The Business of Fashion Podcast

Anoushka Shankar has spent three decades building one of the most distinctive bodies of work in contemporary music. She has taken the sitar — an instrument rooted in centuries of North Indian classical tradition — into completely new territory, blending the ancient Hindustani raga system with electronic, flamenco and Western orchestral influences.

At a time when we're bombarded — wars, looming AI risk, a constant churn of uncertainty — her music is a salve. It carries echoes of long road trips with my family, listening to her father, Ravi Shankar, play the sitar.

But this is not just nostalgia; Shankar’s music is rooted in her personal journey. At BoF VOICES 2025, she explained how she has written from joy, from pain, from outrage — and in each case, the impulse to release something into the world is inseparable from the belief that it will matter to someone. Every act of creation is an act of hope.

“I believe that any creative act is a hopeful act, because we wouldn't send anything out into the void if we didn't have a hope and belief that it was gonna reach other people,” says Shankar. “By nature, it is about hope.”

Shankar spoke about how she found her way back to music after prolonged creative numbness following the pandemic, and what the ancient discipline of improvisation has taught her about adapting to a world in constant upheaval.

Key Insights:

Creativity is an act of hope: Shankar argues that to make anything is to believe it will reach someone. For her, the impulse to create is inseparable from the belief that it will matter. “I've written from a place of joy, from a place of pain, and from outrage about global events, but each of those times there is some shred of hope that means it's gonna make some kind of a difference to bother putting something out into the world,” she says.

Small moments of presence can become a way through crisis: After the pandemic, Shankar entered a protracted period of creative silence, unable to write — caught, as she puts it, in “a period of very, very numb and debilitating pain.” The way back was not an act of will but a gradual process, beginning with a single moment in the garden with her children she kept returning to in the days that followed. "If I was truly present, not caught up in my head or in worries or thoughts, that I could really fully experience these moments of joy, even in the hardest of times, and they would give me the strength to move through."

Hope is a choice made before certainty arrives: As Shankar moved into the second chapter of the trilogy, she began to feel that moments of solace were not enough. Against the backdrop of global violence and grief, including the devastation in Palestine, she says she had little faith that the world would change. The album How Dark It Is Before Dawn became her attempt to make music for that space: “I had to trust that things do eventually change, even if I’m in that moment where I can’t see it. I had to choose hope. I have to choose to hope in the moment when I don’t know it’s going to work, or that anything is going to happen. It’s an act of faith.”

Tradition only lives when it is made current. In explaining Hindustani classical music, Shankar describes a form rooted in oral transmission, apprenticeship and improvisation, and links the discipline of improvisation to a broader way of navigating change. Having learned under her father from the age of seven, she sees the sitar tradition as both a weight of history and a space for freedom. “It is about … assimilating all this stuff that could be a weight – the history and how much there is to learn – but finding a way to have freedom within it,” she says. “It doesn’t really live unless it’s present as well. I have to make that tradition current and real to me in order for it to resonate with other people who are here with me today.”

Additional Resources:
Anoushka Shankar: We Return to Light | BoF
BoF VOICES 2025: Live Your Best Life

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The rise of GLP–1 drugs, such as Ozempic and Wegovy, is forcing fashion and beauty companies to rethink everything from sizing and fit to product development. With one in eight Americans having tried a GLP–1 medication, brands are grappling with how to serve consumers whose bodies may be changing more rapidly than traditional product cycles were designed to accommodate.

In this episode of The Debrief, senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young sits down with BoF senior news and features editor Diana Pearl and The Business of Beauty news and features editor Brennan Kilbane to discuss how fashion and beauty brands are responding to the GLP-1 boom — and why the industry's apparent willingness to adapt to these consumers is raising difficult questions about its long history with size inclusivity.

Key Insights:

GLP-1s have turned into a fashion infrastructure problem: GLP-1 drugs are creating a new kind of consumer need — not just smaller sizes, but clothes and products that can accommodate rapid physical change. For fashion, this exposes the limits of systems built around relatively stable bodies, from fit models to inventory planning to alterations. As Pearl puts it, the industry may be talking more openly about fit, but real change will be slow because the underlying systems are deeply entrenched. “I don’t think it’s going to be a change that happens overnight or even in the next few months,” she says. “This is something that’s going to take years to fully address.”

The best brand responses meet customers where they are: Brands such as Soma offer one model for how to respond: create products for bodies in transition without framing that change as something to fix. Pearl says that approach works because it centres practical need rather than aspiration or shame. “It’s really just making it about: ‘okay, your life has changed, your body has changed, let’s meet you where you are,’” she says. Kilbane adds, “It's possible that we’re going to continue to see more people fluctuating in their weight and it’s quite forward-thinking for a fashion brand to accommodate that changing body.”

Beauty is already speaking more directly to the GLP-1 consumer: Beauty and wellness brands are moving faster than fashion in addressing the physical effects of rapid weight loss, from skin laxity to changes in facial volume. According to Kilbane, the category has to have a clearer product rationale for entering the conversation and respond to specific consumer concerns with products and treatments that feel practical. As Kilbane says, “I’ve talked to a lot of plastic surgeons and dermatologists and even some skincare executives. There are things that happen to your skin when you take these medicines,” he says. “I think especially beauty and wellness brands do need to talk to this customer differently, because they are going through a different transformation.”

Fashion’s unresolved relationship with thinness: The GLP-1 conversation has provoked scepticism as plus-size consumers have long argued that fashion sizing is broken, yet the industry appears more willing to change when bodies are getting smaller. For Kilbane, this criticism is fair: “It’s hard to not see any of this as the fashion industry’s excuse to champion thinness once again,” he says. Pearl adds that the debate cannot be separated from fashion’s deeper history of exclusion. “On the surface, it’s about sizing, but you can’t talk about what’s going on and not talk about fashion’s history of championing thinness,” she says.

Additional Resources:

How Ozempic Is Forcing Fashion to Rethink Fit
Novo Nordisk Looks Beyond Weight Loss to Longevity and Aesthetics
At Wellness Resorts, Ozempic Becomes Part of the Menu
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Born in the leafy enclave of Bedford, New York, designer Conner Ives, a self-professed “country mouse,” grew up in a household that taught him two things early: that quality is worth protecting, and ambition is worth following.

At 16, a connection through his mother's dental practice landed him an internship with Wes Gordon, and soon after he moved to London and set about becoming a designer.

In his first year on the BA at Central Saint Martins, a garment from a school project — a duchess satin duster coat adorned with swans — was requested and worn by model Adwoa Aboah to the 2017 Met Gala. The moment announced him to the industry before he graduated, but back at school, the reception was rather cool:

“I remember my tutorial after [the Met Gala], being sat down and told, ‘It’s nice that you can make dresses for people’ – reducing doing the Met Gala as a 20-year-old first-year BA student to that – ‘but school has to come first,’” Ives recounts.

Now, almost six years into building his label, the designer is navigating what it takes to turn creative instinct into a functioning business. His label began with one-of-a-kind reworked vintage pieces and deadstock materials — a proposition that gave the clothes their character, but was not always easy to translate into the wholesale system.

“We would do 1,500 T-shirt dresses and no two were the same. That was always the selling point of it, but that is a very difficult business pitch to get to a Net-a-Porter, let alone a Net-a-Porter buyer, or a Net-a-porter customer,” he says.

This week on The BoF Podcast, Conner Ives joins BoF CEO and founder Imran Amed to discuss what it means to build an independent fashion business without losing the instinct that made the work resonate in the first place.

Key Insights:

Ives’ brand is built on an American idea of high-low dressing: Ives describes his label as shaped by family memory, American fashion imagery and a belief in clothes that can carry time. His mother’s care for old Frye boots and his father’s instinct for wearing things until they wore out helped form a design language that values both glamour and durability. “Things of quality have no fear of time,” he says.

Central Saint Martins gave him confidence by forcing him to defend his taste. Ives arrived at CSM with a clear instinct for American glamour, spaghetti-strap dresses and debutante references – ideas that did not always fit the school’s preferred mythology. His “White Project” from his first year at the BA later became the basis for Adwoa Aboah’s 2017 Met Gala look, but the response from school was muted. “I think that struggle made me a better designer,” he says. “It made me also have to defend what I did so much more so.”

“Protect The Dolls” worked because it came from instinct, not marketing. “My whole aversion to fashion being involved in politics sometimes is that it oftentimes can feel quite self-serving,” he says. Made the night before his Autumn/Winter 2025 show, the T-shirt only clicked when Ives moved from affection to urgency. “My love for trans people was not what was being threatened here right now. Their safety was being threatened,” he says. The final phrase – “Protect The Dolls” – was printed on at-home transfer paper, ironed onto a T-shirt, and went on to sell over 600 units in a day.

Ives’ advice is to trust the instinct before you overthink it. Looking back, Ives says the clearest lesson was learning not to override his own internal signal. “If you are a creative person, you are probably also a reactionary person,” he says. “That reaction is coming from somewhere really pure and really whole – so listen to it.”

Additional Resources:
Conner Ives | BoF 500 | The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry
‘Protect the Dolls’ T-Shirt Becomes a Fashion Symbol for Trans Rights | BoF
Unearthing the New at London Fashion Week | BoF
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Carlos Nazario has helped redefine how fashion media expresses subculture in a luxury context, making history along the way as the first Black editor to style a cover for American Vogue.

But he grew up in Queens, New York, in a big Puerto Rican family with no connections to fashion. His grandmother Efna was his earliest influence — a woman who understood, intuitively, the power of how you present yourself to the world and shared a key lesson with him.

That lesson has guided his journey as he left for Paris as a teenager, came home, worked his way through internships at W magazine and Love in London, and spent seven years as first assistant to stylist Joe McKenna. When he went out on his own, he built a creative world that looked like the one he'd grown up in — and started making images that put it at the centre of fashion.

This week on the BoF Podcast, Imran Amed talks to Nazario about the nightlife scene that shaped his creative identity, what it cost to break into an industry that wasn't built for someone like him, and why the pictures that endure are the ones made with heart.

Key Insights:
The Insulated Class Barriers of Fashion Publishing: Historically, legacy publications relied heavily on unpaid labor that functioned as a class-based filter. "[It] inherently limits the pool of people who can actually apply for those jobs and sustain them,” Nazario said.

The Rigorous Technical Reality of Image-Making: Beyond perceived glamour, corporate styling is an intensive operation demanding physical labour, complex logistics and immense operational precision. People really underestimate the manual labour that's involved,” Nazario says. “You literally are schlepping a rail of clothes up a fucking mountain, or down a beach, or into a dynamic situation where it's 100 degrees or below zero."

The Editorial Investment vs. Commercial Reality: Breaking through as an independent creative frequently required substantial personal financial risk and sacrifice. Nazario recalls, "I was making no money. I was doing all these editorials for i-D and for Vogue and flying myself to London and flying myself to Paris... and I was going into severe debt to build a portfolio and to build a name."

The Evolution of Modern Media Relevance: The fashion consumers today demand accountability and cultural depth from the publications they follow, rejecting the superficial curation of the past. "We have information at our fingertips, we can see every collection online ... so a magazine can't just be about shopping anymore,” Nazario says. “It has to be about a point of view, it has to be about a narrative, it has to be about a conversation that you're having with the culture."

Additional Resources:
Carlos Nazario | BoF 500 | The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry
The BoF Podcast | Ib Kamara: ‘Europe Is Not the Centre of Everything. Where You Come From Matters.’
The Loudest Met Gala Yet | BoF

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This week, Chanel reported its annual results for 2025. Revenue rose 2 percent to $19.3 billion, defying a luxury downturn.

But the number that caught the industry's attention wasn't the top line — it was the acceleration. In the second half, Chanel's sales grew by high single digits across every category and region, before designs by new artistic director Matthieu Blazy had arrived in stores. The excitement alone changed the trajectory.

The momentum has two sources. One is Blazy, whose runway debut last October sparked "Blazymania" — hour-long queues when his first collection landed this spring, instant sell-outs, and a level of excitement Chanel hasn't seen in years. The other is chief executive officer Leena Nair, who has invested heavily in Chanel's retail network, manufacturing and people, building the foundations that helped a creative spark catch fire.

All of which sent me back to BoF VOICES in November 2023, when Nair and Blazy appeared on our stage at Soho Farmhouse on successive days, in separate conversations. They weren't there together. Blazy was still leading Bottega Veneta, while Nair was two years into her tenure at Chanel. Listening back now, what strikes me is how clearly each articulated the values that would define their partnership.

Nair, an outsider from Unilever, spoke with me about what surprised her most about fashion: the human hand behind everything. The following day, Blazy, in conversation with Tim Blanks, described craft not as tradition, but as something more radical in his work at Bottega Veneta and Margiela.

Two leaders arrived at the same conviction: in an industry reshaped by technology and scale, the most valuable thing to protect is the human hand.

Key Insights:
Nair brought an outsider's clarity to what makes luxury different from mass-market business. Coming from Unilever, where everything is industrialised and scaled for "physical availability and mental availability everywhere," she describes Chanel's opposite logic: preciousness, scarcity, hand work and objects designed to last for generations. That shift from volume to value has shaped her leadership approach.
For Nair, responsible leadership means rejecting the "superhero leader" model. She argues that today's complexity makes collective problem-solving essential. "I really feel the days of the superhero leader who has all the answers is way behind us," she says, describing a leadership style built on listening, vulnerability and prioritising people over top-down control.
Blazy's creative philosophy centres on addition, not subtraction. Rather than editing collections down to repeated ideas, he describes his instinct to keep adding — 80 looks with 80 different stories, no colour card, characters arriving from different horizons. "I'm not very good at editing in general," he said. "I like to explore more and more and more." It is an approach that prizes abundance over repetition.
Craft, for Blazy, is not nostalgia — it is a "timeless technology." He draws a distinction between surface embellishment and technique embedded in the material itself. "I'm not adding a paillette on a silk dress. I'm trying to have the paillettes immediately already made in the fabric," he explains. At Bottega Veneta, this produced the leather trompe l'oeil Oxford shirt and jeans that became some of recent fashion's most talked-about garments.
Both leaders share a conviction that the human hand is fashion's most irreplaceable asset. Nair speaks about preserving human creation and relationships in an era of AI. Blazy describes each artisan's hand leaving a different mark — variation that is celebrated, not discarded. Together, their perspectives offer a counterpoint to an industry drawn to technology and automation.

Additional Resources:
Leena Nair | BoF 500 | The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry
Chanel Returns to Growth as Blazymania Kicks In | BoF
Matthieu Blazy | BoF 500 | The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry

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