Dear BoF Community,
Greetings from Amsterdam, where the spring sun is shimmering on the city’s canals, the quaint side streets are filled with people, and Schiphol airport is efficient as ever, enabling a quick check-in when I arrived last night. All was smooth until this morning, when a fire at a power substation near Heathrow shut down Europe’s busiest airport, creating a ripple effect of flight cancellations and chaos at airports around the world that is certain to last into the next few days. As I write this, I’m still figuring out how I am going to get back home to London on Sunday.
It’s a reminder how our travel plans — and business plans — can be thrown off by unexpected events. Five years ago this week, the world was shutting down as Covid-19 spread across Europe and North America, after the initial outbreak in China.
Like many of you, I was at fashion week in Milan when the first wave hit Italy, and then in Paris when things really started to go downhill. By the time I got back to the UK, it was clear things were going to get much worse. On March 23, 2020, when the first UK lockdown began the BoF business had already begun to grind to a halt. Advertising and sponsorship deals were cancelled. BoF Careers clients opted not to renew their subscriptions. Events we had planned in Brazil and China were put on hold.
I knew this was a make-it-or-break-it moment. Having founded BoF in the days of the global financial crisis, I also knew this was the kind of moment when the industry would need BoF the most. Our team jumped into action. We staged an average of 12 virtual events each week on Zoom and Instagram to stay connected to our global community. We started a live-blog documenting all Covid-19-related industry news in real-time. And we covered the pandemic and how it was impacting the fashion industry from every angle, providing analysis and advice on how to navigate the quickly unfolding situation.
Meanwhile, independent brands from around the world reached out to ask for advice on how they should navigate the crisis. There were so many inquiries that Tim Blanks and I set up a WhatsApp group and brought everyone together on bi-weekly Zoom meetings. These calls became a lifeline for a community of more than 50 independent designers — and reconnected me with our core purpose at BoF: to open, inform and connect the global fashion industry.
Together, we wrote a manifesto on why and how the fashion industry needed to use this moment to slow down, reduce waste, and implement change. Fashion had become a rat race of shows and events that took place all around the world. The amount of waste created by the industry also came into focus, as so many collections and clothes were being discounted or discarded in landfills. This evolved into an initiative that we called ‘Rewiring Fashion,’ a challenge to the industry to change its ways.
A piece in the Financial Times by the Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy particularly resonated with me at the time.
“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew,” she wrote. “This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
Looking back now, it’s hard to believe all of that happened five years ago — and how quickly we have returned to our old ways. We didn’t fight hard enough to learn from the pandemic, so here we are, back where we started, confronting all of the same challenges — and more — without the time and space to imagine what the fashion industry of the future should be.
On the brighter side, our business was much stronger and more focused coming out of the pandemic. BoF Professional subscriptions soared in those early months of lockdown, and we are grateful to all of you who supported our journalism during those tough times. We continue to stick to our goal of driving fashion forward.
If you’re not yet a BoF Professional member, join more than 110,000 members around the world today. You can use the special invitation code ‘imran25’ to save 25 percent off your first year of membership.
On that note, there’s a lot to catch-up on from our analysis of the week gone by, including reflections from Tim Blanks and Angelo Flaccavento on Jonathan Anderson’s decade-long tenure at Loewe, the low-down on the impact of Trump’s tariffs on Canada’s luxury and retail market and an assessment of the strategies fashion brands can use to partner with India’s massively popular cricket stars.
Have a great weekend.
Imran Amed
Founder and Editor-in-Chief
Here are my other top picks from our analysis on fashion, luxury and beauty:
1. Making Sense of This Week’s Big Fashion Bankruptcies. News of Forever 21 and Hudson’s Bay facing liquidation this week rang alarm bells for an industry already facing macroeconomic challenges this year. But their failures could have been avoided.
2. A Restless, Radical Mind: How Jonathan Anderson Transfigured Loewe. Anderson is exiting the LVMH owned house, ending a decade-plus tenure that enhanced the role of the designer, fusing creation and curation into one thought-provoking, aesthetically challenging, entrepreneurial package, writes Tim Blanks.
3. Why Aren’t Luxury Brands Signing India’s Cricketers? India’s most idolised sportsmen have the potential to be powerful marketing vehicles for global fashion brands but only if partnerships don’t distract players from the game or cast them as elitist figures in the eyes of their diverse fanbase.
4. How Can Canada’s Retail Renaissance Survive the Onslaught of Trump’s Tariffs? Faced with US tariffs and slowing luxury spend, Canadian retailers are seeking opportunities to connect with local shoppers through broader assortments and in-person experiences.
5. In a Market of Copycats, Handbag Innovators Stand Out. From Alaïa’s Teckel to Lemaire’s Croissant and Prada’s Buckle bag, signature bag shapes can power growth and crystallise brand identity for luxury houses.
This Weekend on The BoF Podcast
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i-D magazine was founded in 1980 by Terry and Tricia Jones, pioneering a new kind of fashion storytelling that mixed street style with high fashion, always with an eye — and a wink — to the future. The magazine has had its ups and downs, and in 2023 fell victim to the bankruptcy of Vice, which had acquired i-D from its founders in 2012.
Enter Karlie Kloss and her burgeoning media company, Bedford Media, which has plans to revitalise i-D under a new editor-in-chief, Thom Bettridge with experience at 032c, Interview, Highsnobiety, and Ssense. Now, Bettridge is on a mission to re-establish i-D as a cultural institution for a new generation — one that values community over clicks and retention over viral attention.
“I’ve worked on viral covers and while they can do so much for your exposure as a small brand, at the end of the day, it’s really like a sugar high. That famous person’s fans are there to see the person they like. Not that many of them actually stick around,” says Bettridge. “We’re moving from this attention era to a retention era, where the smarter brands are figuring out how to build a narrative people are invested in.”
Bettridge joins BoF founder and CEO Imran Amed to talk about his journey to i-D and what it takes to relaunch an iconic title for a new era.
