeping bags lined pavements and police barriers went up outside Swatch stores from Times Square to Dubai. The object of this global hysteria was not a piece of high-end mechanical art, but the "Royal Pop" – a $400 pocket watch collaboration between mass-market giant Swatch and watchmaker Audemars Piguet. Based on AP’s iconic Royal Oak, which typically starts at $20,000, the launch divided the insular watch enthusiast community while captivating Gen Z consumers and equity analysts alike. 

In this episode of The Debrief, senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young is joined by retail editor Cathaleen Chen and luxury editor Mimosa Spencer to evaluate the highs and lows of the  fallout of the viral launch, the operational chaos across retail and whether a plastic pendant can truly serve as a long-term customer recruitment tool.

Key Insights:

• The Strategy of Alternative Formats: By designing the collection as pocket and pendant watches rather than traditional wristwatches, Audemars Piguet aimed to protect the brand equity of its foundational core product while still opening the brand to a younger, accessory-loving Gen Z demographic.
• An Unequal Value Exchange: While Audemars Piguet is treating the collaboration as an insulated, almost philanthropic “special project,” Swatch Group stands to gain significantly more commercial momentum. Despite some short-term negative sentiment driven by watch purists, the partnership represents a major cultural breakthrough for Swatch as it attempts to reverse recent financial stagnation.
• The Accessibility Offense: The intense backlash from traditional watch collectors exposes a deeper tension within the luxury value proposition. For an industry built on status signaling and rigid gatekeeping, the mass participation of everyday consumers is often viewed by insiders not as democratization, but as a dilution of exclusivity in luxury watchmaking.
• The PR Stunt Demerit: While market traffic and mainstream cultural buzz reached unprecedented stratospheres, the operational execution – which resulted in store closures and aggressive crowds – inflicted real in-person emotional damage. For legacy luxury institutions, headlines detailing retail chaos and police barricades run directly counter to the controlled, pristine environment that high-net-worth clients expect.
• Entering the Cultural Conversation: The collaboration underscores a broader challenge facing the luxury sector: building cultural relevance and household-name recognition among younger consumers who may currently be priced out of $25,000 mechanical timepieces, while planting the seed for future customer loyalty. 

Additional Resources:

• How Swatch and Audemars Piguet Defied Collaboration Fatigue | BoF Professional 
• Pete Nordstrom on the Enduring Power of Retail’s ‘Best Mousetrap’ | The BoF Podcast 
• Can Department Stores Save Themselves? | The Debrief

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For the global luxury industry, the last two years have been defined by a prolonged period of meagre growth, macro-uncertainty, and a slow recovery in the critical Chinese market. But as we move further into 2026, the strategic imperative has shifted. It is no longer enough to simply wait for the cycle to turn; leadership now requires navigating a rapidly-changing environment where geopolitical volatility and technological disruption have become the baseline.

In this episode of The BoF Podcast, Jonathan Wingfield, editor-in-chief of System Magazine joins Imran Amed and Luca Solca, managing director and global head of luxury goods at Bernstein, for their regular seasonal conversation on the state of the industry.  They analyse this new industry paradigm through two distinct lenses: the clinical, data-driven reality of the equity markets, and the visceral, creative pulse of culture. They examining the collapse of the old narrative within luxury, why brand heat has become a lazy currency, and why the real threat of AI isn't the technology itself, but the professionals who master it first.

Key Insights:

• The luxury recovery of early 2026 has been derailed by yet another geopolitical shock. The first months of the year saw cautious improvement, but the Third Gulf War stopped it cold — LVMH reported Q1 revenues down six percent, with the conflict costing a full percentage point of organic growth. As Amed notes, these disruptions used to come once a decade. Now they arrive in rapid succession, making "grand narratives" about industry trajectory almost meaningless.
• AI is quietly transforming fashion's cost base. Brands are using AI to generate ecommerce imagery at a fraction of historical costs, but almost no company will confirm its savings on the record. Gucci faced backlash for AI imagery ahead of Demna's debut; Prada took a different approach, using AI as a creative augmentation tool. Solca broadens the frame, arguing that AI's impact on white-collar work will mirror globalisation's impact on blue-collar labour.
• The attention economy has become dangerous for luxury brands. Both Amed and Solca warn that the industry's addiction to metrics like earned media value conflates noise with commercial traction. The Louis Vuitton ship-shaped pop-up in Shanghai worked because it drove real footfall and purchases; most earned media value is just visibility that never converts.
• The designer resets at Chanel and Dior are generating early positive signals, but Gucci's transformation remains a work in progress. Matthieu Blazy's first Chanel products triggered a genuine retail frenzy, amplified by a shrewd rollout timed to fashion week. Bernstein's traffic data showed Chanel and Dior far ahead of competitors in Chinese mall visits. But Amed left Demna's Gucci debut "feeling more confused," questioning whether the return to overt sexiness is a fashion agenda the industry will follow.
• The independent designer economy is in structural crisis, but alternative models are emerging. The collapse of multibrand retail and the capital required to compete with mega-brands have made launching an independent label harder than ever. Amed's advice is blunt: spend five to seven years inside established houses first.
• Prada's acquisition of Versace represents one of luxury's biggest untapped opportunities — and biggest risks. The market punished Prada's share price, citing a poor M&A track record. But Amed sees an opening: with no dominant "sexy" brand in luxury right now, Versace is "one of the most underleveraged names in the entire industry" — if Pieter Mulier can reinterpret that identity compellingly.

Additional Resources:

• Dispatches From Shanghai: Inside China’s New Luxury Landscape | BoF
• The State of Fashion 2026: When the Rules Change | BoF
• Fewer, Bigger, Better: How Luxury Brands Are Optimising Their Stores | BoF

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The beauty industry is currently contending with marketing saturation, compounded by an overcrowded content ecosystem in which traditional metrics like follower counts and comments are often distorted by bots. To combat this, brands are turning to "rage bait"— content designed to trigger shock, anger or confusion and meant to drive shares and saves, which are now seen as more authentic indicators of engagement. From Lancôme’s "misdirected" PR mailers to ColourPop’s fake apology squares, the strategy bets that a negative or confused reaction is more valuable than no reaction at all in a world where attention is the ultimate currency.

In this episode, BoF’s Sheena Butler-Young talks to Business of Beauty Executive Editor Priya Rao, and Senior Editorial Associate Rachael Griffiths about whether these high-risk stunts build genuine brand equity or simply erode long-term consumer trust.

Key Insights:

• The Engagement-Sales Gap: While rage bait excels at awareness and can grab people’s attention, there is no direct, proven line to immediate sales. Success is currently measured through the "halo effect" on other posts and metrics like shares and saves rather than conversion.

• The "Boy Who Cried Wolf" Risk: Brands face a significant limitation in that this strategy is often a one-time lever. If a brand issues a fake apology for marketing, it risks losing all credibility when a genuine corporate blunder occurs.

• Suitability by Segment: Chaotic creator" style may work best for indie or playful brands like ColourPop and Dieux. Heritage or luxury brands — particularly those focused on medical-grade efficacy or high price points — risk alienating customers who expect a serious relationship with the brand.

• The Confusion Trap: Stunts that cross the line from cheeky to genuine misinformation, such as Schick’s ambiguous partnership with Nick Jonas, can leave consumers feeling annoyed and disappointed rather than entertained.

Additional Resources:

• Why Are So Many Beauty Brands Faking Scandals? | BoF
• Playbook | Beauty Retail in the Age of Connected Commerce | BoF
• How to ‘Un-Cancel’ a Beauty Product | BoF

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Earlier today, BoF published an exclusive in-depth interview with Saks Global CEO Geoffroy Van Raemdonck, examining the company’s strategy as it expects to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy next month. 

For over a century, Saks Fifth Avenue represented a manifestation of American aspiration—a luxury icon whose flagship on New York’s Fifth Avenue served as a vital crossroads for the global fashion industry. But even the most storied institutions are not infallible. On January 13th, the newly formed Saks Global — parent company of Saks, Neiman Marcus, and Bergdorf Goodman — filed for court-supervised restructuring.

Saks Global’s crisis was largely self-inflicted. The acquisition of Neiman Marcus, coupled with slow payments to vendors resulted in a deepening inventory crisis. As debt obligations mounted and cash reserves dwindled, Saks fell further behind on vendor payments, prompting suppliers to freeze shipments. Without new merchandise to sell, revenue plummeted, trapping the retailer in a terminal liquidity crunch. It was caught up in a downward spiral that left its industry reputation in tatters.

Now, just four months into Chapter 11, the company’s new CEO Geoffroy van Raemdonck is leading a turnaround effort to salvage its reputation and restore trust with its customers and the wider industry.

In this special episode of The BoF Podcast, BoF’s retail editor Cathaleen Chen and Imran Amed sit down with van Raemdonck to unpack his plans for a big turnaround.

Key Insights: 

• The Four-Month Sprint: Since filing for a court-supervised restructuring on January 13th, the company has prioritised velocity to get products back on its shelves. Van Raemdonck notes that speed was essential to stabilising the business: "We moved fast because we focused on liquidity and trust ... we secured $1.7 billion in new liquidity and implemented a critical vendor programme to ensure our brand partners were paid."
• Ending the Real Estate "Straddle": The restructuring allowed the business to separate its high-performing retail operations from non-core ventures, such as in real estate. “We were paying $55 million of rent every year for Lord and Taylor stores that were closed and had no hope to reopen because that business was liquidated. So you carry costs that really have no impact and value to the customer,” van Raemdonck says, effectively ending the “straddle” of a retail business combined with a real estate business.
• The Case for Three Banners: Van Reaemdonck says Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, and Bergdorf Goodman will remain distinct, as data suggests they serve unique customer profiles. “In markets like Beverly Hills, the overlap between our banners is only 11 to 15 percent,” he notes. 
• US Market Resilience: While the global luxury market faces headwinds, internal metrics show that the top-tier American consumer remains a reliable growth engine. van Raemdonck says: "The US market is strong and resilient. I think the the high-end luxury customers are very much influenced by their wealth and the stock market much more than by the GDP and the employment level. 76 percent of our customers tell us they feel optimistic about their personal finances."

Additional Resources: 

• Unpacking Saks Global’s Post-Bankruptcy Plan | BoF
• Bondholders Approve Saks Global’s Five-Year Business Plan | BoF
• Saks Global Files for Bankruptcy After Monthslong Hunt for Cash | BoF

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In fashion, the word "legend" is often used as a convenient shorthand for longevity. But Joan Burstein — affectionately known in the fashion world as Mrs. B — was a legend in the truest sense of the word. When she opened Browns on South Molton Street in 1970, she didn't just open a boutique; she established a portal for the radical avant-garde fashion designers that would fundamentally shift our  industry’s tectonic plates.

Mrs. B also possessed a legendary eye for talent. She was the one who plucked John Galliano’s graduate collection out of obscurity, provided the first British home for Rei Kawakubo’s Comme Des Garçons and Giorgio Armani, while  also giving American designers  like Ralph Lauren and Donna Karan an entry portal to the European market. 

Following the recent passing of Joan Burstein at the age of 100, we find ourselves at a moment of profound reflection for the industry and Mrs. B’s immense legacy. 

Joining Imran Amed this week to reflect on this special history is Mandi Lennard, who worked closely with Mrs. B as a buyer during the 1980s and 90s, London fashion’s most fertile era. As the founder of her own creative consultancy — Mandi’s Basement — Mandi  has spent decades at the heart of London’s fashion scene, applying the sharp, instinctive eye she honed under Mrs. B’s mentorship. 

But first, we asked some of the people who witnessed Joan Burstein’s magic firsthand to share their favourite memories with us.

Key Insights: 

• The Instinctive Edit: Mrs. B prioritised staying power over viral trends, operating on a philosophy of patient observation. Her strategy involved "watching" a designer for several seasons to ensure their signature was robust enough to survive the commercial pressures of the global value chain. As Lennard notes, Mrs. B was looking for longevity: "She’d watch someone for three seasons, to see if they’ve got staying power ... She wasn’t looking for what was ‘in.’ She was looking for what was ‘next.’"

• The Boutique as a Cultural Bridge: Browns acted as a critical laboratory where American commercialism met European avant garde. By placing Ralph Lauren alongside Comme des Garçons, Mrs. B forced a cross-cultural dialogue that redefined modern luxury retail. "She brought the Americans to Europe. Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan ... But then you’d have the radical disruptors like Rei Kawakubo and Comme des Garçons.” reflects Lennard. “It was a portal. She brought the world to London."

• Counter-Cyclical Loyalty: Mrs. B was known to place  orders for designers having a "difficult" season. She viewed the retailer-designer relationship as a long-term investment in talent rather than a quarterly metric. "If a designer had a bad season, she wouldn’t drop them. She’d actually buy more.” Lennard recalls. “She’d say, ‘They need us now more than ever.’ It was about the relationship, not just the sell-through." 

• Radical Hospitality: The Browns experience was defined by a service model where staff acted as curators, guiding customers through a challenging and highly aspirational environment. This high-touch approach created a unique retail atmosphere that felt like a sanctuary for the fashion-obsessed. "It was very old school in the sense of the service,” explains Lennard. “You were treated with as much respect if you were buying a pair of Katherine Hamnett jeans as if you were buying the whole shop. It was about making people feel part of that world.”

Additional Resources: 

• Joan Burstein, Retail Pioneer, Dies at 100 | BoF 
• Joan Burstein, Queen B | BoF

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Since the earliest days of tools like ChatGPT and Claude, industry conversations have been marked by a tension between excitement around speed and efficiency alongside deep-seated fears of job loss, creative dilution and concerns about its environmental footprint. What once played out in theory is now unfolding in practice – as a broader rejection of what AI represents — particularly as more consumers view AI-generated content as a cost-cutting measure that erodes fashion’s human touch,

In this episode, The Debrief host Sheena Butler-Young discusses with BoF correspondents Marc Bain and Haley Crawford why the backlash is intensifying and how consumer sentiment against brands using AI-generated imagery is forcing a reckoning. They explore whether fashion can actually embrace these tools without losing the care and time that confers luxury status.

Key Insights:

• Consumers are moving past passive skepticism around AI and increasingly displaying a more visceral negative reaction to AI visuals.
• In an industry built on originality and attribution, AI is often perceived as shortcutting the creative process — or worse, borrowing from artists without credit. For many, it raises uncomfortable questions about what constitutes real creative ownership.
• At the same time, there is growing concern that AI could erode both the craft and the pipeline behind fashion creativity, threatening entry-level roles and the time, care and human touch that underpin luxury’s value.

Additional Resources:

• Why People Hate AI
• The Fashion Marketer’s Guide to AI
• Why Revolve Can’t Stop Talking About AI

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For four decades, Dries Van Noten defined a singular path in global fashion with a universe rooted in intellectual rigour, exquisite craftsmanship and independence. When he stepped back  from his eponymous brand last year, it wasn't a retreat into a quiet retirement. Instead, Van Noten has embarked on a profound transition—moving from the relentless, dictated rhythm of fashion to a new life as a custodian of culture in Venice.

Van Noten has established a new foundation at the Palazzo Pisani Moretta, a space dedicated to the beauty of craftsmanship and the belief that in a world marked by global uncertainty, the act of making something beautiful is the ultimate form of protest. 

“I think everybody knows that it’s ugly times,” says Van Noten. “When we say ‘protest,’ you protest against something—so I think it’s quite clear when we say ‘the only true protest is beauty’ that people know what we mean.”

In this special episode of The BoF Podcast, our editor-at-large Tim Blanks speaks to Dries Van Noten about this remarkable transition to becoming a custodian of beauty.

Key Insights:

• The Post-Runway Pivot: Reclaiming the Creative Rhythm: Van Noten discusses the liberation of moving away from the "dictated rhythm" of the global fashion calendar. “We didn't retire to have an easy life and just relax," Van Noten states. “Fashion dictates the rhythm. Here, nobody dictates us with what I'm doing now. It’s a different life, a different rhythm, but still busy.” For Van Noten, this transition is not a withdrawal, but a strategic refocusing on projects that prioritise human intuition over commercial pressure.
• 
  
• The Palazzo as a Living Lab: Custodianship of History: His Venice headquarters, the 15th-century Palazzo Pisani Moretta, serves as a living laboratory where the focus shifts from product to process. Van Noten views his role not as an owner, but as a temporary guardian of the space's cultural and physical history. “I really feel that we are custodians now of something which is so special... It’s a palazzo built to impress, but there is also a very strong human factor in it.” he notes.
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• Beauty as Engagement: The Radical Act of Aesthetics: In a world marked by macro-uncertainty and conflict, Van Noten posits that creating beauty is a provocative, active form of protest rather than a passive escape. He argues that aesthetics can be a healing, grounding force in an increasingly "ugly" global landscape. “In such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty,” says Van Noten. “For me, it's impossible just to sit there and to complain… I always look to the future, and I think [for] the future you have to protest, you have to have hope. Protest for me also gives hope.”
• 
  
•  Rejecting fashion hierarchies: A core pillar of the new foundation is the rejection of traditional fashion hierarchies. Dries places the work of avant-garde masters like Rei Kawakubo on the same plane as local artisans and emerging designers from conflict zones, centering the "soul" of the object over its brand equity. ‘I meet such different people... Last week I was still standing here with a person in Venice who makes books, a bookbinder... I think he's 87. I had tears in my eyes. He was so happy and so proud to show me the book covers that he made.’ Van Noten expresses 

Additional Resources: 

• The BoF 500: Dries Van Noten | BoF
• Dries Van Noten and Julian Klausner: How to Make a Designer Transition Work |BoF

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For years, the fashion industry operated under the assumption that digital scale was the right path. However, the "growth-at-all-costs" model is currently fracturing as luxury giants grapple with soaring customer acquisition costs and a logistical crisis fueled by high return rates. In response, a quiet counter-culture is emerging, with stores like Ven. Space and Dot Reeder thriving by intentionally limiting their digital footprints. 

In this episode, executive editor Brian Baskin and senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young discuss with BoF correspondent Austin Kim how these analogue retailers are using hyper-local intimacy and intelligent curation to build a more resilient business model that values brand equity over infinite reach.

Key Insights:

• The Rejection of Digital Friction: Store owners like Chris Green of Ven. Space are intentionally limiting their digital footprints to avoid the "grind" of high customer acquisition costs. Austin Kim notes that for these owners, "these small businesses are people doing what they love and what they don't love is e-commerce and they have no interest in it".

• The "Sit and Fit" Financial Advantage: Analyst Simeon Siegel posits that the in-store customer is the superior economic unit because they absorb the costs of fulfillment. As Kim explains, "In the store, the customer takes the pair of jeans off the rack, walks it over to the cash register, and then takes it home to themselves," whereas online, a brand must pay for picking, packaging, and the high probability of returns.

• Product Curation as a Moat: Success for these boutiques relies on a "mythic" assortment of brands that creates a level of trust an algorithm cannot replicate. Kim highlights that the draw is the owner's perspective: "Chris Green is almost like a Mr. Rogers if he wore Dries van Noten ... that perspective is exactly what I think customers connect with".

• Analogue Marketing and the "Third Space": To cut through digital exhaustion, retailers like Outline are pivoting to high-quality print catalogs. Co-founder Margaret Austin describes e-commerce as "unsexy," preferring a strategy where receiving something at your door acts as "an amazing strategy" to cut through the noise of social media.

• The Scalability Paradox: The "secret sauce" of these stores is often the owner-operator’s deep local roots, which is difficult for corporate entities to mimic. Kim warns that "you lose the soul of a business really quickly as you scale, especially on e-commerce," because you begin buying for an international audience rather than maintaining a specific, connected perspective. 

Additional Resources:

• Meet the Retailers Succeeding by Ignoring the Internet | BoF
• The State of Fashion 2026: When the Rules Change | BoF
• The BoF Podcast | Pete Nordstrom on the Enduring Power of Retail’s ‘Best Mousetrap’

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For the global luxury industry, Salone del Mobile in Milan has become a moment where brands look beyond the runway to expand into the broader "lifestyle" economy. At the centre of this intersection is Dimore Studio, co-founded by Britt Moran and Emiliano Salci — a studio that has defined the aesthetic language for luxury hospitality, retail and private residential projects worldwide.

Moran is originally from a small town in North Carolina. He moved to Italy over 30 years ago, initially intending to take a gap year before applying to medical school. He never went back. Together with Salci — his former romantic partner and now business partner of over 25 years — he has built Dimore into a multi-faceted brand spanning interior design, two furniture collections, a textile line, and a newly opened gallery in a former bank in central Milan.

As luxury conglomerates increasingly pursue the "home" and hospitality categories to drive long-term growth, Moran offers an insider's perspective on why credibility in this space can't be bought — it has to be built.

“I think you just have to completely trust your instinct, nurture the passion, do it only for the passion not thinking that you're going to become incredibly wealthy doing it,” says Moran.“Emiliano always tells me, we're not doing this for the money. We're only doing it because it's something that we love.”This week on The BoF Podcast, Britt Moran joins Imran Amed in Milan to discuss the business of building an "atmosphere," his unlikely path from the American South to the centre of Italian design, and why fashion's rush into the home category requires more than just marketing.

Key Insights: 

• Atmosphere is the product, not furniture. Moran frames Dimore's core offering not as chairs or tables but as the complete sensory experience of a space — scent, music, lighting, feeling. This is what clients are paying for and what sets Dimore apart from conventional design studios. As he puts it, the studio began with the idea of "setting up atmospheres," and the furniture collections emerged later, almost as by-products of the environments they were creating for clients.

• Italy's manufacturing ecosystem remains a competitive advantage. Moran highlights the strategic importance of proximity to Brianza, the furniture manufacturing district outside Milan where major producers like Cassina and Poltrona Frau work alongside independent artisans. Having done projects in the US, France and the Middle East, Moran is categorical that the quality-to-price ratio in Italy has no equivalent elsewhere — a claim with real implications for any brand considering where to source its home and lifestyle products.

• Most fashion brands are getting the design crossover wrong. While fashion houses are flooding Salone del Mobile with installations and activations, Moran draws a sharp line between those using Design Week as a marketing platform and those — like Loro Piana — that are leveraging genuine material expertise to create credible home products. The distinction matters: consumers and the design community can tell the difference between a brand that understands three-dimensional design and one that's dressing up a booth.

• The Dimore partnership works because of creative tension. Moran describes himself as "much more classic, much more conventional, maybe much more traditional" while Salci is "very forward thinking" with an "urban edge." This creative polarity — not shared taste — is what gives Dimore its distinctive aesthetic. The fact that they began as romantic partners and successfully transitioned into a purely business relationship adds an unusual dimension to a studio that has now endured for over two decades.

Additional Resources:

• Britt Moran | BoF 500 Profile
• Why Salone Del Mobile is Irresistible for Luxury Brands | BoF

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Luxury entered 2026 with hopes that new creative directors and signs of stabilisation would finally help the sector turn a corner. Instead, the latest round of earnings has raised bigger questions about what growth now looks like for the industry. While brands including Dior, Gucci and Chanel are generating renewed interest, that excitement has not yet translated into a meaningful sales rebound. 

From the slowing Chinese market to geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, luxury conglomerates are facing a complex web of challenges that creative hype alone cannot solve.

On the episode, BoF luxury editors Mimosa Spencer and Robert Williams explain why China remains such a critical missing piece, why Louis Vuitton is under closer scrutiny than usual, and why jewellery continues to outperform the rest of luxury.

Key Insights:

• One of the clearest messages from this earnings season is that new designers can lift mood and momentum internally, but that alone is not enough to restart the industry. Williams says the latest results confirmed that the impact of all these creative resets is “pretty limited, especially in isolation”. As he puts it, “the result of that is more like treading water or stabilising versus actually reigniting growth.” Spencer adds that the disappointment was sharper because there had been so much excitement around these debuts that “a lot of investors were expecting some earlier results.”

• Both Spencer and Williams point to China as the market hanging over the entire sector. Even where sentiment improved at the end of last year, investors were still looking for signs that Chinese demand might return in a meaningful way. Spencer says the bigger issue now is not just timing but structure: “The question is whether the kind of growth we saw in the past will actually come back.” She adds: “It seems like it takes a lot more work for a luxury brand to actually get good results in China.”

• LVMH still wants the market to see Dior as the manageable turnaround story, but Williams suggests the real anxiety now sits around Louis Vuitton. The brand has held up better than many peers, but investors are increasingly asking where its next phase of growth will come from. Williams points out that the bigger concern is not short-term performance, but what comes next. “No one can really see where the growth is going to come from,” he says. “Is this still a growth industry? What will the industry look like and how will it operate if it's not growing anymore?” If the industry’s strongest player cannot clearly define its next phase of growth, it raises deeper questions about the trajectory of luxury as a whole.

• Despite the broader slowdown across luxury, Spencer argues that jewellery’s outperformance is not just about demand for hard luxury, but about how consumers now judge value. Handbag prices have climbed so sharply that jewellery, by comparison, can feel like a more rational indulgence. “Jewellery prices haven’t gone up in the same way that handbag prices have gone up,” she says. At the same time, jewellery still carries a perception of durability and investment value, whether or not that always holds in practice.

• Luxury brands may be making more progress with their established high-spending clients than with the broader aspirational base they once relied on for volume. Williams notes that some houses are succeeding in pulling core customers back into stores, even if that is not yet translating into a wider recovery. At Chanel, for example, he points to renewed momentum among “well-to-do women with big executive jobs in their late 30s, 40s, and 50s,” while Louis Vuitton’s monogram anniversary campaign has helped refocus attention on its most iconic products.

Additional Resources:

• The Luxury Rebound Gets a Reality Check | BoF 
• Kering’s Strategy Reveal, Examined | BoF 

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The global fashion industry is a $2.5 trillion economic engine, and yet in the corridors of Washington and high finance, it's often treated as a sideshow. This week I was in DC at Semafor World Economy, listening to conversations about AI and genomics and energy — and arguing that fashion is actually one of the best barometers we have for where the global consumer is heading.

Because the luxury landscape is being reshaped in real time. This week LVMH reported that its fashion and leather goods division contracted by 2 percent in the first quarter. Kering's group revenues were also flat, with Gucci down 8 percent. Meanwhile Ralph Lauren has raised its guidance three times in the past year, with revenue up 12 percent in the most recent quarter. And Zegna's flagship brand grew more than 7 percent in the fourth quarter.

So what are these winners doing differently? In this episode I sit down with three leaders who, from very different starting points, offer a remarkably consistent answer — one that has little to do with logos, scarcity or hype, and everything to do with substance, inclusion and a clear sense of what customers are willing to pay for.

First, Ermenegildo Zegna, group executive chairman of the Zegna Group, on why he chose this moment to step back as chief executive and hand the reins to his sons. We talk about vertical integration as a hedge against inflation and the formula he’s giving the next generation to run by.

Ermenegildo Zegna: "Think slow but act fast. These to me are the most important criteria for being successful."

Then, I’m joined by Patrice Louvet, president and chief executive of Ralph Lauren, and Noah Horowitz, chief executive of Art Basel — two leaders whose businesses keep growing while the rest of the market softens. We unpack why Patrice thinks the industry is working from a “lazy definition” of luxury, and ask why — in a world of frictionless, AI-powered shopping — the most valuable thing a brand can offer is a reason to show up in person.

Patrice Louvet: "We're not in the apparel business. We're in the dreams business."

Three leaders. Three businesses. One consistent answer about what luxury looks like now.

Key Insights: 

• The Next-Gen Handover: Ermenegildo Zegna stepped back from the CEO role at age 70, appointing his sons to lead the Zegna Group. He emphasises that in times of change, leaders must "think slow but act fast" and remain true to core values.

• Vertical Integration as Resilience: A key differentiator for Zegna is its "sheep to shop" model. By owning 60 percent of its supply chain, the group maintains quality control and a compelling value perception that justifies its luxury pricing in an inflationary market.

• The Experience Economy: Both Ralph Lauren and Art Basel are leaning into "experientialisation". Patrice Louvet argues Ralph Lauren is in the "dreams business," comparing Ralph Lauren's creative process to a movie director rather than a traditional designer.

• Inclusive vs. Exclusive Luxury: Ralph Lauren differentiates itself through "inclusive luxury," welcoming customers into stores styled as "homes" and offering products ranging from $12 socks to $320,000 watches. This contrasts with retail peers who use security guards and create long queues.

• Art as a Human Market: Noah Horowitz notes a "flight to safety" in the art world, where collectors are moving away from speculative contemporary trends toward well-priced masterworks and global discovery. He defines the market as "confidence-driven," relying on community and connectivity.

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When Elliot Hill returned to Nike as chief executive in October 2024, he was tasked with reversing one of the most significant slumps in the company’s history. 

The business had lost momentum with both investors and consumers and his strategy has focused on restoring wholesale relationships, rebuilding key categories like running and trying to stabilise the brand’s broader narrative. 

But Nike’s latest earnings and weak outlook have intensified doubts about whether the recovery is moving quickly enough. In a fragmented marketplace where heat has moved toward niche competitors and rejuvenated legacy rivals, Nike is struggling to convince a skeptical public and an impatient Wall Street that its next chapter has truly begun.

On the episode, Sykes joins hosts Sheena Butler-Young and Brian Baskin to unpack why Nike’s comeback still feels unfinished, what the brand is getting right, and what it would take for the market to believe again.

Key Insights:

• Sykes argues that the sharp reaction to Nike’s latest earnings was less about one bad quarter than a broader loss of patience. Hill has spent more than a year telling investors that the comeback is taking shape, but the numbers still do not show enough momentum to support that story. “Investors are just sort of running thin on patience with Elliott Hill,” Sykes says. That problem is compounded by Nike’s own guidance. As Sykes puts it, “you can’t really get ringing endorsements from people” when the company is already warning that the next quarter will still be down.

• The sportswear landscape of 2026 is fundamentally different from the one Nike dominated a decade ago. Whilst Nike is still a big player in sportswear, its dominance does not necessarily mean the same thing it once did. With the market fragmented, heat is now distributed across brands like Hoka, New Balance and Adidas, and attention moves quickly between rivals. “Nike is still bigger than every other sportswear brand out there right now,” he says. “But when Nike is at its best, it is not participating in the conversation, it is controlling the conversation.” The issue is not that Nike has become irrelevant. It is that the market no longer seems to operate in a way that allows one brand to command the same singular hold it once did. Nike now requires a more versatile approach to global regions like China and sub-brands like Converse, which currently act as a drag on overall productivity.  

• Sykes is clear that Nike is not doing everything wrong. He points to genuine progress in North America, improved wholesale relationships and real traction in running. But those wins have not yet added up to the kind of breakthrough moment that changes the narrative. Nike is trying new products and categories, yet none of them has become the catalyst investors and consumers are looking for. “There are things there that I would say are definitely more positive than I thought they would be,” Sykes says. But he also notes that “there just seems to be still a bit of disconnect between what the brand thinks about its product and what consumers think about its products.” 

• Sykes argues that the company has to rebuild the basics before it can deliver the kind of defining cultural or product hit that resets perception. “You have to hit the singles before you can hit a grand slam,” he says. That may be true operationally, but the problem is that Nike is a company judged not just on steady execution, but on its ability to create category-shaping moments. Until one of those arrives, the sense of drift is likely to continue.

Additional Resources:

• Can the World Cup Solve Nike’s Problems? | BoF 
• The Public Isn’t Buying What Nike Is Selling. Can That Change? 

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In this second Ask Me Anything episode, Imran Amed responds to questions submitted by listeners around the world, offering a wide-ranging reflection on where fashion stands now — creatively, commercially and culturally. 

The conversation moves from personal encounters with figures such as designer Yohji Yamamoto and Gentle Monster founder Hankook Kim to broader questions about whether the industry has lost its sense of excitement, what luxury means today and how emerging brands can still find a path to market.

“Sometimes big-brand fashion can feel a bit boring and corporatised and cookie-cutter. But there are so many independent, young, exciting brands out there doing really, really interesting things,” says Amed. “I’m starting to feel excited about fashion again.”

Later in the episode, the discussion turns to AI, fashion education and entrepreneurship. Amed makes the case for engaging early with new technologies rather than resisting them, calls on educators to stay connected to the realities of the industry, and reflects on the early failure that ultimately led him to build BoF.

Key Insights: 

• The creative energy in fashion is returning, driven by a wave of new creative director appointments. After a period where the industry felt productised and corporatised, recent moves — Mathieu Blazy at Chanel, Jonathan Anderson at Dior, Meryl Rogge at Marni, Duran Lantink at Jean-Paul Gaultier — have injected a sense of excitement Imran says he hasn’t felt in years. The lesson: pay attention to independent and emerging brands too, where some of the most thoughtful work is happening away from the spotlight.

• The old gatekeeper model for launching a fashion brand is over. When Amed wrote his “Business of Fashion Basics” series in 2007, the only path to market for young designers ran through department store buyers, glossy magazine editors, publicists and showrooms. Today, brands can reach customers directly through social media and content — though some may still benefit from selective engagement with the traditional system.

• BoF’s global editorial perspective has been present from day one, but global coverage requires active effort. Rather than seeing international storytelling as a matter of geographic inclusion, Amed frames it as a responsibility to understand how different markets connect through shared challenges. “The struggles a designer in Brazil is facing are often similar to the struggles, questions and challenges a designer in Dubai is facing,” he says. “You only really realise that when you start going around the world and people are asking you the same questions.”

• On AI, the biggest risk is inaction. Drawing a parallel to his first experience with email and the internet in 1994, Amed argues that AI represents the same kind of transformational shift — and that professionals who reflexively reject it will fall behind, just as those who dismissed bloggers and influencers did a decade ago.

• When the world feels uncertain, focus on what you can control. Amed’s advice to designers and business leaders navigating geopolitical instability: you can’t control tariffs, wars or macro uncertainty. You can control the quality of your work, the environment you create for your teams, and your cost base. Beauty and creativity, he argues, are a uniting force — and sometimes the best response to turbulence.

• The failure that led to BoF: focus on the problem, not the solution. Before launching BoF, Amed tried to build a fashion incubator modelled on Silicon Valley. After eight months, he couldn’t sign a single designer. But because he’d identified the right problem — bridging the gap between creativity and business — the failure pointed him toward a different solution. “If your first solution doesn’t work, try another solution, keep iterating,” he says. “I did.”

Additional Resources:

• The Emerging Designers Pushing Fashion Forward | BoF
• The Great Fashion Reset | Is Fashion Failing Emerging Designers? | BoF 
• Why Revolve Can’t Stop Talking About AI | BoF

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In March, H&M released financial results alongside its annual sustainability report, presenting two seemingly contrasting narratives. The company reported a 34.6 percent reduction in emissions from 2019 levels and also noted that 91 percent of its materials are now sustainably sourced. However, this environmental progress occurred alongside a 1 percent dip in sales, raising questions about the commercial viability of its green strategy.

While many industry peers are backing away from environmental messaging to focus on the bottom line, H&M is arguing that sustainability is not in tension with profit, but is rather a "core driver of future growth". 

On The Debrief, we examine whether this decoupling of growth from environmental impact can truly resonate with consumers, or if it remains a purely internal metric.

Key Insights:

• As a fast fashion brand, H&M understands that sustainability alone is not going to win back shoppers. Instead, Walid says the company is trying to translate its recent efforts into something more tangible at the point of purchase. The pitch is not that consumers care about emissions reporting in itself, but that sustainability can function as a marker of quality. As Leyla Ertur, H&M’s Head of Sustainability, told Walid during their conversation, “Our customers don’t care about our Scope 3 emissions going down. What they care about is what they’re buying.”

• Walid suggests that one of H&M’s biggest challenges is the disconnect between how the company sees itself and how customers perceive it. “When we say H&M, I think people are thinking of H&M, the brand … But when H&M talks about itself, they’re talking [about] the whole conglomerate,” she says, pointing to brands like COS and Weekday, which occupy a more elevated position. While those labels may successfully compete with higher-end high street players, that distinction is largely invisible to consumers, who still associate H&M with “fast fashion … something cheap for an occasion.” As a result, while the group may understand how to build more premium propositions across its portfolio, Walid argues that the core H&M brand itself has not yet meaningfully shifted perception.  

• For all the company’s investments and emissions reductions, the core contradiction remains that H&M is still producing and selling huge volumes of clothing. Waleed is explicit about that limitation: “They’re not addressing the overconsumption and overproduction problem in fashion.” At the same time, she notes that H&M is one of the few large players still investing at scale in decarbonisation, water reduction and supply chain upgrades.

• H&M is investing across sustainability, brand elevation and new channels like resale, but Waleed cautions that it is still too early to judge whether these efforts are working. “They use all these different levers that don’t come into one … There needs to be a way to bring that together,” she says. Initiatives like fashion week shows, collaborations and younger-facing campaigns are designed to re-engage consumers, but “I don’t think people have caught traction … just yet.” For now, the strategy remains a long-term bet rather than a proven turnaround.

Additional Resources:

• Exclusive: H&M Says Sustainability Is Good for Business. Can It Get Shoppers to Care?
• BoF Analysis: The Rise of Ultra-Fast Fashion Players
• The Game of ‘Selling’ Sustainability

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Faye McLeod has built a body of work that sits at the intersection of retail, image-making and brand building. During her 16-year tenure at Louis Vuitton, she created some of the luxury industry’s most visible physical expressions – from windows and façades to fashion show sets. In that time, she helped define how the house translated its image from the runway and the archive into public-facing experiences around the world.

“I love the fact that the windows are a democratic space. You’re talking to the people on pavements – people can love it or not, and that’s okay,” she says. “You can’t retouch or hide anything. You’ve just got to be authentically you. And I think that’s what I’m really good at – being just me.”

Now in a new phase of her career, McLeod is building her studio, Closer, bringing her special mix of emotion, world-building and collaboration to other  brands and clients.

On this week’s episode of BoF Podcast, McLeod joins BoF founder and CEO Imran Amed to discuss her path into window design, the emotional logic behind her creative process, and why she decided this was the right moment to strike out on her own.

Key Insights: 

• Windows are where luxury meets the street. McLeod describes window design not as a decorative retail function but as one of fashion’s most public-facing forms of communication — a place where a brand has to earn attention in real time. What draws her to the medium is precisely that lack of control. “I love the fact that the windows are a democratic space,” she says. “You’re talking to the people on pavements.” 

• Her instinct for contained spaces comes from somewhere deeper than design training. McLeod links her creative process to a traumatic childhood accident. At the age of five, she fell down a deep hole in the desert in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates and spent hours trapped in what she describes as a concrete box, using imagination and inner resolve to survive. She now sees that experience as formative. “I had to go inside myself to survive. I had to use my imagination,” she says. “I’m good at designing in a contained space.” 

• The audience feedback completes the work. McLeod returns to the idea that creative concepts only fully come alive when people respond in ways you could not have planned. “What I love about what we do is watching the crowd sing back,” she says. “It’s something you cannot control with creative. You just put it out into the universe and see what happens.” In Chengdu, people queued with scissors to cut off pieces of the tail and take them home as souvenirs.

• Her work is built collectively, not individually. Despite the scale and visibility of the projects she discusses, McLeod is emphatic that none of them are authored alone. “It’s not just about one person, it’s about everybody,” she says. “It’s an orchestra and you just find your place.” 

• Her philosophy is simple: pour love into the work. Looking back on her career, she says what she wishes she had known earlier was not a strategic lesson but an emotional one: to trust herself more, let anxiety matter less and commit fully to what she was making. “I wish I knew you just had to pour love into everything you do,” she says. “I just get a big jar of love and I pour it right on top of everything.” 

Additional Resources:

Faye McLeod | BoF 500 | The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry

Role Call | Faye McLeod, Visual Image Director | BoF 

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For years, Revolve was fashion retail’s byword for influencer marketing, particularly around its over-the-top Coachella event. But as the Instagram aesthetic matures and the cost of human-led marketing rises, the company is pivoting. The new mandate? To become as much an AI powerhouse as it is a party-hosting fashion giant. 

In a recent conversation with Retail Editor Cathaleen Chen, Revolve founders Michael Mente and Mike Karanikolas argued that AI isn't just a buzzword for the board; it’s the engine that will sustain their multi-billion dollar dominance.

Chen joined The Debrief to talk about how Revolve is pushing the limits of how AI can be used in retail, and whether its strategy is working. 

Key Insights:

• Revolve was founded by software engineers who viewed fashion as an e-commerce "white space,” setting it apart from rivals that invested in new technologies only after establishing themselves in the marketplace. "While Revolve looks like a Shopbop or a Net-a-Porter... Revolve is actually built like a data science company." said retail editor Cathaleen Chen.
• Revolve differentiates itself by building its own tools where possible, rather than buying off-the-shelf software, including the product search on its website. Using AI, Revolve has moved beyond literal keyword matching to a system that understands the vibe or occasion a customer is shopping for. By analyzing image attributes, the site can surface the perfect "party dress" even if that specific tag doesn't exist, explains Chen. "What their AI tool is able to do is pull up anything that is sequined... or textured... it is anticipating the desire."
• Revolve fosters a "bottom-up" environment where every employee is encouraged to experiment with AI. They aren't just looking for "moonshots"; they value any application that moves the needle even slightly. "Eeven if something improves efficiency or output by just 1%, that's considered a success,” said Chen.

Additional Resources:

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Volkan Yilmaz — known to his millions of followers as Tanner Leatherstein — grew up in his family's tannery in Turkey, learning to convert raw animal hides into finished leather from the age of eleven. 

That foundation took him through an improbable journey: a failed business venture in Turkmenistan, a green card lottery win, years driving trucks and cabs across New Jersey and Chicago, an MBA, a brief stint in management consulting he couldn't stand, an Etsy shop he built from scratch — and eventually, almost by accident, a viral video that changed everything.

He started cutting luxury bags open. Applying acetone to test the finish. Burning the leather to verify tanning claims. Scratching the hardware to see what's underneath. And asking, what are you really paying for?

“At upwards of $500, they’re not selling you a leather bag, they’re selling you a signal of status loaded on, hopefully, a good leather bag,” he says. “If I’m a customer of this brand paying $3,000, I know I’m buying a status signal, but at least I deserve the best quality of materials and craftsmanship.”

Leatherstein joined BoF founder Imran Amed at our London offices to discuss what he's found inside some of the world's most famous handbags, what it tells us about the relationship between price and quality in luxury, and what he believes comes next for an industry under growing pressure from consumers who are no longer willing to take marketing at face value.

• The tannery is where his authority comes from. Yilmaz grew up in his father's Turkish tannery, learning to select raw skins and work through the chemistry of tanning from the age of eleven. That early immersion — sensory, unglamorous, technical — is what allows him to read a bag's construction in ways most consumers cannot. "I was so fascinated how this smelly dirty bloody trash turns into a luxury fabric at the end of that process," he recalls. "Like alchemy."

• The path to the camera was as unlikely as the path to leather. Before building a following of millions, Yilmaz had to overcome a conviction that he was ill-suited for on-screen performance. The shift came while filming a charitable appeal — nervous, voice shaking, but he got through it. "I realised this is just a decision I made and I could change it," he says. The inner voice that tells us what we can't do, he argues, is often just a choice we forgot we made.

• His methodology is deceptively simple. Every review follows the same sequence: an acetone test to strip the finish and reveal the base material underneath, a hardware scratch test, a flame test to verify tanning claims, and a cost-of-goods estimate to calculate the retail multiplier. "The finish is the makeup on the bag," he explains. "I'm trying to see how much makeup is on it." At the luxury tier, he says a multiplier of fifteen to twenty times is not atypical.

• Status signalling is real — but it comes with obligations. Yilmaz doesn't dismiss luxury pricing as a con. If status is what the customer is paying for, that's a legitimate transaction. But it's not a blank cheque. "If I'm a customer paying $3,000, I know I'm buying a status signal — but at least I deserve the best quality of materials and craftsmanship," he says. "What surprised me in these dissections is that sometimes I couldn't even find that."

• Luxury isn't ending, but it needs to become something else. Challenger brands have proven that very good leather goods are achievable at the $500–600 price point, and Yilmaz believes that will pull consumers away from the traditional luxury tier. The brands that survive will be those that find a new reason to be desired — beyond logo recognition and price inflation alone. "I don't think it's the end of luxury," he says. "It's just an evolution."

Additional Resources:

• From Critic to Craftsman: Tanner Leatherstein’s Next Chapter | BoF 
• Volkan Yilmaz | BoF 500 | The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry 

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For years, European luxury brands set the pace in fashion, while American labels were often dismissed as overly commercial and too broadly distributed to compete at the highest end of the market. 

But that balance is shifting. As many European luxury houses struggle with slowing demand, price resistance and creative inconsistency, a group of American brands is seeing renewed momentum. 

On the episode, Diana Pearl joins Sheena Butler-Young and Brian Baskin to unpack what those brands are getting right, and why their recent success may offer a useful playbook for the rest of the industry.

Key Insights:

• Pearl argues that part of the shift comes down to timing. American brands like Coach, Ralph Lauren and Tory Burch went through their overexposure phase years ago and were forced to correct course, while European luxury brands are only now grappling with the consequences of aggressive growth. “European brands maybe got a little cocky,” she says. “They raised prices too much and maybe let the creative slide a little. I think as those businesses have grown, it just became more about sales and less about focusing on the core of the business.” By contrast, American brands “really had to recalibrate, pull back, think about who is our core customer and laser in on that message.”
• Pearl presents Coach as the clearest example of how this American reset has worked. Instead of chasing quick expansion, the brand spent years refining its identity, sharpening its offer and building around a defined consumer. “They want to be that first luxury bag purchase that someone makes when they’re in high school, when they get their first job and save up to buy a nice bag,” she says. That focus shapes everything from product to casting to marketing tone. Just as importantly, Coach stopped cycling through products too quickly. Rather than dropping a hit bag and moving on, “when they see these silhouettes start to pop off, they find ways to iterate them,” Pearl says, pointing to the Tabby and the Brooklyn as examples.

• Pearl says European luxury’s current problems are not just about price, but about value and treatment. Consumers have become more sensitive to whether products feel worth the money and whether the shopping experience feels inviting. “People don’t want to spend their money at a place where they feel like they’re being mistreated,” she says, referring to growing frustration with intimidating store environments, long queues and rigid service hierarchies. She also argues that “cachet can only get you so far,” especially when shoppers no longer feel that the biggest European brands are producing the most desirable or practical items.

• Another theme in Pearl’s reporting is consistency. Several American brands now doing well are still shaped by founder-led or founder-adjacent creative visions, and she suggests that stability matters. “Even if consumers don’t necessarily know that creative directors are changing, they see it in how a brand feels inconsistent from season to season,” she says. With Tory Burch, Ralph Lauren and Khaite, the creative point of view feels legible and sustained. That makes it easier to build a coherent world around the brand and evolve it gradually, rather than asking consumers to reset every few years with a new designer era.

Additional Resources:

• What European Luxury Can Learn From American Fashion | BoF 
• The Great Fashion Reset | How to Fix Luxury’s Trust Issues | BoF 
• The Great Fashion Reset: Can Designer Debuts Revive Luxury? | The Debrief | BoF 

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