The Business of Fashion

As some of you might know, I’m expecting my second child later this month. I plan to take the very necessary, fully paid parental leave that I’m offered at The Business of Fashion (which should be mandatory everywhere), so this will be my last column for The Business of Beauty until the spring. With a newborn and a two-year-old at home, I expect to be in the throes of chaos, but soon enough I imagine I will find my way back to thinking about beauty industry. Since it’ll be a while before I write any more columns where I unpack my burgeoning thoughts and questions, my letter today explores the things I’ll be watching and wondering about during my time away. See you in 2025! Sign up to The Business of Beauty newsletter now to receive the must-read stories from our ever-expanding, global beauty and wellness coverage.

In 2006, the September issue of US Vogue contained a whopping 625 pages of ads. That same year, editor Anna Wintour became a household name thanks to the hit film “The Devil Wears Prada,” based on the book of the same name by her former assistant, Lauren Weisberger, who, despite publicly denying it, based the story on her experiences assisting Wintour. The movie — which traces the story of aspiring journalist Andy (Anne Hathaway) as she assists Wintour stand-in Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) — became such a pop culture phenomenon that enthusiasm has hardly died down eighteen years later. Unsurprisingly, the internet broke a little this week following Puck’s report that Disney was making a sequel to the film that could reunite screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna and director David Frankel with Streep and Emily Blunt, who played Miranda’s senior assistant Emily. Of course, the business of fashion magazines has changed radically since 2006 and the sequel’s plot is said to follow Priestly as she navigates a difficult media landscape while chasing ad dollars from an LVMH-like luxury conglomerate, where former assistant Emily is now an executive. Read the full story by Amy Odell https://lnkd.in/e8CjChQ2 #TheDevilWearsPrada

In the past, fashion brands could tightly control their perception with carefully managed public relations and marketing campaigns. Today, a brand’s image is largely in the hands of consumers who augment, challenge and reframe a brand’s narrative in real time online. Which fashion brands are the most in tune with their customers, and how do they achieve it? BoF Insights and Quilt.AI produced The BoF Brand Magic Index to provide a data-rich answer to the question of what makes a powerful brand. For the latest iteration, we analysed 50 luxury fashion brands on social media from October 2023 to March 2024, measuring how closely content from audiences on social media matches the content created by the brand itself. Dior led in Alignment by extending its brand codes across its range of product categories, from beauty and fragrance to eveningwear, generating an image of glamour that is desired by and played back by its customers. Other brands with a wide range of product lines, such as Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren, ranked lower in Alignment (46th and 48th, respectively). While these brands generate a large share of revenues from outlets and lower-priced lines, their decision to play at in the low end comes at a cost to the image they want to communicate as high-status brands. Read the full story and get your free sample of the report https://lnkd.in/egEQ5ZH7

Looking for a new role in fashion? Zara, Me+Em, TOTEME and more are hiring: Denim Menswear Designer at Zara: https://lnkd.in/eNJi7fbj Me+Em: https://lnkd.in/e2pUmyfd Product Development & Production Director at TOTEME: https://lnkd.in/e4T-zD5e #Careers

We are crossing over into a new era where competitive advantage for major retailers which will come, not through further extraction of value from society, but through contribution of value to society, argues futurist Doug Stephens. Read more.

The “no-makeup” look sounds like a simple concept, but it’s proven to be a minefield, at least for celebrities. Just ask Olivia Culpo, whose offhand remark to Vogue about eschewing mascara and lip liner at her wedding touched off round after round of backlash, and backlash to the backlash on social media. At its heart, the discourse around makeup and “no makeup” is about the endless quest to look good without appearing to try too hard to look good. “The whole ‘no makeup makeup’ thing is always a bit tongue in cheek,” said Lisa Payne, head of beauty at trends agency Stylus. “One could argue that if you’ve made any steps towards making yourself look better, even if you’ve put a moisturiser on, you’ve cosmetically altered yourself.” Culpo has stepped into a fiery section of internet discourse. Wearing too much makeup can attract cries of fakery. But making a show of wearing no makeup at all can draw accusations of being a “pick me girl” (a woman who is deemed to be rejecting feminine traits to impress men) and allegations of being anti-feminist, or trying too hard to be relatable. Read the full story by BoF's Daniela Morosini.

C.P. Company will become the new fashion partner of eight-time Premier League champions Manchester City Football Club for the 2024/25 season onwards, the company told BoF. City players will wear reworked versions of the Italian outerwear label’s clothing ahead of away games in the Champions League from next season onwards, as attention on football players’ pre-game “tunnel ‘fits” continues to increase. The partnership, rumours of which began circulating in March, is somewhat of a full-circle moment for the Italian outerwear label. Its military-style clothing — such as its “goggle” jacket — was adopted en masse by the notorious English football fans of the 1980s and 1990s and became ingrained in British terrace subculture. This association with British football fandom saw its popularity spread to the extent that to this day, the UK remains the brand’s largest market, said chief executive Lorenzo Osti, son of C.P Company founder Massimo Osti. Decades later, this aesthetic has become coveted by fashion consumers and proponents of trends such as “blokecore” which merges the aesthetic of ‘80s and '90s football fans (predominantly working-class British “blokes”) — clothing such as adidas terrace shoes and football jerseys — with fashion-friendly clothing techniques like tailoring. In Manchester City, C.P. Company will benefit from an association with one of the most high-profile teams in world football. It's also a strategic move to help grow sales in Asia, where City already has a large fanbase, Osti said. Get the full details on the partnership from BoF's Sports Correspondent Daniel-Yaw Miller. https://lnkd.in/dZftQHna

A consortium led by British tycoon Mike Jatania is nearing a deal to buy struggling UK cosmetics retailer The Body Shop out of administration, people with knowledge of the matter said. Read more.

At a recent Singapore retail convention, an Australian financier recounted how his wife spent her time on a trip to Tokyo. Speaking privately on the sidelines of the event, he revealed that she didn’t spend a single minute sightseeing in the city because she was laser-focused on buying a haul of luxury goods. By taking advantage of highly favourable exchange rates, she found that it was cheaper to purchase a plane ticket from Melbourne to Tokyo and buy the items from major French houses in Japan than it was to shop at the brands’ Australian boutiques. With the Japanese yen continuing to plummet against major currencies — last week it dropped to its lowest level since 1986 against the US dollar — shopping sprees like this have become increasingly common. Wealthy and aspirational consumers from around the world have been flocking to the Japanese capital as the yen hit multi-year lows against the euro, the Australian dollar and the Chinese yuan. Read more.

The fashion industry’s approach to DEI is at a crossroads. Several companies have quietly wound down or renamed their DEI departments; where the role still exists, diversity chiefs are featured less prominently on corporate websites. Kohl’s and GameStop are among the firms that have removed DEI language from annual reports, The Wall Street Journal reported in April. In June, Tractor Supply Co. told customers it was shutting down all of its DEI efforts. Few fashion companies are likely to follow the lead of Tractor Supply Co., which has an overwhelmingly rural, conservative customer base. The best-in-class DEI programmes are evolving quickly, tweaking the language they use to stay off the radar of conservative activists. They’re also moving beyond the box-checking approach that centred on numerical diversity targets, instead putting an emphasis on areas like management training, communication and hiring practices. Diversity specialists are also making the case that they should be considered part of companies’ commercial efforts, rather than an offshoot of charitable giving or human resources. “We are in the repercussions part of the journey,” said Amber Cabral, a DEI strategist who runs her own consultancy. “We’re in the part where you have to decide how you want to show up, and [there’s] a lot more uncomfortable, difficult things happening.” Read the full story by BoF's Sheena Butler-Young.