The Business of Fashion Podcast

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

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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 | BoF
• Jonathan Anderson | BoF 500 | The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry 

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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 | BoF
• Sustainable Fashion’s New Marketing Angle Is All About Wellness | BoF
• Wool Workout Clothes? The Demand Is Growing | BoF 

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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 

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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 | BoF
• How Fashion Schools Are Tackling AI’s Blind Spots | BoF 

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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 

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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?

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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 | BoF
• Matthieu Blazy Puts Enchantment to Work at Chanel | BoF
• Haute Couture’s Heroes in Training | BoF

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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 

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