The Business of Fashion Podcast

For years, European luxury brands set the pace in fashion, while American labels were often dismissed as overly commercial and too broadly distributed to compete at the highest end of the market.

But that balance is shifting. As many European luxury houses struggle with slowing demand, price resistance and creative inconsistency, a group of American brands is seeing renewed momentum.

On the episode, Diana Pearl joins Sheena Butler-Young and Brian Baskin to unpack what those brands are getting right, and why their recent success may offer a useful playbook for the rest of the industry.

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Pearl argues that part of the shift comes down to timing. American brands like Coach, Ralph Lauren and Tory Burch went through their overexposure phase years ago and were forced to correct course, while European luxury brands are only now grappling with the consequences of aggressive growth. “European brands maybe got a little cocky,” she says. “They raised prices too much and maybe let the creative slide a little. I think as those businesses have grown, it just became more about sales and less about focusing on the core of the business.” By contrast, American brands “really had to recalibrate, pull back, think about who is our core customer and laser in on that message.”
Pearl presents Coach as the clearest example of how this American reset has worked. Instead of chasing quick expansion, the brand spent years refining its identity, sharpening its offer and building around a defined consumer. “They want to be that first luxury bag purchase that someone makes when they’re in high school, when they get their first job and save up to buy a nice bag,” she says. That focus shapes everything from product to casting to marketing tone. Just as importantly, Coach stopped cycling through products too quickly. Rather than dropping a hit bag and moving on, “when they see these silhouettes start to pop off, they find ways to iterate them,” Pearl says, pointing to the Tabby and the Brooklyn as examples.

Pearl says European luxury’s current problems are not just about price, but about value and treatment. Consumers have become more sensitive to whether products feel worth the money and whether the shopping experience feels inviting. “People don’t want to spend their money at a place where they feel like they’re being mistreated,” she says, referring to growing frustration with intimidating store environments, long queues and rigid service hierarchies. She also argues that “cachet can only get you so far,” especially when shoppers no longer feel that the biggest European brands are producing the most desirable or practical items.

Another theme in Pearl’s reporting is consistency. Several American brands now doing well are still shaped by founder-led or founder-adjacent creative visions, and she suggests that stability matters. “Even if consumers don’t necessarily know that creative directors are changing, they see it in how a brand feels inconsistent from season to season,” she says. With Tory Burch, Ralph Lauren and Khaite, the creative point of view feels legible and sustained. That makes it easier to build a coherent world around the brand and evolve it gradually, rather than asking consumers to reset every few years with a new designer era.

Additional Resources:
What European Luxury Can Learn From American Fashion | BoF
The Great Fashion Reset | How to Fix Luxury’s Trust Issues | BoF
The Great Fashion Reset: Can Designer Debuts Revive Luxury? | The Debrief | BoF

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Bella Freud's path into fashion was shaped less by legacy and more by instinct. Despite her family name, she describes an upbringing without privilege or pressure — drawing inspiration from the creative people around her.

After studying fashion in Rome, Freud launched her own brand in 1990, starting with knitwear and tailoring. Japan became an early and important market, helping establish her business. Over time, she built a small, agile label while navigating the realities of cash flow, wholesale pressures and a constantly shifting industry.

But it's her more recent creative chapter that has captured a whole new audience. Fashion Neurosis — her podcast, now in its third season — invites guests from fashion, art, film and literature to literally lie on a couch and talk about how clothes have shaped their lives. Rick Owens, Kate Moss, Zadie Smith, David Cronenberg. Each episode has the quality of something intimate and slightly cinematic — less interview, more confession.

Freud says she didn't anticipate how much the format would change her too. "When someone's lying down, their thought process changes. You start to think from your heart more than your mind." And that exchange, she says, is the whole point. "I don't just want to get things out of people — I want to exchange. It's a conversation and it's quite exciting to find oneself saying things that you weren't necessarily expecting to. It feels emotional and I like that."

Whether through clothing or conversation, Freud's work has always centred on the same idea: creating something that resonates emotionally and gives people a sense of connection.

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Freud's understanding of fashion as a form of power was shaped by her time at Seditionaries, Vivienne Westwood's London boutique. She describes Westwood's designs not as crude punk provocation but as garments of precision and technical beauty: "like rebel uniforms," she says, but "really, really well made… like couture." What stayed with her was not the shock value but the effect on the wearer — the way those clothes gave you "an aura of kind of unfathomability" and, ultimately, "a kind of dignity." It was her first lesson in what fashion could actually do.

For Freud, clothing and language have always been versions of the same instinct. As a child, she recalls feeling "so much impotence and rage" — and realising that if you chose words carefully, "you could have an effect." That same drive found expression first in her slogan knitwear — "Ginsberg is God," "Je t'aime Jane" — and later in Fashion Neurosis itself.

Freud has built her label without the backing of a major group, navigating cash flow pressures, wholesale shifts and at least one near-collapse. Her recovery came not through a strategic pivot but through a small, almost accidental creative act — 50 "Ginsberg is God" sweaters made for a film with John Malkovich, one of which Kate Moss wore, and which quietly restarted everything. Japan was her first real market; M&S, decades later, her biggest platform yet. What connects those moments is a consistent instinct: to do things at her own pace, on her own terms, and to treat the business as an extension of the work rather than separate from it.

Freud says that Fashion Neurosis has taught her "to be visible in a way that I didn't dare before." The format — the couch, the overhead camera, the absence of direct eye contact — creates a setting that is at once private and revealing, and changes how guests think and respond. "When someone's lying down, their thought process changes. You start to think from your heart more than your mind." That revelation has been as much personal as professional. Breaking with the convention of the detached host, Freud puts herself on the line alongside her guests. "I don't just want to get things out of people," she says. "I want to exchange."

Additional Resources:
Bella Freud | BoF 500 | The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry
How Bella Freud Is Sustaining Success in Her Second Act
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Fragrance is booming, but the way consumers discover and buy scent is changing fast. While scent has traditionally relied on in-person testing, more than half of fragrance purchases in the US now take place online. As department stores decline, brands are leveraging new technologies and creative storytelling to reframe perfume less as a single signature scent and more as an accessory, a collectible and part of a wider personal style.

On the episode of The Debrief, BoF beauty correspondents Daniela Morosini and Rachael Griffiths unpack how short-form video, AI tools, layering trends and packaging are reshaping the category.


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Morosini argues that fragrance’s online shift reflects both the broader movement of beauty sales online and the weakening dominance of department stores, which historically anchored prestige fragrance. What has changed more recently is that digital content has become better at translating scent into something consumers feel they can understand. “Fragrance has historically been a difficult category to sell because so much of the marketing around it… how do you explain to somebody at home what a fragrance really smells like?” she says. Short-form video, she adds, has helped “bridge that gap” by making it easier for people to imagine “if I buy this perfume, I’m going to feel like X or Y.”

Griffiths explains that terms like “fragrance wardrobe” and “layering” are not just consumer buzzwords – they signal a real shift in how brands are selling scent. Rather than persuading shoppers to commit to one signature fragrance, brands are encouraging them to build collections, combine scents and buy multiple formats. “A fragrance wardrobe is effectively your fragrance collection,” she says, but the word wardrobe is important because it “hints at that fashion-to-fragrance relationship.” She adds that layering has become a community-building tool because “there’s nothing more niche than when you layer certain things in a way that nobody else has” and create “your own signature scent.”

As fragrance becomes more visual and more digitally merchandised, bottle design and format matter even more. Griffiths says packaging remains central because it helps fragrance function like an accessory, whether that is a solid scent compact pulled from a handbag or a bottle photographed for a shelfie. “The packaging is really important,” she says, especially when consumers want products that “look nice for you to slink out of your bag.” Morosini makes a related point: design can also tell consumers how a scent is meant to make them feel. She recalls how Paco Rabanne’s One Million was intentionally packaged like a gold bar to communicate aspiration, wealth and fantasy before anyone had even smelled it.

Additional Resources:
Prestige Fragrance’s Online Shopping Problem | BoF
How to Sell Fragrance Like a Fashion Accessory | BoF
Why Fragrance Is the Latest Red Carpet Accessory | BoF

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After a season shaped less by shock debuts and more by second and third chapters, Tim Blanks and Imran Amed take stock of the fashion month that was.

“This season was kind of one note for me,” says Blanks. “It reminded me that in that golden age … of the ’90s, you would go to a day that was just bang, bang, bang. That’s what I still crave — that sense of surprise and that sense of designers working at a peak.”

If last season was driven by anticipation, this one was more revealing; in addition to witnessing how their creative ideas are evolving, new designers’ visions are now landing in stores, meeting customers and beginning to show whether they can convert attention into traction.

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For both Blanks and Amed, Chanel is the season’s most convincing success story – not just on the runway, but in the store. Amed describes seeing customers respond viscerally to Matthieu Blazy’s first ready-to-wear in person, noting that “the way customers were engaging with that product — the shoes, the bags — I hadn’t seen anything like that since Alessandro Michele at Gucci.” Blanks argues that the collection’s appeal lies in the intelligence of its details — not in obvious Instagram gestures, but in private pleasures built into the clothes. He points to a tweed jacket lined with a scarf print drawn from a caricature of Chanel herself and says, “That lining would be your secret.” For him, this is precisely why the work resonates: “He says we don’t make fashion for Instagram… and I think that kind of thing will elicit an incredible response from people.”

Gucci prompts the most debate because the stakes are so high. Amed frames Demna’s task as structurally different from what he previously achieved at Balenciaga. However, Blanks is more interested in the atmosphere and coded intention of the show, even if he remains unsettled by it. “I think that in his mind he was making a show about Italian fashion,” he says, adding that “it came across better in pictures than it actually did while we were watching it.” Still, he stops short of dismissal: “There is so much in fashion that I can look at and say, well, it’s not for me, but I appreciate that it’s for someone.”

Just months into the role, both Amed and Blanks see clear signs of Anderson’s authorship beginning to take shape inside the house of Dior. Blanks points to details like the lily pad shoes, which echo the surrealist footwear from Anderson’s past work, noting that “he already has signatures at Dior.” More broadly, Blanks describes the approach as “a magpie sensibility applied to the monolith of a brand.” Amed agrees that the pace of change is striking, saying “the amount that he’s already brought to that brand in such a short period of time is pretty extraordinary,” even if the process remains experimental. “Not everything is successful,” he adds, “but that’s the way he progresses… he’s refining, he’s a refiner.”

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As conflict between the US, Israel and Iran escalates, the threat to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has pushed energy prices sharply higher. That matters to fashion far beyond the pump: oil and natural gas helps power factories, move goods and produce synthetic fabrics used across the industry.

Shayeza Walid and Cathaleen Chen join hosts Sheena Butler-Young and Brian Baskin to explain how the immediate pressure of spiralling oil prices is showing up differently across the supply chain and consumer markets, and why even a short-lived shock can deepen existing strains on manufacturers, retailers and shoppers.

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The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has immediate and severe consequences for Asian manufacturing hubs, which rely on the Gulf for approximately 60 per cent of their crude oil. Walid notes that for many producers, “it’s a supply issue and a logistics issue before it’s a cost issue right now.” She continues: “Every single person is dealing with the fact that oil and gas supplies are not coming through to their countries.” In that sense, the first pressure point is not simply higher prices, but whether manufacturers can secure the energy needed to keep production moving at all. Beyond the physical scarcity of fuel, the lack of insurance for shipping companies has created a logistical bottleneck that prevents essential energy supplies from reaching factories in China, India, and Bangladesh.

As polyester and other man-made fibres are intrinsically tied to oil, manufacturers focused on synthetics are feeling the pressure quickly. Walid says the impact is already visible in India and China, where producers are seeing both reduced supply and rising prices. “Man-made fibre prices were already going up,” she says. In some Indian manufacturing clusters, she adds, “those areas could very well be crippled if the crisis continues because they only use that type of fabric.”

Chen argues that the more immediate consumer effect is not necessarily higher apparel prices, but weaker confidence. She points out that many retailers are still working through existing inventory, so any inflationary effect on clothing would likely come later. “The more immediate effect on the consumer economy is simply psychological,” she says. Even before prices move materially, “consumer anxiety around inflation, even if inflation isn’t here yet, that’s going to affect how much they’re willing, how much they’re happy to spend on things like a pair of jeans.”

Both reporters suggest fashion is more used to volatility than it was before the pandemic, but this kind of disruption still reveals how exposed supply chains remain. Chen says many companies have become “very nimble in the situation of crisis”, while Walid points to the need for more durable supplier relationships and stronger local support. “It’s increasingly important to consider local dynamics for their suppliers and where their clothes are being manufactured,” she says.

Additional Resources:
Oil Shock: What Fashion Needs to Know | BoF
War in the Gulf Tests Resilience of a Rare Bright Patch for Luxury | BoF
When War and Luxury Collide | BoF

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