The Business of Fashion Podcast

This week, by popular demand, we are back for the third installment of Ask Me Anything, where listeners from around the world send in their most pressing questions about what is happening in the fashion business.This time, the conversation jumps off from the latest season of shows, specifically what’s actually happening at Gucci, whether metrics like Earned Media Value (EMV) and Media Impact Value (MIV) are worth anything at all, how brands can strike the right balance between creativity and commerce, and where human judgement still remains integral, even as AI becomes part of everyday creative work.Key Insights:Gucci’s creative direction has sharpened, but the business case hasn’t. After several collections that felt disjointed, Amed sees Demna’s most recent Milan show as the clearest statement yet of his vision for the house. “This most recent show, The Store, just kind of clicked.” But Amed is not ready to call it a fix: “The remaining question I have is, is it enough in this very challenging market where the luxury industry is not growing?”Brand-measurement metrics deserve scepticism: Asked whether scores like Earned Media Value (EMV) and Media Impact Value (MIV) actually mean anything, Amed argues they’re built to serve a different purpose than the one marketed. “Honestly, these are vanity metrics,” he says, noting they’re often “designed for marketing teams to ask for money from finance people.” His test for any brand: “Long-term brand health and commercial performance, that matters.”Creative success depends on alignment between designer and business: Comparing the current moment at Balenciaga and Chanel, Amed suggests the difference isn’t talent but clarity of the brief. On Balenciaga: “I get the sense that the brief was a bit disjointed ... can you mine the heritage of Cristóbal Balenciaga ... and then can you also keep the customers that Demna managed to attract ... Are those things even compatible?” At Chanel, by contrast: “They’re all singing from the same hymn sheet about what Chanel is trying to do now ... When it works like it’s working at Chanel, it does feel like magic.”AI changes how humans create, not whether they’re needed. Amed pushes back on the idea that AI can generate campaigns or strategy on its own. “I don’t think AI on its own can generate beautiful campaigns ... it still requires a human to work with it.” His advice to anyone starting out: build real-world taste and judgement, “because that’s going to be priceless in the age of AI.”Crediting artisans is what separates collaboration from appropriation. Weighing the recent Prada and Fendi controversies over Indian craftsmanship, Amed draws a clear line between the two. On Fendi’s long relationship with Mumbai atelier Chanakya: “Maria Grazia is investing in and spending time with the artisans ... that for me is an example of how these things should work.” On Prada’s uncredited Kolhapuri sandals: “That felt like a real case of appropriation.” His broader principle: “If you’re going to take something from a culture, credit the people, make sure they’re properly compensated.”Additional Resources:Has Demna Solved Gucci’s Identity Crisis? | BoFChanel: The Designer Revamp That Worked | BoFDid Fendi Commit Cultural Appropriation in India? It’s Not That Simple | BoF Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tim Blanks, editor-at-large at The Business of Fashion, joins Imran Amed for their seasonal review of the Spring/Summer 2027 shows. In London, Simone Rocha and Erdem delivered what Blanks calls career heights, and Christopher Kane made his debut at Mulberry, which brought the label back to the London schedule. In Milan, Demna presented his third show for Gucci, and Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons built Prada’s collection almost entirely around the skirt. In Paris, Anthony Vaccarello staged his final show for Saint Laurent, a collection built around gold. Kering confirmed his departure on Oct. 9.But the thread Blanks and Amed kept coming back to was bigger than any one show. In an industry dominated by giant groups trying to meet quarterly targets, there is a renaissance of independent designers and independent thinking. Blanks says independence is the theme he expects to return. He describes fashion at its best as an “individual idiosyncratic statement, this passion, and that applies not just to the designers but to the people who sell the designers.” Amed adds that independent stores around the world are looking for designers who offer something customers can’t find everywhere.Key Insights:London finds its feet again: Blanks saw two of the city's established names reach new heights. "I saw designers who are really part of the establishment, like Simone Rocha and Erdem, who reached career heights," he says, pointing to a mood of "anything goes, reckless" confidence. "I thought Erdem's show had a particularly wanton quality that was quite enthralling ... you do feel a volcanic force building sometimes, and in this show there was just this explosion of subversive energy."Demna's Gucci moment: After two seasons spent researching the house, Blanks felt Demna's third Gucci collection finally delivered clarity. "I really liked this show," he says, noting the designer "explored all those different elements — that hyper-bourgeois element, the Tom Ford element ... he really needed to find his way through Gucci." Prada doing Prada: Miuccia Prada's return to the main collection, built around 63 skirts and her own maxim — "the skirt is my T-shirt" — struck Blanks as a necessary reassertion rather than a retreat. "It totally resonated with me as a reflection of her golden era ... I felt it was a necessary reassertion. I think that anyone who loves Prada would love this collection."Rick Owens' new alchemy: Owens' Paris show marked a genuine shift for a designer whose idea of beauty is usually challenging. "This time, it was beautiful," Blanks says. "Those gowns at the beginning — they were woven from seatbelt material ... he is like an old-time alchemist, making extraordinary things out of actually quite banal things."Saint Laurent's gilded goodbye: Witnessing Anthony Vaccarello's final show after 10 years at the house, the collection was built entirely around gold. "This is his farewell to Saint Laurent ... the single-mindedness of his vision is quite overwhelming. It's imperial fashion," Blanks says. "The clothes were like a coronation."Chanel as "an Act of Faith": Matthieu Blazy's Chanel collection led Blanks to a bigger point about belief and independence inside a giant, privately-held house. "Fashion is an act of faith," he says. "It's something that people have to believe in for it to work ... [criticism] destroys the illusion." He frames Blazy's process as fundamentally independent: "The sheer joy in the making ... that's kind of really independent thinking. You know, when he says, 'I want something that's unknittable,' and comes up with knittable sequins."Additional Resources:Miuccia Prada: Future-Proofing a Fashion DynastyChristopher Kane Opens New Era at Mulberry Satoshi Kondo: Crafting Issey Miyake’s Comeback Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today, we introduced The BoF 500 Class of 2026: 100 new members added to our ever-growing index of people shaping the global fashion industry. This year’s BoF 500 cover stories feature Miuccia Prada, Marc Jacobs, Givenchy’s Sarah Burton and Issey Miyake’s Satoshi Kondo, examining the ineffable creative quotient that turns clothes into things of desire.But creativity is just one part of the fashion equation. It is not something managers can simply turn on like a light switch. Designers also need sufficient time and resources, and teams that know how to translate their visions into commercial products — not to mention the best factories, strong retail networks and so on — to make a fashion business tick.Recently, Marc Jacobs has been grappling with some big changes at his namesake brand, opening a new chapter under new owners WHP and G-III which closed a deal to acquire the Marc Jacobs business from LVMH in September.Over the summer, Jacobs met with BoF contributor Eric Wilson in New York to discuss life after LVMH — and whether he can work with his new business partners without losing his soul. The full story is out on BoF on Oct. 7.After the cover shoot, Jacobs sat down with Imran Amed to talk about what’s next for his business and reflect on the ongoing fashion slump. “What I see is a bunch of non-creative people thinking that this all hangs on a creative person,” Jacobs says. “And I think it's just a big mistake.”Key Insights:The LVMH ceiling: Jacobs is candid that LVMH's backing came with a ceiling. “We might have a tote bag that's successful and we might have our show that's been applauded … [but] LVMH was not going to open stores or pour money into this place,” he says. Under his new owners WHP and G-III, he sees uncertainty paired with possibility: “There's an opportunity for something to change and grow, which certainly wasn't the case if we remained at LVMH. It would have just been a maintenance program, which is all that's really been in the past decade plus.”Changing the designer as a fix: Asked about last year’s wave of creative changes across the industry, Jacobs pushes back on the idea that just swapping out a designer fixes everything. “You can put a different logo over a designer's head or you can change the store that clothes are available in, but there’s an exhaustion, I think, from all of this stuff. And I don't know that the world even knows who's where at any given point,” he says.Instinct over advice: Jacobs resists offering advice to emerging designers, instead emphasising lived experience: “You do your best to trust your instincts and to go with your instincts in the gut ... I've been up and down and out, and I just never lose this desire to make things and be a part of this fashion world.”Additional Resources:Marc Jacobs | BoF 500 | The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry Introducing The BoF 500 Class of 2026 Miuccia Prada, Marc Jacobs, Sarah Burton and Satoshi Kondo Are 2026’s BoF 500 Cover Stars Marc Jacobs Approaches a New Era Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Every weekday morning, a certain slice of New York opens the same e-mail. Lawyers, bankers, editors, restaurateurs: some of the city's most plugged-in people read Feed Me, the daily newsletter written by Emily Sundberg.In a few short years, Sundberg has turned a newsletter she started at her desk into one of the most talked-about new media publications in New York. She has built it herself, with a paywall from day one and no outside investors. Feed Me now includes contributing columnists, reader events, merchandise and a podcast.Her readers are exactly the people fashion brands are trying hardest to reach: smart, sceptical and very aware of how they are being marketed to. That makes Sundberg one of the sharpest outside observers of the industry today."I just never underestimate how clued in and informed my audience is, and I never want to speak down to them."Sundberg joins Amed to talk about building a media business on instinct, and capturing the attention of fashion's most sought after customers.Key Insights:Fashion's customers know exactly how they are being sold to: Sundberg notes that when a strong campaign lands on Instagram, the compliment is increasingly about the marketing itself. "They're in on the bit. They know that they're being sold to," she says. She tells brands to stop recycling the same models and copy, and to assume every campaign will be "dissected, potentially dunked on, on X or Substack or Instagram."Pushing a single product can backfire: Sundberg has noticed brands putting all their marketing behind one hero item, such as J.Crew's pink shrunken sweater or a Free People coat she saw 20 women promoting on her feed. "Why would I want to buy that coat if you're pushing it so hard?" she says. Sundberg cites shoppers booking flights to buy Chanel's new collection as "the best case scenario."Menswear is how fashion reaches readers who don't work in it: "Almost half my readers are men," Sundberg says, and many of them "actually geek out a lot about how they get dressed every day." Her male readers follow how their favourite clothing companies have changed through bankruptcies, investments and new creative directors. "There's a way to talk about fashion and style to non-fashion people," she says. "And that has become really important."Fashion media lacks the independent, authoritative voices that other fields have: Sundberg has trusted experts for restaurants, tech and books, but says: "I don't feel like I have as many of those voices right now in fashion." She worries that people starting Substacks and podcasts aren't being edited. When Amed says fashion media sits too close to the brands it covers, she agrees that too much of it runs on the "same press releases" and is "scared of advertisers."Three Books Emily Sundberg Recommends:Scribble Scribble: Notes on the Media, by Nora EphronThe Official Preppy Handbook, by Lisa BirnbachThe Shards, by Bret Easton Ellis Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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? | BoFChristopher Kane Joins Mulberry to Power Ready-to-Wear Relaunch | BoFMulberry Quarterly Sales Jump 23% as Turnaround Gathers Pace | BoF Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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:What to Look Out for at New York Fashion Week | BoFLVMH Announces Young Designers’ Prize Semifinalists for 2026 | BoFNew York Fashion Week’s Identity Crisis | BoF Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 | BoFJonathan Anderson | BoF 500 | The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.