The Business of Fashion Podcast

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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