What Fashion Designers Need to Know Today

Discover the most relevant industry news and insights for fashion designers, updated each month to enable you to excel in job interviews, promotion conversations or perform better in the workplace by increasing your market awareness and emulating market leaders.

BoF Careers distils business intelligence from across the breadth of our content — editorial briefings, newsletters, case studies, podcasts and events — to deliver key takeaways and learnings tailored to your job function, listed alongside a selection of the most exciting live jobs advertised by BoF Careers partners.

Key articles and need-to-know insights for fashion designers today:

1. New York Fashion Week Isn’t Dead

The death of New York Fashion Week has long been lamented, but the events of last week appear to be proof of life. Sure, there are still problems. Homegrown talents like Peter Do, The Row and, most recently, Gabriela Hearst have decamped to Paris. Former mainstays like Oscar de la Renta and Marc Jacobs now show off-calendar. Shows in hard-to-access locations on the far west side of Manhattan and in the Brooklyn Navy Yard have made programming into something of a week-long schlep.

Over the past week, however, New York Fashion Week has proven its critics wrong. The big moments this season felt more grand than before — just look at Ralph Lauren’s equestrian showcase in Bridgehampton, which included a one-night-only recreation of his famed Polo Bar restaurant, or the surprise performance by Wu-Tang Clan, brought together by Tommy Hilfiger on a decommissioned Staten Island ferry. Marquee shows from Alaïa and Off-White, both of which typically show in Paris, as well as the arrival of Swedish minimalist favourite Toteme, signalled the strength and desirability of the American market.

Related Jobs:

Head of RTW SA Purchasing & Production, Alexander McQueen — Novara, Italy

Womenswear Head of Design, Hugo Boss — Metzingen, Germany

Associate Designer, Chico’s — Fort Myers, United States

2. Chanel Owners and L’Oréal Heir Investing in Olsens’ The Row

The family behind luxury brand Chanel and the billionaire heiress of L’Oréal have bought a stake in the fashion label The Row, founded by the Olsen sisters. The Wertheimer brothers, via their family office Mousse Partners, and Francoise Bettencourt Meyers’ family vehicle, Tethys Invest, have bought a minority stake in the fashion brand. Imaginary Ventures, co-founded by fashion entrepreneur Natalie Massenet, is also investing in the label, people familiar with the matter said. The Olsen sisters will remain The Row’s majority shareholders. The transactions value the company at about $1 billion, the people said.

The Row was started in 2006 by sisters Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who shot to fame as child actresses in the late 1980s in the sitcom “Full House.” Their label has established itself as a respected quiet luxury player and presents its collections during Paris Fashion Week. It offers leather handbags like the Margaux, which can cost about $7,000. The family office behind Chanel has also invested in a wide range of startups including Brightside Health, digital advertising firm Brandtech Group, biotechnology company Evolved by Nature and health-care provider Thirty Madison.

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Junior Leather Goods & Accessories Designer, DeMellier — London, United Kingdom

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RTW Designer Tory Burch — New York, United States

3. Givenchy Names Sarah Burton Its New Designer

Sarah Burton will be Givenchy’s fourth designer in less than ten years as it struggles to define a path between pared-back Parisienne glamour and contemporary urban glitz. After the label grew to new heights under Riccardo Tisci, whose pop-culture-savvy marketing and streetwear-inflected merchandising drove sales for over a decade, successor Clare Waight Keller reconnected the brand with mid-century French elegance from 2017 to 2020. Most recently, American designer Matthew Williams did something in-between: chic suiting belted with chunky utility hardware, faux fox-fur overcoats, classic kitten heels styled in kinky stockings.

Burton’s appointment ends a year-long search for Givenchy’s new designer: LVMH announced that predecessor Williams would exit the brand last December, following several seasons of industry chatter after the group brought in stylist Carine Roitfeld to support Williams and began exploring other options for the label. In July, Givenchy sought to open a “new chapter” with the appointment of a new chief executive officer, Alessandro Valenti, most recently Louis Vuitton’s EMEA president.

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Couture & Bespoke Bridal Fitter, Emilia Wickstead — London, United Kingdom

Production Director, Stine Goya — Copenhagen, Denmark

Quality Assurance Manager, Camilla — Sydney, Australia

4. Can Off-White Get Back on Track?

Earlier this month, Off-White made its New York Fashion Week debut, taking to a public basketball court in Brooklyn, after a previous plan to show in New York last September was shelved amid growing uncertainty at the label co-founded by the late Virgil Abloh and Milan’s New Guards Group. Kamara’s fourth show for Off-White — titled “Duty Free” and inspired by a “global traveller” flying into New York from Ghana, where Abloh’s parents were born — was part of a full-court press in the US market that not only accounts for 24 percent of Off-White’s business but is integral to its DNA and cultural legacy.

Since Abloh’s death in 2021, amid waning demand for streetwear, the label has struggled. A push upmarket after Abloh’s former employer Louis Vuitton (where he was men’s artistic director) acquired a controlling stake in Off-White’s trademark, compounded by weakness at New Guards Group owner Farfetch, only made matters worse. To get things back on track, the brand needs to recalibrate its positioning, says CEO Cristiano Fagnani. “Two or three years ago, we went in a very stiff and steep direction to high-priced products and uber luxury. I think we are comfortable and confident to say that our space is a much larger canvas than that,” he said.

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5. After the ‘Toryssance’: Tory Burch’s Balancing Act

Much has been made of the shift in visual vocabulary underway at Tory Burch in recent years. Beginning with spring-summer 2021′s Shaker collection, she began to shake off the Sixties- and Seventies-inflected, global-traveller glam that had defined her brand’s ethos for more than a decade. Burch used the runway to reset the brand’s tone to a stripped-back modernism — more elevated, more sophisticated, cooler. As Burch’s revamped runway aesthetic has trickled into shoes, bags, stores and campaigns, the industry has taken note.

Last year, The New York Times ran a story headlined “That’s Tory Burch?,” an examination of the origins of and reaction to the brand’s improbable new vibe. It was a bit of a backhanded compliment — implicit in any resurgence is the stagnation that preceded it. At the brand’s runway show this month, Burch infused her collection with more softness and wearability than in recent seasons without diluting her newfound conceptual proclivities.

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Bag Designer, Simone Rocha — London, United Kingdom

Trim Developer, Burberry — Milan, Italy

Assistant Handbag Designer, Tommy Hilfiger — New York, United States

6. Hodakova Takes Home Top Honours at the 2024 LVMH Prize

Hodakova, the Stockholm-based label founded by Ellen Hodakova Larsson, won top honours at the 2024 LVMH Prize announced in Paris on Tuesday for creating both desirable silhouettes and a viable business model for an upcycling brand. Hodakova impressed the jury with her “combination of savoir-faire, sustainability — and desirability,” senior LVMH executive and jury member Sidney Toledano said. “Like many of the designers this year, the brand has a mature point of view, not just on fashion but on business and the world.”

In a prize ceremony at the Frank Gehry-designed Louis Vuitton Foundation, a tearful Larsson said she was “super excited to show us her next chapter” at her upcoming fashion show on September 24th in Paris, before turning to the jury to promise: “I’ll work really hard.” With prize money of €400,000 and a year of mentorship from LVMH executives, Hodakova hopes to “build an infrastructure where we can change from a small perspective to a big perspective,” Larsson told reporters.

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Senior Designer, With Nothing Underneath — London, United Kingdom

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Senior Apparel Designer, Splits 59 — Los Angeles, United States

7. Why H&M and Inditex Are Betting on Lab-Grown Cotton

Growing cotton bolls itself sucks up huge amounts of water, pesticides and fertilisers. For all the water you’ll ever use to wash your cotton T-shirt over its entire lifetime, it will have taken 50 times as much water to grow the cotton that went into it. Cotton uses about 2.3 percent of global arable land and accounts for 16 percent for all insecticide sales. And the fashion industry has been forced to reckon with allegations of forced labor and poor working conditions in certain cotton-harvesting regions.

Boston-based startup Galy says its found an alternative that avoids all of these problems by growing cotton in a lab. The company shared an evaluation by environmental consultancy Quantis to show that, at an industrial scale, its process reduces water use by 99 percent, land use by 97 percent and the negative impact of fertilisers by 91 percent when compared with conventional cotton. For clothing, founder and CEO Luciano Bueno says that Galy still needs to improve on strand length. That development will need investments in further research. The startup has raised $33 million from Bill Gates-led Breakthrough Energy Ventures, H&M and Inditex — bringing the company’s total raise so far to $65 million.

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Product Developer, Casablanca Paris — London, United Kingdom

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8. Milan Proposes Supply-Chain Database Amid Sweatshops Probe

Milan wants to set up a supply-chain database to help address incidents of labour exploitation in the fashion sector, according to a draft of the plan seen by The Business of Fashion. The protocol put forward by the Prefecture of Milan comes amid a scandal over poor working conditions in Italian factories used by major luxury brands. Since the start of the year, Milanese prosecutors have linked companies including Dior and Armani to sweatshops operating on the outskirts of the city. Their presence in luxury brands’ supply chains reflected a lack of adequate controls to prevent and stem labour exploitation, prosecutors concluded.

Several important details remain under discussion and how the protocol will be implemented still requires clarification, said Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana president Carlo Capasa in an email. Outstanding concerns include its limited geographic scope, challenges in ensuring confidentiality of sensitive information and the complexity of documentation the scheme would require, he said.

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Senior Designer, Broken Planet — London, United Kingdom

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