The Outsiders – Columbia Journalism Review
In January 2022, Glossier—a beauty blog turned beauty company that sells itself as being by and for cool girls—announced layoffs. Glossier was founded by Emily Weiss, formerly a staffer at Vogue, then a CEO who became a member of the rarefied group of girlbosses who saw their market value deflate during the pandemic. A slew of coverage reported the news in the way that fashion media tends to, dishing quick takes on who was “in” or “out.” The reality, of course, was both much worse and much less dire, as Glossier was discovering: a company can hover in the balance between coolness and ubiquity, or obscurity and profitability. Fortunately for readers, The Business of Fashion already had an in-depth story in the works, about trouble at Glossier beyond one woman and one sign of waning success. “It was like, okay, the party’s over,” Brian Baskin, the executive editor, recalled. The piece, “How Glossier Lost Its Grip,” chronicled the company’s rise and its unicorn valuation, accusations of racism and toxic workplace culture, a decline in sales. It quoted from an email that Weiss sent to staff (“These missteps are on me,” she wrote) and from industry analysts (“Scaling is the name of the game, but it seems Glossier may have maxed out on DTC”). It was one of the site’s most widely read stories to date, garnering more than a hundred thousand page views. “It wasn’t some big scoop,” Baskin said, “but everyone still came to us to understand what was going on.”
The Business of Fashion—a publication that is part trade reporting, part networking, for the industry professional who reads financial reports more than the enthusiast who follows Vogue covers—also grew out of a blog. Started in 2007 by Imran Amed, a forty-nine-year-old former McKinsey consultant, it has since developed a reputation for being required reading. BoF, as it’s known, derives its revenue almost entirely from subscribers, who pay to access an unusual combination of journalism, anthropological case studies, and Wikipedia-style fact sheets. Its hybrid newsroom comprises fashion obsessives and repotted business reporters who do not worship designers in the least; Baskin, for one, joined from the Wall Street Journal, where he’d focused on trucking. That formula has been successful. Today, BoF has more than a hundred thousand paying subscribers at different tiers, representing readers from more than a hundred and ninety countries; the highest level, the Executive Membership package, which debuted in April, costs a hundred and fifty dollars per month. BoF’s newsletters reach more than a million subscribers. Amed, now the editor in chief, continues to write and host a podcast; he posts to the BoF Instagram account, too, reaching about three million followers.
The company also holds events and prepares private presentations for conglomerates, offering a view into every part of the culture and economics of fashion: clothing, textiles, accessories, and trends, as well as labor, globalization, sustainability, and sometimes ethics. BoF panels have taken place in Cairo, Kuwait City, Mumbai, Dubai, and, most recently, Manila, where Amed addressed a crowd of some fifteen hundred people. Previous guests at BoF Voices, an annual invite-only conference, include Jonathan Anderson, the creative director of Loewe; Richard Dickson, the CEO of the Gap; and Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai. Other events have been attended by Pharrell, Naomi Campbell, Kim Kardashian, and Kris Jenner.
There is an annual “State of Fashion” report produced in collaboration with McKinsey, consistently one of BoF’s biggest traffic draws. The BoF 500 lists the industry’s most powerful people, correcting for those outside of overrepresented fashion centers in the Western world. The Brand Magic Index uses AI to measure alignment (how closely a brand’s self-talk matches the way customers talk about the brand), engagement (the volume of conversation in relation to the size of a brand’s following), and intent (how deliberately a customer or follower goes looking to find a brand). When I spoke to Amed, he compared BoF to Bloomberg, for its combination of reporting, market analysis, and advancement of technology-driven insights. Core subscribers represent a “very CEO-type, creative-director-type, top-of-the-food-chain kind of audience,” Vikram Alexei Kansara, BoF’s editorial director, told me. The dynamic that results is a constant in fashion, where media is controlled by and produced for a powerful few. As a case in point: BoF frequently reports on LVMH, the uber-conglomerate, and LVMH is a minority shareholder in BoF.
BoF has an international staff of about a hundred people, who work to scrutinize an industry that is opaquer than it’s ever been, even as it generates trillions of dollars and leaves behind a long trail of environmental damage and labor violations. It’s an under-covered beat to which BoF is uniquely dedicated, and that has not always made its coverage popular. “We’re not here to call people out, and we’re not here to be a watchdog,” Kansara said. “But to be constructive we need to start with a basis of fact, and sometimes fact can be unpalatable.” As Amed put it: “We don’t have all the answers or solutions, but simply by asking the right questions, sometimes on topics that haven’t been addressed, we can at least start these important conversations.” The site’s top stories have included a news report on Adidas’s billion-dollar buyout of Kanye West; a detailed profile of Coach as it leans away from “accessible luxury”; and an investigative story examining Lululemon’s failures with diversity and inclusion, including interviews with current and former employees who attest to working in an environment where it’s considered “off brand” to be Black. “What is fashion? It’s the zeitgeist of the time,” Diane von Furstenberg, the designer, told me. “I think Imran is so clever because his work is about the business of the zeitgeist of the time.” After attending a BoF conference, she observed that he had “created a community.”
That is surprising, in a sense. Amed—the child of immigrants in Canada, he never set out to be a journalist—told me repeatedly that he feels like an outsider. (According to von Furstenberg, “He was an outsider who became the symbol of an insider.” She added, “The world is outsiders who become insiders.”) The arrival of Fashion Week in New York, seen now from rows that designate a hierarchy of importance—and beyond, from the concentric circles of buyers and publishers and paid influencers—makes literal the sense of belonging, or not, to an industry in which that is currency. From that network comes an overwhelming volume of content, enough to make critics seem superfluous, a luxury that can’t be afforded. So it is all the more remarkable that Amed—not a revolutionary per se, but someone interested in challenging norms, and certainly expectations—has turned BoF into a fashion-media mainstay. “I believe an outsider’s perspective is valuable,” he said. “You are able to ask questions about how things could be done differently.”
I met Amed at a café in London, a street over from where he started BoF, on his couch. He is a neat, composed man who stands and sits with excellent posture. “My biggest struggle, probably to this day, is that I didn’t know how to channel my leadership skills in a way that people would actually want to follow me,” he said. “Now, arguably, I am leading an industry.” He describes himself as having been an “achievement oriented” kid. After collecting degrees from McGill and Harvard and spending entry-level years at McKinsey (an experience he remembers as “empty”), he went on a vipassana retreat in South Africa and decided, without quite knowing his direction, to quit his job and pursue a creative focus. He set up BoF on Typepad, the old blogging platform, and sent his missives via email—“not a thing” at the time, as he put it. “The idea of building a community, focusing on servicing the reader first and not worrying about advertisers—those were all principles embedded in BoF from the very beginning,” he said. “It wasn’t set up to be a business. For six years, it was purely for readers to share.” The reach of his audience and subscribers (including Vanessa Friedman and Cathy Horyn) soon made Amed an accredited fashion reporter; he was invited to fashion shows. Early posts combined analysis with interviews. “I was this curious guy,” he said. He began to realize that his work was blowing up: A friend who worked in fashion told him that, on a flight to Milan, the woman in the next seat was reading pages of BoF printed out. People he knew from Harvard read the newsletter and encouraged him to get his writing published. “I was like, ‘It is published,’” he recalled telling them.
Amed—named after Imran Khan, the cricket player—was born in Calgary four months after his parents arrived in Canada. His paternal grandmother had worked as a seamstress to support her family; Amed told me that his father has always been able to appreciate a fine fabric. His mother was raised in Moshi, Tanzania, by a leader in a devout Ismaili Muslim community, which Amed described as remarkably global and often persecuted. His parents met at the University of Nairobi, where they were each the first member of their family to graduate from college. Under a Pierre Trudeau initiative, they emigrated along with many South Asians who were forced out of East Africa. (“They had originally applied to Australia,” Amed said.) The family settled in a suburb, which they heard had the best schools.
Parts of Calgary are multicultural, but where Amed lived “there was a lot of conformity, of homogeneity,” he recalled. “We were surrounded by privileged kids, and it taught us about what was possible. It also meant that, aside from our religious community, we didn’t grow up with a lot of people of color,” he said. “I look at my elementary school photos and I’m always in the front row, the smallest person and one of the only nonwhite people.” When Amed was ten, “We Are the World” came out, and the message of solidarity made an impression. He wrote out the lyrics, had his mother make fifty photocopies, and then took them to school, where he managed to herd his classmates into performing under his direction. “I learned then that leadership is ultimately about purpose,” he said. “People don’t follow a person—they follow a purpose. And I think I’ve been honing that lesson since. It’s not about me, it’s about the idea.”
His interest in fashion, though, he kept to himself. Every Saturday, he would go down to his basement—which he described as having “really long shag red carpet, furniture my dad literally made with his own hands”—and tune in to Fashion File, hosted by Tim Blanks. Canadians of a certain age will remember Fashion File as one of two fashion-focused half-hour broadcasts that were, for many, the most access we could get to the “real” fashion industry. (The other show was FashionTelevision, hosted by Jeanne Beker.) Blanks, who had come to fashion somewhat by accident—he’d landed an early job at a culture magazine, which led him to become the editor of the now-defunct Toronto Life Fashion—was perfectly situated when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation decided to explore fashion-focused programming. Blanks provided CBC viewers with one five-minute segment per day, which were then stitched together at the end of the week. He was among a small gaggle allowed backstage, along with Beker, Elsa Klensch at CNN, and Marie-Christiane Marek at Paris Première, to document an industry on the brink of a new kind of fame. (When I told Blanks that I grew up watching Fashion File, he responded that if he had a dime for every time somebody said that, he would have “at least ten bucks.”) “It was filled with people who were different,” Amed recalled. “The fashion industry is made up of privileged white people who grew up in this world,” he said. “I did not.” Fashion File was his atlas.
When he started blogging, it was mostly musings on fashion-business strategy, spurred by his consulting experience. (One of his first professional contacts had been Alex Bolen, the CEO of Oscar de la Renta.) As the reach of BoF grew—“accelerated by social media,” he said—he began inviting peers to contribute, becoming an editor without quite knowing what that was. He recruited Kansara, then a freelance consultant for clients such as Uniqlo and Burberry, to write a column about technology’s influence on fashion. They were scrappy, audacious. Bandana Tewari—a former editor at large for Vogue India, now a champion of sustainable fashion—noted that BoF “made fashion something real, not something for a bunch of fools parading on ramps and putting our noses up in the air,” as she told me. “Within his community, it was well-received. We were like, ‘Who is this person—young, with great ideas, refreshing perspectives?’”
“To be honest, in the earliest days it was a hobby,” Kansara said. “There was no money involved. I guess, in a slightly crude sense, I found that I would write something and the phone would ring.” A few industry people set up an office in New York, while Amed remained in London, where he also freelanced for mainstream outlets. In 2013, they established BoF as a media entity, with its own domain name. Amed began focusing on it full time. And in 2015, he hired Blanks as an editor at large, asking him to elevate BoF’s fashion criticism and help develop relationships with designers. “I brought an ease with the industry,” Blanks said. “I wasn’t an asshole, and I hadn’t spent twenty-five years pissing people off. I’d been a very easy person to work with, and I had an audience.” When they spent their first Fashion Week together, “it was so trippy,” Amed recalled. “That voice—his distinctive voice, with the accent and his inimitable wit, intelligence, everything that he is.” People stopped Blanks to say: “Oh my god, you’re my fashion hero.” Amed knew exactly what they meant.
When Amed first pitched investors, they turned him down, saying that they didn’t, as a rule, back media ventures, which they considered too risky. For a while, BoF did not have a strategy; it was not until 2016 that Amed introduced paid subscriptions, a pioneering gambit for a fashion blog at the time. The founding members of the staff “saw the potential of BoF as a calling card,” Kansara told me, “not just as a platform for thought leadership but something that could be very valuable in and of itself.” Once they built a monetizing infrastructure, Amed had the means to hire professional journalists—a job description with which few contributors identified, in those days. Kansara organized the newsroom around areas of expertise, such as luxury, retail and e-commerce, direct-to-consumer, and global markets. He was also responsible for establishing BoF’s opinion section and overseeing Fashion Week coverage.
Baskin arrived in 2018. From the start, he realized, there was a good deal of overlap between his former beat—logistics, supply chains—and his new one: “I was like, ‘I know how all this works.’” As at the Journal, BoF didn’t determine coverage based on the cooperation of sources. “Being so dependent on access can be pretty harmful to the whole endeavor, because it means you’re only getting the stories they want you to write,” he said. “It can make our job a lot harder, but I find it more rewarding.” Still, there were important differences, including the almost religious importance the fashion industry places on being a “brand.” “I had never covered an industry where brand mattered,” Baskin told me. “Trucking companies don’t really care what you write about them all that much. Even when I was covering oil—Exxon, BP, they kind of knew that people didn’t love them too much. Obviously, during the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, they definitely cared about their image then. But day to day it wasn’t a central question.”
Baskin now runs BoF’s team of American reporters and editors, as well as a few based in Europe. He brought on Sarah Kent from the Journal to report on sustainability—now a full-blown section of the website, staking out a beat that fashion outlets have typically ignored. “Before, it was sort of a hush topic,” Tewari said. “Only the geeks talked about it; only the academics talked about it. BoF put it up front and central, right next to where stories about LVMH exist. Even for diehard consumerists, it’s very difficult to avoid reading and participating in this huge paradigm shift.” Kent covers how the environmental impact of fashion relates to labor and globalization, in stories about deadly heat waves that have swept through manufacturing hubs in Asia, disputes over what counts as “recycled” gold, and exploitation in Italian supply chains. “In a world which is so distanced from the making of, the business of, and the understanding of your T-shirt that was made in Bangladesh, we never get to see the whole picture,” Tewari said. “Certainly not for us who were working in Vogue. I think BoF opened a chapter of going behind the curtain to see the layered structures within the industry.”
In total, BoF aims to publish three strong pieces a day: “preferably,” Baskin said, “a news story, an analytical feature about, say, how to run your business better, and some kind of cultural story.” He also put together the BoF style guide in 2019 and has continued to preside over its expansion, including on topics such as race and gender, working with the global-markets editor to ensure accuracy. Current and former colleagues credit Baskin for cementing BoF’s reputation as honest and reliable. But if he ever feels out of his depth in the land of “capital-F fashion,” as he put it, he’ll turn to a colleague. “Lots of people know how to describe clothes,” he said. “Far fewer people know how to describe the way clothes get to our closets.”
That expertise lies foremost with Amed—who, thanks to BoF, was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire; he brought his parents to Buckingham Palace for the ceremony. And yet, he told me: “If I’m being honest with you, I still don’t identify as a journalist.” Starting BoF was a means of expression, he said. “I’ve always been a super-analytical person, and I applied it to something that I was passionate about, and the result was completely unique in media and fashion at the time.” He’s pleased to see the reporting enterprise that BoF has become. “Clearly, we do create journalists.” It’s been through them, he said, “that I really understood and met people who had been drawn to journalism as a source of seeking truth and holding powerful entities to account.”
The fashion world is expansive: we can count the invitations to a Balenciaga show, but there are few reliable ways to quantify the scope of its influence or the reach of the images that are disseminated from the runway. It is also insular, with a strange etiquette that pervades and a politesse that governs which gossip is allowed to be shared. (To put it lightly: those who are succeeding and those who are failing share one quality, which is that they should know without being told.) Perhaps that is a function of the codependency between so much of the fashion industry and the media that surrounds it. The sale of clothing rests on certain accepted truths about the state of style, governed by conglomerates, promulgated by their partners in publishing and, lately, on social platforms. (“The flourish of a pen fashions,” wrote the philosopher Gwenda-Lin Grewal in 2022’s Fashion Sense, “as does the tip of a finger pointing.”) And there are certain accepted truths about journalism’s role: many people will tell you it is a necessary good, but the actual presence of most fashion reporting is small enough that I have come to think of it as an accessory that charms the eye without commanding much attention. It is a precious few who are influential enough to enact change in this realm—and yet they are disincentivized to do so, because they are the same people who profit from a stasis of ideas and a cancerous growth of scale. The list of good fashion critics is even shorter.
That’s not to say that there have been none, or that we lack a tradition of smart, funny, fair criticism. Eugenia Sheppard stands out, for her reviews in the New York Herald Tribune: in 1951 she opened a story on the rivalry between Christian Balenciaga and the new designer at Dior by writing, “Big Daddy Balenciaga didn’t take the crown from Marc Bohan of Dior this afternoon.” Fashion shows would not start until she took her seat; eventually, her truculence got her banned, so she asked buyers to bring her sketches afterward. There have been other great fashion journalists: Cathy Horyn, who spent much of her career at the New York Times and now writes for The Cut; Kennedy Fraser, whose work has appeared in Vogue and The New Yorker. Diane Pernet’s A Shaded View of Fashion is widely recognized as the industry’s first blog. But compared with most cultural fields, as Blanks put it to me, “Fashion, as far as I’m concerned, never really had a critical canon.” There’s a sense in which fashion is “an applied art,” he said, and with that has come “a dismissive attitude.” (No one, he suggested, would say there’s a critic who has yetdone for fashion what Pauline Kael did for film.) Robin Givhan, a critic at large for the Washington Post, is the only fashion journalist to have been awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
Women’s Wear Daily—founded in 1910 by Edmund Fairchild, and by the fifties the fashion industry’s most important trade publication—is the most obvious historical analogue to BoF; many draw a line between the two. It was “the Bible of the fashion industry, because they told it like it was, and they told you everything that was going on,” Natalie Massenet—the former founder and executive chairwoman of Net-a-Porter Group, and a former WWD journalist—told me. WWD seemingly cultivated a reputation for being “feared and disliked,” though Fairchild argued against that view in his memoir: “Not so,” he wrote. “The real issue is that in the fashion business, it’s almost against the law to tell the truth, and anyone who steps behind the silk curtain to show how raw the business really is can expect a rough time.” When, in 1987, Fairchild put a review of Yves Saint Laurent all the way back on page twelve of WWD, the Times reported that the “placement meant war.” With that, employees at YSL were forbidden to speak with anyone at WWD, and WWD reporters were banned from attending shows. In recent decades, WWD has been repeatedly sold and scaled down, while BoF built its business, rather efficiently, as a digital enterprise. (A spokesperson for WWD provided a statement asserting that the publication has remained “THE industry voice of authority” for a hundred years, capitalization included.)
Von Furstenberg told me that Amed reminds her of Fairchild, but that he’s “kinder.” (She also said, of BoF: “Some people can say that it’s mean or aggressive, but it isn’t—it’s just provocative.”) When Massenet worked at WWD, she sometimes contributed to its famed party reporting, a stark assessment of social rankings: “I did it with my little notepad, trying to get fun quotes of who said what”; BoF doesn’t offer anything similar. The closest comparison might be the BoF 500—which, in naming the fashion industry’s movers and shakers, has rankled some readers. “If you were included, you were really delighted,” Massenet said, “but if excluded, no one liked it, no one agreed with it.” Omoyemi Akerele, the founder and executive director of Style House Files’ Lagos Fashion Week, has appeared on the BoF 500; she observed how the rankings turn fashion’s exclusivity on its head. “Sometimes you don’t feel seen, you don’t feel heard—and it’s not easy for a girl like me, from Nigeria, which is not necessarily known for fashion,” she said. “Being on the list is a reminder to stop, reflect, and tell yourself, ‘Okay, you might not have achieved everything you want to achieve, but look, there’s progress.’” She, too, has heard talk of BoF being “hard or harsh.” But she’s a defender: “Does that mean that what they’re publishing isn’t true, or does it mean they should be approaching it with a soft gloss?” Akerele appreciates BoF’s reporting on the textile ecosystem as a tool for socioeconomic development, and the places where that promise falls short. “If you’re looking for glitz and glam, don’t go to BoF,” she said. “But if you want to geek out on fashion, it’s for you.”
“To be constructive we need to start with a basis of fact, and sometimes fact can be unpalatable.”
Tewari views BoF as redistributing value among people in the industry, or at least reconfiguring their sense of it. (Seeing the first BoF 500, she remembered thinking, “Oh my god, Women’s Wear Daily is going to be pissed off.”) The way fashion ascribes value is, of course, fundamental to how the business operates; I am not the first to argue that the most famous book about clothing was Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. As Anouchka Grose, a psychoanalyst and writer, observes in Fashion: A Manifesto (2023), “luxury garments are the perfect exemplar of the beauty and horror of capitalism” according to Marx. “Way before people in developing countries were stitching SOS messages into Primark garments, Marx was devoting hundreds of pages to the deadly maltreatment of seamstresses.” What, then, is fashion journalism for? What is it capable of? The answer may depend on the incentives, even for BoF.
BoF is still supported predominantly by subscriber revenue, but Amed did eventually secure investors—LVMH being one, as part of a group that holds a minority stake. There are more than thirty members, including Felix Capital, Index Ventures, and the Financial Times, which joined in 2019 and led BoF’s Series B funding round, its last to date. (The FT’s report on the deal referenced the similarities between the two publications; the FT publishes a well-regarded luxury fashion magazine called How to Spend It and produces a “Business of Luxury” conference.) BoF’s strategy and operations are up to Amed, as CEO, along with the senior leadership team; they are advised by a board. The investors share a board seat, represented by Felix Capital’s Frederic Court; they are not consulted on editorial matters, however, and are required to sign a pledge to support BoF’s journalistic independence. (BoF’s coverage of LVMH is always appended by a disclosure of that arrangement.) Contributors have told me that the boundary holds. (And in fairness, much of journalism is compromised by one financial relationship or another, be it ownership, advertising, or some other funding source.) Still, the significance of the LVMH relationship lingers, as it buys up more and more companies, from Celine to Sephora. Meanwhile, Kering, the closest thing to an LVMH competitor, has amassed its own portfolio, about which BoF reports. The number of truly independent fashion companies and publications is vanishingly small.
One fashion professional told me that they’ve observed a hesitation at BoF to break news—that the staff tends to focuson what a story means rather than what it is. Noble, in some senses, but an approach that can delay the ability to contribute to or effect change. BoF positions itself, above all, as providing consultation, such that its influence lies in its ability to get and keep certain readers’ attention. When I asked Amed about BoF’s engagement in political realities, he noted the importance in principle: “At its best, our industry takes the creativity and communication of fashion, and is connected to what’s happening in the zeitgeist.” Still, he drew a bright line around BoF’s remit. “This is an extremely challenging moment in the world, when it comes to the war in Ukraine, the war in Gaza, untold horrors in the Sudan,” he said. “And while we don’t take a position on reporting on those happenings, because that’s not what our readers are looking for from us, when there’s an implication for us we’ll think about it.”
At the turn of the century, Massenet told me, fashion started to be a “consumer sport,” in parallel to “the rise of personalities” in fashion. “Anna Wintour became a hot guest on nighttime television. Michael Kors was on Project Runway and becoming a household name,” she recalled. “You had this consumerization of the trade industry, against this backdrop of people wanting more information to make better-educated decisions. Now, with the internet and social media, every fashion show is broadcast live into the palm of your hand. The consumer can make decisions at a split second, and the trade industry is no longer that go-between for the manufacturers and the consumer. There’s been a real splintering of where the authority is coming from, and now there’s a cacophony of voices, opinions, directions.” Amed, once at the periphery, has climbed his way into the center—where he can now feel others encroaching. The distance between writer and CEO can be short. As Massenet likes to say, “journalists make great entrepreneurs.”
Avery Trufelman, the host of a podcast called Articles of Interest, is one such voice with a loyal audience. Formerly on staff at a popular architecture podcast, 99% Invisible, Trufelman takes a similar approach to clothing, as an entry into the unspoken experience of living inside a material object. “It felt important to focus on the engineering of garments, to treat clothing like buildings,” she said. Given her background, she told me, “I always consider myself an outsider. But I think everybody in fashion does.” She long viewed Amed as “this lofty figure on high—a power broker of the fashion world.” Then he placed her on the BoF 500 and invited her on his podcast. He was well-prepared, generous; she was impressed. Still, no matter how much BoF creates a sense of community for the fashion world, she said, “there is something fundamentally about the business of fashion itself—not the publication—that is resistant.” The validation of appearing on the list was nice, but it didn’t do much to improve her level of access to powerful designers. “Everybody becomes annoying because they’re complaining that they’re annoyed; everyone’s annoyed because everyone is looking over their shoulder for someone cooler. It’s a web of people that don’t want to be in community.” In other words: “Everyone is like, ‘This world is so bullshit!’ Yeah. No duh.”
Recho Omondi—the host of a podcast called The Cutting Room Floor, for which she interviews fashion peers and pros—began her career in luxury retail, at a store called Jeffrey, while she completed a BFA in patternmaking and fashion design at the Savannah College of Art and Design. She started a label, which ran for five years, but mainly identifies with those at “the back of the house,” as she put it: in stores, in production, behind the scenes. She reads BoF for its “proper journalism and proper reporting, in an age where those two words are really fluctuating,” finding it more credible than Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar, and preferable to WWD. “I almost think it’s so necessary that it’s agnostic to whether I like it or not. It just needs to be here.” That’s not to say it’s perfect: she was disappointed when BoF covered a breakout episode of her podcast, an interview with Leandra Medine, another blogger turned founder who faced substantial criticism over labor practices. Omondi felt BoF’s article focused on controversy—the discussion had explored deep-rooted tensions between Jewish and Black Americans, and the ongoing impact on fashion—at the expense of nuance. “But I don’t think it was a reflection of Business of Fashion as a whole,” she told me. “It was a specific case, it was a touchy subject, and I don’t think it was well-researched, nor did it have the time to be.”
Omondi, too, has felt like an outsider in fashion—but she doesn’t take the feeling all that seriously. Thanks to the internet, she said, “some could argue that the people who are the most inside are growing the most irrelevant.” Fashion’s obsession with “exclusivity” has been displaced by “inclusivity”—that’s what’s on trend now. “I think some people in the business are still trying to uphold a status quo without realizing they’re the last ones at the party,” she told me. Massenet said something similar: “I think that it’s inevitable that anyone who is in it at some point was not, and worked very, very hard to get in, and as a result works very, very hard to keep everyone else out. That insularity doesn’t foster a lot of different thinking. Every once in a while, you will see people coming in like a bolt of lightning, just electrifying the status quo, but it’s very slow to change. The industry inherently does not want that musical-chair moment where someone might be left out of the party they’ve worked so hard to attend.”
As Grose writes, “Fashion can make us physically uncomfortable, socially uncomfortable, not to mention occasionally killing the people who make it, while also destroying the environment. No amount of decolonizing Vogue can undo all that.” Perhaps the decentralizing forces of the internet can. “There are no authority figures,” Omondi noted, “and, fortunately or unfortunately, everyone gets to talk.” Reshaping the industry may be rather optimistic, though; as Amed told me, “Even when you do get access, you must operate within the paradigm of rules and hierarchy, which make it difficult to drive for change.” Omondi sees a need to build a bridge between the old guard—“those who do have the information and the skills,” as she put it—and younger people. “The tension between older generations and younger generations, which in my opinion is unlike anything we’ve seen before, isn’t helping anybody,” she said.
That imperative—to evolve in connection—defines BoF’s purpose. “Our mission over time, especially as more social issues move into the fore,” Kansara told me, “has been to educate and lead the industry forward.” In the view of many readers, they are succeeding. “I think it says a lot about where Imran comes from,” Tewari said. “He gravitates towards inclusivity quite automatically.” And yet, the more influential BoF becomes, the bigger it grows, the closer it gets to all that it’s meant to cover and critique. It can be neither “in” nor “out.” Fashion as a commodity has many such contradictions: In the obsessive pursuit of the new, it is an industry with an impossible calculus of sales and sensibilities. The more successful an item is, the less desirable it becomes; the more you see, the less you want. And then you are bored.
The paradox of inclusivity is that it weakens desire from the outside. All the really exciting stuff, then, happens at the edges. “I think I’ll always feel like an outsider,” Amed told me. “It’s wired into my existence. Even now, with the access that I have, you go into these exclusive spaces and look around and realize that if you don’t speak up, there’s no one else that shares that lived experience.” Then he added, “I don’t want to be naive about it, either. I’m inside those rooms. Now that I’m inside as an outsider, what am I going to do with it? If other media companies in the fashion industry took new channels like social media and email seriously, perhaps the opportunity I stumbled into wouldn’t have been open for me.”
Haley Mlotek is a writer, editor, and organizer with the National Writers Union. Her first book, No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce, is forthcoming from Viking in February 2025.
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