The Business of Fashion Podcast

Behind every luxury handbag, bespoke suit and couture gown lies an intricate value chain powered by skilled artisans. But as master craftspeople retire without successors, fashion faces a growing shortage of skilled workers — US tailoring employment has fallen roughly 30 percent over the last decade. Nordstrom, North America's largest employer of tailors, is funding tailoring programmes at FIT and Seattle Central College with another planned at ASU FIDM. The effort is aimed at rebuilding that pipeline at a moment when skilled trades more broadly are enjoying renewed interest from young people questioning the value of a four-year degree.

In this episode, Sheena Butler-Young is joined by BoF Commercial Features Editor Dan Hastings to explore why fashion’s skilled-trades pipeline has thinned, what the industry is doing to rebuild it, and whether rising tuition costs and anxiety around AI have created a new opportunity to sell young people on these careers.

Key Insights:


As Hastings sees it, today’s shortage reflects decades of consolidation and the shift of more luxury manufacturing outside traditional fashion capitals. In his view, the industry failed to invest enough in training the next generation of skilled craftspeople, leaving many expert artisans nearing retirement with too few successors in the pipeline. The industry, he says, "kept the offices in the West... but we didn't really train that next generation of handicraft people.”

Fashion has long heralded the creative director while overlooking the production side. Hastings argues the industry " venerates the creative director" as its "rock stars," while the people making the clothes remain invisible — a visibility gap that can be compounded, particularly in more junior roles, by pay that doesn’t always reflect the skill required.

Apprenticeship programmes tend to cluster around established luxury hubs, leaving many young people unaware these careers are even an option. Hastings argues that interest is there when people know where to look: “It all comes down to knowing that these programmes exist.” But information about apprenticeships, scholarships and bursaries doesn’t always reach prospective workers.

Short courses can make trade careers look deceptively fast to enter, but true mastery takes decades. Hastings notes that at some fashion houses, reaching the highest levels can require decades of experience, warning that for a generation “raised on instant gratification,” the long runway between entering the trade and reaching real earning power can be a tough sell.

While AI may automate some patternmaking functions, Hastings insists it can't touch the artistry of haute couture. He recalls the tradition of embroidering a strand of hair into a Chanel wedding gown for good luck — “that kind of magic doesn't really happen with AI” — arguing luxury houses will have no choice but to keep investing in training if they want to justify their prices on craftsmanship.

Additional Resources:
Can AI Ignite a New Generation of Fashion Tradespeople? | BoF
Fashion's Craftsmanship Challenge | BoF
Facing a Shortage of Luxury Artisans, LVMH Seeks Apprentices in the US | BoF

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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.

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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 | BoF
LVMH Announces Young Designers’ Prize Semifinalists for 2026 | BoF
New York Fashion Week’s Identity Crisis | BoF
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For many shoppers, fashion is now experienced primarily through a screen — discovered on social media, watched on runway livestreams and purchased from a product photo. Fashion critic Eugene Rabkin argues in his new book that this shift has left the industry prioritising a garment's image over the garment itself, hollowing out creativity and quality along the way. At the same time, as AI generated imagery floods the feed, a counter-movement is emerging: luxury brands are commissioning painters and illustrators, hosting phone-free dinners and building hands-on experiences designed to pull customers back into the physical world.

In this episode, senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young is joined by Diana Pearl, BoF's US Editor, and Marc Bain, BoF's UK Editor and technology correspondent, to discuss whether this renewed emphasis on human creativity and craft is a meaningful response to fashion's image-first culture — or just the next trend cycle.

Key Insights:
As consumers increasingly interact with clothing through small screens rather than in person, Bain explains that subtler markers of quality have lost their power to communicate value. "As we interact more with clothing through imagery rather than the physical garments themselves, the logo becomes more important... Now the logo is just the easiest thing to identify. And that has become the most important thing on a garment."
Drawing on a concept borrowed from French theory, Bain says the gap between a product's online image and its physical reality has left some shoppers disillusioned — a dynamic he says extends well beyond fast fashion. "It doesn't just apply to Shein..Eugene Rabkin's argument is that it's come to apply to a whole lot of fashion, including luxury fashion... There's been this decline in quality over the years."
Bain says and Rabkin are careful not to cast technology as the villain, noting that AI's impact depends entirely on how brands choose to use it. " Technology is amoral. It's a tool..And it's really how it's used that is more important."
Pearl points to a wave of luxury brands hiring painters, illustrators and sculptors as a direct response to overly polished, perfected imagery that technology has made ubiquitous — a trend only accelerated by AI. e. "Being perfect and having just this picture-perfect imagery is no longer seen as aspirational. It's actually seen as, ‘slop’ … having that human-made art... is what feels now aspirational and special."
As brands pull back from influencer-driven content blitzes in favour of intimate, phone-free events, Pearl says the playbook for measuring success has changed. . "It's all representative of this bigger shift that we're seeing away from volume and just get as much content as possible... towards the depth of connection."

Additional Resources:
Is Fashion Stuck in Its Simulation Era? | BoF
As AI Floods the Feed, Fashion Marketers Tap Artists | BoF
Logging Off Is the New Luxury. How Can Brands Adapt? | BoF

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In the summer of 2007, BoF founder Imran Amed landed in Tokyo for the first time. A young American writer named W. David Marx took him on a menswear tour of the city's back streets of Shibuya and Harajuku. That trip would eventually lead Marx to become BoF's first contributor — apart from Amed himself.

Nearly 20 years on, Marx is still in Tokyo, watching a city that experienced three of fashion's biggest shifts before anywhere else: luxury as a middle-class product, the rise — and now retreat — of streetwear and menswear as a global obsession. Marx is the author of three books on Japanese and global culture. The first, “Ametora,” is about how Japan absorbed, and then improved, American style. The most recent, “Blank Space,” is a cultural history of the 21st century, arguing that something has gone missing from the way we make culture today.

Amed sat down with Marx in Tokyo to discuss all of this and more in what is a fascinating conversation about the state of global culture and global fashion today, and how Japan’s place in it has changed.

Key Insights:
Japan taught the luxury industry that luxury could be a mass-market business. Marx traces Japan's luxury boom back to the 1970s, when newly wealthy Japanese travellers began bringing home souvenirs from Paris. He argues Japan is where brands like Louis Vuitton first learned that "luxury could become a middle class market," building duty-free stores in airports rather than relying solely on flagship boutiques for old-money customers — a model since exported across the world.

Tokyo Was the Origin Point of the Global Streetwear Boom: Marx lays out how Bathing Ape's underground Tokyo stores became a phenomenon so outsized it reshaped how the rest of the world thought about streetwear. He recalls a Stüssy veteran saying, "Bathing Ape blew streetwear out of the water."

Luxury's growth problem is structural, not cyclical. Marx argues luxury goods are fundamentally different from something like an iPhone, because "for every additional handbag you sell to a new consumer, you do decrease the value of the handbag that you sold originally." That tension between scarcity and growth, he says, “is at the root of the industry's current slump”.

Culture Has a ‘Blank Space’ Where Invention Used to Be: Marx’s central argument is that value shifts, not a lack of talent, have pushed culture away from art for art's sake. He points to hip-hop and graffiti as movements built by outsiders pursuing invention for its own sake, contrasting that with today's incentives: "If you are making things to get attention, if you're making things to make money, it's just very unlikely that your strategy's going to be to be the most inventive as it could possibly be."

Three Books W. David Marx Recommends
Fashion is Spinach, by Elizabeth Hawes
On Human Finery, by Quentin Bell
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, by Jean Baudrillard

Additional Resources:
Streetwear’s First IPO, Explained | BoF
How Big Luxury Is Rewiring for the Future | BoF
How BAPE Kept Its Cool for Decades | BoF

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Beauty has long been one of the industry’s most reliable growth engines — fragrance boomed post-pandemic, prestige beauty held up better than other categories, and value-driven brands like e.l.f. proved that sharp pricing and marketing could keep consumers spending. But a slowdown that began last year and has only become more pronounced since has challenged that thinking.

In this episode, senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young is joined by BoF senior beauty correspondent Daniela Morosini to unpack the first half's earnings across the beauty conglomerates — from Estée Lauder and Shiseido to L'Oréal, Beiersdorf and E.l.f. — and identify what’s still driving growth and what’s stalling, as well as what investors will be watching for next.

Key Insights:

Selective Spending, Not Shrinking Wallets: Consumers haven't stopped buying beauty — they've become pickier about where they spend and what they’re purchasing. "People are just getting a little bit more selective," said Morosini. Shopping itself is shifting, too: "Maybe it's not always Sephora and Ulta. Maybe it's TikTok Shop."

Skincare Results, Injectables and the Price-Value Equation: Affordable, results-driven skincare brands are outperforming, while medical aesthetics are surging in parallel. Morosini points specifically to "the derm-backed skincare brands or the dermatological brands, the more affordable ones like CeraVe and La Roche-Posay, alongside the growing pull of the lasers and the injectables."
Hair's Unexpected Boom: Hair has emerged as one of the biggest bright spots this earnings season, driven equally by innovation and a cultural shift around hair loss. Morosini notes, "hair loss has just become so much more of a hot topic and I think a lot of stigma has been removed," while also crediting brands like K18 and Olaplex that “have increased what we expect hair products to do for us."

Estée Lauder's Momentum Question: Lauder posted a 17 percent stock jump on its first results under new leadership, but Morosini cautions the win may be borrowed. "The question is how much has Estée Lauder improved its brand's desirability and how much has it benefited from a rising tide," she says, adding that stripped of Amazon Prime Day effects, US growth was closer to "about two percent."

The Danger of the One-Hero Brand: From E.l.f.'s reliance on Rhode to Beiersdorf's dependence on Nivea, this earnings season exposed how a single hero product can mask underlying weakness. "When that's basically all concentrated around one brand, that makes investors a little bit nervous," Morosini says, noting the read-through for M&A: “At a certain point you have to buy the growth."

Additional Resources:
Beauty Is Growing. Not Everyone’s Benefitting. | BoF
Can Estée Lauder Turn a Moment Into Momentum? | BoF
Beauty Is Betting on Fragrance. Why Isn’t Shiseido? | BoF

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