The Business of Fashion Podcast

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 

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 | BoFHow Fashion Schools Are Tackling AI’s Blind Spots | BoF 

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 

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?

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 | BoFMatthieu Blazy Puts Enchantment to Work at Chanel | BoFHaute Couture’s Heroes in Training | BoF

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 

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

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