Welcome to the Scoop: a weekly email series in which I quiz fashion insiders on the stories of the week. This will be a way for the Vogue Business community to synthesize and reflect on the latest headlines and get a little inside scoop every Friday.
This week’s guest is IoDF CEO Leanne Elliott Young. In 2020, alongside Cattytay, Leanne co-founded what was then called the Institute of Digital Fashion as a tech consultancy for fashion brands. Essentially, their goal is to help people like you and me understand what things like digital product passports (DPPs) are and how to use them.
Leanne is also a very recognizable figure in the London fashion scene. Always dressed in big, sculptural fashion moments, and with her signature long white-blonde hair and alien sunglasses, she looks every part the tech CEO. I called her up ahead of London Fashion Week (LFW) to get the scoop.
Hi Leanne! What s the scoop?
We have launched a new entity, the IoDF platform, that concentrates on DPPs. It’s a new business, separate from IoDF (the agency), and it’s a big deal for us. For LFW, we wanted to build something that could showcase our new model for DPPs.
We looked at the LFW schedule, and designer Maximilian Raynor is such a jewel on it and totally in tune with what we care about. We care about people and the planet and how we can connect more people to the fashion week experience. We reached out to Max, and for this upcoming London Fashion Week, we are releasing 20 limited-edition caps together. Each hat comes with a snapshot of the IoDF DPP system, which, in this case, gives the consumer access to the brand’s LFW post-show party. We also really like the idea of physically tipping your hat to get through a door.
Beyond access to the party, does the cap lead you to a website?
The snapshot DPP acts as a portal. You scan and connect directly to the IoDF system, which verifies that the product is yours. It serves as your ticket, with additional brand gifts as incentives to scan. We don’t replace CRM, Shopify, or resale platforms; we sit above them, activating product identity across those systems.
Resale, in particular, is important because so many brands are losing to it at the moment. If you look at a brand like Rick Owens, you buy something in-store, and then it’s worth much more on resale platforms because of scarcity. The brand is getting nothing. So, for us, it’s really about building ROI in resale for brands. With DPPs, brands can tell not just how many products they sold but also how many times they were resold.
It’s really interesting that you chose Maximilian Raynor to partner with. I personally loved the outfit he made for Lisa Rinna at the Fashion Awards, but his name is growing regardless. How do you know what the right talent to invest in is?
I’ve been a part of LFW for so long, and I am emotionally attached to all of the designers. We launched our IoDF Creators fund to support that, but as you said, I spend time across the London communities, art, fashion, and tech, and you really know someone is rippling up when you see people outside of the London art circle wearing them. Art and music communities are always the first adopters of cool zeitgeist brands.
AI, AI, AI… It’s the topic of the year and the century. I know you guys at IoDF were early adopters. How would you advise other business leaders and brands to manage their teams through its adoption?
The main thing to address is the fear of job displacement. So the biggest advice for C-suite and other leaders would be to invest in making your team AI-literate. You can then understand how you can all best use it and absolve the fear together. If you’re not having those real conversations with your team, you end up with a team that’s scared to adopt AI, while also using it 99% of the time.
People, as well as being scared, are curious. So if you’re not building different pathways for your team, from studio floor to shop floor to C-suite and management tiers to work with AI, not only will you not have a good picture of its benefits, but your team will be using it secretly, and likely less effectively.
I want to add that I think there is an AI bubble. You can see the way that the biggest companies are funding one another, and that is one of the first signals of a bubble, right? So I do think there’s a dream that’s being sold. At the same time, AI is definitely affecting everyone’s workflow, and that’s fantastic.
My colleague Hilary Milnes recently interviewed Ferrari chief design officer Flavio Manzoni and LoveFrom’s Jony Ive and Marc Newson. Lovefrom have just designed Ferrari s first electric car. In the piece, Manzoni talks about focus group testing and how it can be a barrier to innovation. What do you think: can you be innovative while making sure you don’t offend anyone?
I have been thinking about this a lot because it mirrors what we are experiencing, trying to get brands to understand DPPs. It’s a structural change, and it’s seen as upsetting at first because they don’t want to change the way they have been working so far. And fashion is so traditional.
Every time we speak to a brand, it’s like a focus group. To start, they don t know who to put us in contact with. They got rid of all their innovation teams; it tends to be one person these days. Same with the sustainability teams. We have to speak to the marketing team, then the social, then the C-suite.
And the entire company infrastructure, the reporting lines, and the commercial models were all built in this different era. And we come in asking these big organizations to move before the consensus is fully formed. And by the time everyone is comfortable with our suggestions, it won’t be innovation. It’s just going to be standard practice because the customers are all ready. They have been scanning things since Covid.
Do you have any trend predictions for the season that just started? What do you think we re going to see on the catwalks?
I think we will see a hard reset on fabrics. No one wants to wrap themselves in petroleum-based fabrics anymore. We know that microfibers are shed in it. It traps heat; you can’t breathe. I think it is going to be a massive conversation, which is great for emerging designers and for bigger enterprises that have already partnered with companies focusing on materials innovation. DPPs solve that.
I also think we will see revealing clothes — everyone wants to show off their bodies now because of Ozempic. The patents on GLP-1s are going to expire soon, which means big pharmaceutical companies will be creating weight-loss drugs for pennies. And since everyone’s going to be thin eventually, being thin will stop being the goal. The goal will be to look sculpted. We’re going to have to gym hard.
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