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If you grew up in Manchester, it’s likely you know someone who worked in a cotton mill. For me, it’s my grandma Lilian, who, from the age of 14, put on her wooden clogs at 5am every morning and headed to Elk Mill, Oldham, to work the looms. The Elk Mill was one of the last mills in Greater Manchester to cease production in 1998. Most shuttered in the 60s and 70s, as textile production moved abroad and Cottonopolis — as Manchester was once known — was no more.
Now, after an unfortunate interlude as a hub for ultra-fast fashion brands (more on this later), Manchester is experiencing a second coming as a key fashion city. While many of London Fashion Week’s high-fashion brands struggle to scale their businesses beyond £5 million in annual revenue, amid wholesale declines, Manchester has in recent years given birth to some of British fashion’s fastest-growing contemporary brands, including Adanola, Represent, and Nadine Merabi. The city also hosted fashion shows from international labels, including Fila x Haider Ackermann in 2022 and Chanel in 2023. Puma relocated its operations from London to the Northern English city this summer, while next week, Manchester Fashion Week is set to relaunch for a pilot edition that features three days of talks and shows from local brands.
Many of Manchester’s key brands, including Represent, Nadine Merabi and Private White VC, are missing from the schedule, but the event intends to highlight the city’s outsized cultural influence and prove the concept for future editions. “We’ve got this huge ambition for Manchester Fashion Week and what it’s going to look like, but we’ve had to really scale it down for this first year for the pilot,” says executive producer Gemma Gratton. “Manchester was the foundation of the [textile] industry and we are keen to celebrate that.”
Last month, the British Fashion Council pledged to decentralise fashion under new CEO Laura Weir, and will host several “city-wide celebration” events across the UK in the run-up to London Fashion Week. Manchester is a key city, as well as Liverpool, Newcastle and Edinburgh. Ahead of this event, and Manchester Fashion Week, I headed home and did a tour of several of its most exciting HQs, to meet with some of Manchester’s rising founders and understand why it’s fertile ground for fashion business.
“Manchester is a cultural icon and has increasingly become a desirable place for people to live and work,” says Bev Craig, leader of Manchester City Council. “This summer’s Oasis reunion has shown the impact Mancunian culture has had on British society. When Manchester hosted Chanel’s Metiers d’Art show in 2023, people were forced to sit up and take notice of our city, and I’ve no doubt that over the past year, even more brands and businesses will have recognised there is a thriving and passionate fashion scene to be found here.”
Why Manchester?
Adanola was my first stop. Launched in Manchester in 2015 by Hyrum Cook, the brand — known for pilates and brunch athleisure — is now valued at $530 million, based on its latest minority investment last month from Story3. Cook grew up in Manchester and launching a brand from here “turned out to be a real advantage”, he says. “Our target audience was, and absolutely is, still in Manchester [where people are willing to invest in their wardrobe, whatever the occasion, and the majority of people are intentional with daily outfits]. At no point have I considered relocating. We’ve been in good company [in terms of other brands] for as long as Adanola has existed, and I take lots of inspiration from the other brands around the city.”
Nadine Merabi launched her eponymous Salford-based eveningwear business in 2015. In 2024, the brand hit £40 million in revenue, with 90 per cent of sales split evenly across the US and UK. She started out making her own outfits for events. “People would ask where I got the [pieces] from. And remember people associated premium fashion with London then, so I’d say ‘oh, this designer in London’. I thought, if I said Manchester, would I have been taken seriously or not?” the designer says. Shortly after launching her label, soap stars from Hollyoaks and Coronation Street — which were filmed locally — wore her designs for television awards and events, which helped Merabi get the attention of Selfridges, her first stockist, six months after launching.
Merabi isn’t a trained designer, and feels it’s important we move away from the idea that you have to go to Central Saint Martins and live in London to start a brand. “We’ve got a lot of creative minds in the North. And I think it’s a shame not to let those flourish. Manchester was the world’s first fashion city. It’s nice now how things are coming back full circle,” she says, patching in from vacation to her Salford HQ as I sat with CEO Jacobo Hachuel. “Today, you don’t need to be in London to have a global fashion brand.” The brand opened a store on Mayfair’s South Molton Street in September 2024.
“Manchester’s always had this plucky fighting spirit, whether it’s the City/United [football] rivalry or Oasis and Blur. And now we see it, there’s momentum building here,” says Represent CEO Paul Spencer, speaking from the brand’s HQ in Bolton, where founders George and Michael Heaton grew up. Represent launched in 2011 from the founders’ garden shed. It’s now a global brand: sales grew 16 per cent to £93.9 million, with the US and UK as key markets. A 25-minute drive from Manchester city centre, Represent HQ is a looming 30,000 sq ft space inside a warehouse, featuring a huge functional fitness gym (where employees do classes every morning) and a photography studio. “This was filled with sand the other day for a shoot,” says head of marketing Liam Shannon, while giving the tour. As I look in, the team is shooting product shots of the main line for e-commerce, and another team is in a plush meeting room sampling future collections for activewear line 247.
“Clearly, there’s an advantage to staying in Bolton. We can grow here. We’ve now taken the fourth unit on the site and it’s relatively inexpensive,” says CEO Spencer, who joined the brand in June 2022 from Puma. “We had two or three people joining a week at one time, so we needed to be able to expand the space.”
Shaking the fast fashion stigma
After its industrial roots, in the 2000s, Manchester became known for ultra-fast fashion, following the launch of Boohoo (2006), Missguided (2009) and PrettyLittleThing (2012) in the city. The three sites upended the UK high street, undercutting high street players with low prices and ultra-fast go-to-market strategies. But they’ve been widely criticised for low product quality and poor labour conditions. However, since the dawn of cheaper rivals Shein and Temu over the last five years, these businesses are facing sales declines. And Manchester’s rising contemporary labels are slowly shaking off the city’s fast fashion reputation.
“One of the stigmas with Manchester is it was a hub, still is kind of a hub, for the fast fashion players. So it’s been about shaking off that stigma,” says Melissa Bell, former head of buying at Adanola and founder of made-to-order tailoring brand Atelier Ninety Five, launched in 2023.
Alongside her brand, Bell runs a brand consultancy for other local brands, including Adanola and The Couture Club. She feels the Manchester talent pool is changing, reflecting the city’s growing fashion chops. “The influx of CVs coming from London is crazy today. And talent is willing to make the move to Manchester,” she says. “Before, not many people knew the likes of Adanola or Represent are Manchester brands. Now [Manchester founders] are putting ourselves on the map a little bit.”
While Manchester is increasingly attracting fashion talent, right now it still skews towards e-commerce and sportswear/casual fashion, because of the fast fashion past, Represent CEO Spencer says. “London is obviously still sharper when it comes to fashion with a capital F, and finding talent from luxury brands, which tend to be down there to enable us to elevate, is important. In Manchester, we were finding, when it came to designers and graphic designers, we were pulling from a pool that was more sports-inspired.”
Manchester Fashion Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University is one of the largest fashion schools in the UK, with more than 1,800 students training to be the next generation of designers and fashion change-makers, she adds. But they need even more brands to work at. “I have seen a shift, but I think it will take a bit longer,” Merabi says. “You’ve got so many young, creative, brilliant minds finishing university. It’s our responsibility to make sure that we continue to build these businesses in the North so that more people feel they can stay here.”
A supportive local community
Manchester people get behind their brands. It forms a solid local foundation for fledgling labels, allowing them to build at home and then expand globally. Streetwear and footwear label Clints — launched during the pandemic — is one of the city’s best-loved local labels. It’s one of many Manchester brands born from Covid times, notes founder Junior Clint. “In Manchester, I think you can try things out without the pressure of what it looks like from outside. When I started, I handmade products and sold them online and at pop-ups. And there was almost an instant impact in the city. People out here are very supportive,” he says. Clints declined to share revenues, but now has a thriving business in the US and Europe via its e-commerce.
This week, the brand will stage its own festival with the likes of Mike Skinner, K-Trap, Chip and Children of Zeus on the bill. We meet in the brand’s flagship store in Spinningfields, which has been open since 2022. “We did a pop-up in the store space and then the landlord asked if we wanted to take it permanently,” he says, noting it was for a good rate. “We got our friends to build the interior and it’s become a place for local customers and tourists to come get exclusive products or find things they can’t find online. Our warehouse is only 10 minutes away, so if a customer needs something, we Uber it.”
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Many local venues support young design talent with IRL events, says Natasha “Roop” Fernandes Anjo, founder of accessories label Roop, which launched from Cheshire during Covid and is now a thriving DTC business, specialised in silk bags and hair accessories. “If I’ve ever wanted to do a pop-up, or needed a photographer at the last minute, or if I need clothes for a shoot, I’ve been given so many things for free — the community here is really supportive.” While in London, there are plenty of empty retail units for pop-ups and events, Manchester doesn’t have many vacant spaces. Fernandes Anjo notes that wine shop Kerb has hosted pop-ups for Roop for free. “That’s the nice thing about Manchester. You feel like you can just go and do something if you have the vision.”
Manchester’s founders are all quite tight-knit, and the majority of people I spoke with for this story mentioned cult streetwear label Drama Call as a key player in Manchester fashion. Founded by Charlie Bows in South Manchester in 2017, the label — known for its graphic tees which retail for around £45 — has been worn by stars from rapper Aitch to football player Marcus Rashford. The brand just released its third Manchester United/Adidas collaboration in July, reworking the 1991 away shirt.
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“We had 270 shirts [at the physical drop], and then like 3,000 people came. The queue was bending around the whole of Old Trafford. It was a big moment,” Bows says, speaking from the brand’s studio in an industrial estate in Salford. Stacked with product to the rafters, Bows has renovated the upstairs, complete with a chillout lounge “for celebrities when they come in”. When we speak, Bows is fresh from attending the Oasis reunion in Manchester’s Heaton Park. He got his hands on the famously hard-to-get tickets after Noel Gallagher’s teenage sons visited the studio for some clothes and invited him along.
“Manchester is changing rapidly, in good and bad ways,” Bows says. “Maybe we’re losing our roots a little, but there’s more opportunity now. There are founders to look at as a blueprint if you want to start something up, which we didn’t have when we were younger. And it’s not just fashion, it’s music, photography. It was sometimes hard to gain that inspiration in the city. But now there are so many people doing amazing things. It gives kids and young [entrepreneurs] hope.”
Part of the reason Puma moved to Manchester is because of its thriving young sports community, inspired by its football history. To give back, it just launched a new “R-City” initiative (a play on Manc slang), which will provide free fitness coaching and music production training for local youths, culminating in a free music and sports event next year.
Will Manchester Fashion Week help bolster the creative scene further? It remains to be seen. Many of the city’s key labels aren’t showing, and for now, the programme is focused on talks over shows. But any exposure is helpful, Merabi says. “I hope it continues. Events like that give Mancunians and northerners the confidence to pursue fashion. It’s like when Chanel did the Northern Quarter. It said ‘do you know what? We can be taken seriously.’”
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