This article first appeared on Vogue Business.
It was a tight squeeze inside the pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery in London on Monday night, as scores of designers, retailers, press, PRs, educators and others from across the industry gathered for the British Fashion Council’s annual summer party. Always a fun affair, this year’s event had fresh energy as members of the BFC community waited to hear from its new CEO, Laura Weir.
She did not disappoint. “Tonight, we are here to celebrate not the next British fashion season, but the next British fashion era,” said Weir, to cheers from the crowd. “I can’t help but feel that since Brexit and Covid, we have been sleeping on the creative British asset that quite literally touches everyone. It is time to reset.”
Eleven weeks after she took over from Caroline Rush, Weir used the summer party to announce her first major moves in the role. Among the crowd-pleasers, she revealed that, starting from this September, designers who are members of the BFC will no longer have to pay a fee to show at London Fashion Week. The move will align London with some of the smaller fashion weeks, like Berlin and Stockholm.
“Fashion week is a valuable piece of national IP and our shop window for what creative Britain looks like,” said Weir in the speech. The BFC will also double its investment in the London Fashion Week guest programme, with the aim of encouraging more global press and buyers to attend.
She noted that government representatives from Hong Kong, India and the Middle East have requested meetings with her to find out more about London Fashion Week, and are investing millions in building their own local platforms. “They understand that investment in culture leads to the commercial and reputational success of a nation,” said Weir. “We have all of that in spades, we’ve had it for years — we have the fashion week, the creativity, the ambition — and yet we are losing design talent to Paris, Milan and Berlin, not because of a lack of creativity, but because of a lack of infrastructure to support our designers to make, create, show and importantly, to scale in this country.”
Other announcements included an agreement with the government to fund an additional three years of NewGen from 2026. The BFC will also increase its scholarship funding, though no further details were provided. It did not comment on how it will finance the changes set out on Monday (around a third of the BFC’s funding comes through government grants, while the other two-thirds come from partnership revenue, the membership programme and patrons).
Finally, Weir unveiled that the organisation is going to pilot a new creative education programme called the BFC Fashion Assembly, which will take designers back to their old schools across the country. The project was conceived by Sarah Mower, the BFC’s ambassador for emerging talent and Vogue’s chief critic, who attended Monday’s event.
“Too often, fashion has been a London-centric story,” said Weir. “We must now decentralise in so many ways. We must recognise nationwide excellence and make the UK accessible — and importantly open — to the world.”
There will be more to come. “I am still shaping my strategy and my intention is to build on the great foundations of the BFC — to put designers at the heart, to make mentoring and business skills central to our offer and to ensure our funding models result in long-term impact for the British creative economy,” said Weir. “Every event and showcase we host will be intentional and magnetic, and the BFC’s work internationally on behalf of our members will mark a new era of post-Brexit cultural diplomacy.”
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