The Business of Fashion Podcast

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 | BoFThe 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

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 | BoFNot All Creators Convert. Here's How to Find Those That Do. | BoFFrom Hype to Discipline: The New World of Influencer Marketing | Case Study | BoF

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 | BoFBoF VOICES 2023: An Inflection Point for AI | BoFWhat Stood Out at Salone | BoF 

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 | BoFThe Best Fashion Stores in the World | BoFThe Debrief | Why Some Retailers are Ignoring the Internet | BoF

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 | BoFWhy Independent Retail Is More Important Than Ever | BoFHow to Build a Fashion Store Worth Leaving Home For | BoF

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

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 

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 | BoFSustainable Fashion’s New Marketing Angle Is All About Wellness | BoFWool Workout Clothes? The Demand Is Growing | BoF 

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