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When Laura Weir delivered her first speech as CEO of the British Fashion Council (BFC) in July, scores of industry insiders crammed into the summer pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery in London to hear her put her first stake in the ground: “Too often, fashion has been a London-centric story. 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 have been some hints since of what this decentralisation might look like. The BFC’s Fashion Assembly — conceived by BFC ambassador for emerging talent and Vogue chief critic Sarah Mower, and launching as a pilot in 2026 — will see designers visit their old schools across the country, to allow young people beyond the capital envision themselves working in fashion. London Fashion Week (LFW) will also continue to expand its City Wide Celebration, which this September included events in Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle.
The move comes at a time when broader efforts to decentralise fashion are gaining pace. Local authorities, arts councils and universities are carrying out research into the growth potential of regional “creative clusters” (part of the UK’s wider “levelling up” and industrial strategy); brands, universities and local fashion organisations are coming together to lobby local government funding for infrastructure and support such as training and upskilling; there are grassroots efforts to revive local fibres and material heritage; and more brands and designers are beginning to establish themselves outside of the capital.
In June, Fashion Alliance North, a partnership between Leeds School of Arts and Liverpool John Moores University, launched with the intention to link education, industry and government in support of emerging designers in the north of England. Meanwhile, September saw Manchester Fashion Week return under new ownership after a decade-long hiatus, hoping to position the city as a hub for innovation and sustainability. The government also announced that Greater Manchester, Liverpool City Region, North East, West of England, West Midlands and West Yorkshire would receive £25 million each to grow their creative industries while driving innovation and investment.
Arguments for the decentralisation of fashion are manifold. Proponents say it offers the potential to build a stronger, more inclusive and sustainable industry by shifting focus beyond traditional creative capitals. Spreading design and manufacturing activity across regions can stimulate local economies, revive heritage skills and strengthen domestic supply chains. By rooting fashion in local communities and materials, decentralisation encourages more circular, place-based production models and reduces environmental impact.
It also broadens access to education, mentorship and visibility for emerging designers, making the sector more diverse. “It’s very difficult for young people to be creative and sustain themselves in London. In that environment, [many] can’t afford rent, they can’t afford studio space,” says Gayle Cantrell, assistant professor of fashion, product and heritage at Northumbria University, who in 2024 co-authored a paper on the decentralisation of fashion education in the North East. She sees the region as fertile ground for a slower, community-based approach to fashion, away from the press and show cycle that may be felt more keenly in London.
But decentralisation won’t be easy. The reality remains that perceptions, career pipelines, access and opportunities are starkly different for those outside the capital than those within. Can the UK shift the narrative?
Tackling an ingrained bias
The BFC’s Fashion Assembly underscores the importance of broadening horizons for Britain’s young people. But inspiring words alone can’t solve the problem. Some 84 per cent of UK fashion companies are headquartered in London, per the BFC, while London universities such as Central Saint Martins (CSM), London College of Fashion and Royal College of Art benefit from historical prestige that has long seen their graduate shows garner press coverage from major fashion publications.
The average cost of living for students in London from 2025 to 2026 falls between £1,719 to £1,837 per month, according to research by Imperial College London. Additionally, 61 per cent of internships (often seen as an essential stepping stone into the industry) undertaken by recent graduates were unpaid or underpaid, according to 2025 research by the Sutton Trust.
“A lot of our students are from privileged backgrounds, many of them from central London or the home counties,” says Berni Yates, fashion and textiles lecturer and head of knowledge exchange at CSM fashion. Wanting to understand CSM’s low student intake from outside of London and its neighbouring vicinities, Yates undertook a secondment to the North East in 2023 as part of a project with University of the Arts London (of which CSM is a college) and the BFC, which fed into the 2024 paper on education decentralisation.
While there, Yates discovered a thriving local fashion ecosystem that was going unnoticed on the wider stage. There were local brands such as Reuben Shields; further and higher education institutions with links to employers such as retailer Fenwick; Barbour’s manufacturing facility in South Shields; Dewhirst manufacturer in Stockton-upon-Tees; local fashion repair hubs; and access and participation events to engage and train students from underrepresented groups in creative, practical and digital skills.
“When I was doing the secondment, it almost felt like, because I was working with the BFC, [the project participants] had some buy-in, that people were finally listening to them,” Yates says. “Working with three leading institutions on the project meant that people could see we were actually [taking] action and doing research into how this ecosystem could work. The secondment came with real people who actually gave real time to listen and work together, and a willingness to really shift the landscape of the industry.” Still, she says, meaningful change remains elusive.
In its own attempt to prick fashion’s ears, Birmingham City University showed at LFW in September (something more universities may be able to do with the scrapping of fees, another strategic move by Weir). But press coverage was limited, showing how hard it is to get a London-centric industry to pay attention. “It’s almost as if [the media thinks] it doesn’t sound as sexy if it’s not from London,” says Yates.
The disconnect between non-London universities, the BFC and the wider London-based industry is familiar to many fashion educators. “Having lived and worked in London for many years, I really saw the way that people spoke about anybody living outside of the London area with utter disdain. It’s a huge thing to try and turn around,” says Northumbria University’s Cantrell.
“We have to work that little bit harder because we’re not from London,” says Liz Barnes, head of Manchester Fashion Institute (MFI) at Manchester Metropolitan University. She argues that, while LFW is a useful global-facing “shop window” for British fashion, it’s time to expand support for other regions and skillsets. Though the fashion school values its creative design outputs and has links with London employers, Barnes believes in supporting and spotlighting all facets of the fashion industry so MFI’s students (who are largely local to the North West and often the first in their family to go to university, according to Barnes) can see pathways into fashion both outside of London and beyond ‘star’ careers such as design.
“We have to start to reframe what we mean when we talk about fashion,” Barnes explains. “It’s so much more than a material product that you see on a catwalk — it’s manufacturing, it’s engineering.”
Leaning into heritage
Anna Felton studied fashion at Bournemouth Arts Institute and worked, for a time, as a designer in London. Felton now runs her brand Monkstone Knitwear from her farm in Pembrokeshire, Wales. Having launched using only wool from her own flock to make limited runs of cardigans, jumpers and accessories on hand-operated machines at the Corgi factory in Carmarthenshire, she soon resolved to contribute to the revival of Welsh wool and brought other farms on board. Mirroring the success of similar schemes across the UK, Felton ended up oversubscribed from farmers keen to inject new value into their wool, which currently sells at auction for less than the cost of shearing.
The wool tells a story of its environment, colours differing depending on the weather and the time of year it was shorn. It’s inherently place-based, but Felton says she doesn’t necessarily feel included in the UK fashion industry. “I just don’t know what that looks like right now,” she says. “How do you put yourself into that high fashion industry as the person that creates that bottom line product?”
According to a 2025 reshoring report by the UK Fashion and Textile Association (UKFT) and the Institute for Positive Fashion (a BFC offshoot), 100 per cent of survey respondents (UK retailers and e-tailers who collectively operate across 180 countries) said they would like to source — or source more — domestic wool. However, when Felton previously worked for knitwear manufacturer Corgi, she says what the factory produced for British luxury brands was mostly cashmere, which doesn’t come from the UK.
Yates cites Italy as an example of an industry with closer links between design and craft, and a more nationally distributed industry; the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana (CNMI) and the Italian government place great value on the country’s regional fibres, artisans and the prestige of ‘Made in Italy’. But in the UK, industry resolve is too often lacking. “I could list the brands I’ve had conversations with [to supply yarn] and you get really excited thinking ‘this could be it’; not just for me, but for five or 10 farmers. But they always pull out,” says Felton.
If there was incentive for brands to invest in British fibres, continues Felton, the cash influx would mean more regional employment in farming, processing, making, and eventually design and creative roles, once the economies of scale reduce the barrier to entry for locally-driven knitwear brands. “On average, you’re paying £45 per kilo to process yarn in the UK before you’ve made it into a garment. The moment you go over 1,000 kilos — about 1,000 jumpers — you get the price of yarn down to around £12.50,” she says.
It’s not only lack of industry buy-in standing in the way of a more localised vision of fashion. “Our difficulty was getting the local enterprise agency and the councils here to take us seriously,” says Joel Anderson, CEO and co-founder of Kindred of Ireland, a Belfast-based brand seeking to revive the Irish linen industry. It was winning a UK-wide competition to run a pop-up on Oxford Street in early 2024 that finally swung the pendulum in the brand’s favour. “It took the Westminster City Council to vouch for us before our own enterprise agency began to take us seriously. We need outreach with institutions outside of London; not just brands, but business and financial institutions,” Anderson says.
Kindred of Ireland is committed to staying put, working with local mills and seamstresses to make its products and providing local jobs (advertisements for which always have to close after just a few days due to the volume of graduates seeking creative work locally, Anderson says). But the brand’s two months in London were eye-opening. “We thought, if we were here, it would be like rocket fuel for the brand, we would be so much farther on,” he says, citing the press contacts, larger audience and wider fashion ecosystem that is concentrated in the capital. More visible networks, a roadmap of connections for new brands (wherever they’re based), mentoring, and editors and fashion organisations seeing what’s outside of London would be invaluable, according to Anderson.
Fashion’s backbone
In surveying the UK’s wider fashion network (as Vogue Business did in its recent ‘Made in the UK’ series), a different narrative emerges. “I’d argue that fashion is quite decentralised already,” says Andrew Rough, CEO of ACS, a reverse logistics company in Glasgow, offering services such as repair and cleaning. “Yes, the majority of fashion brands and retailers have their head offices in London, but the majority of the supporting backbone to the industry is outside of London.”
According to the most recent census data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), London represents just 15 per cent of apparel and textiles manufacturing. “Our facility is over 200,000 square feet. It’s the biggest in Europe. There’s just no way you’d be able to get that level of real estate in London, the unit economics just wouldn’t stack up,” says Rough. During a time when the British fashion industry is suffering from a crumbling wholesale sector, supply chain disruptions and import duty hikes, Rough believes affordable onshore circular infrastructure can not only reduce risk, but unlock key resale revenue streams for brands with faltering sales. But it’s a chicken and egg scenario. The infrastructure must be there for brands to access, but brands must use it to keep it alive, bring down costs and stimulate opportunities.
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Jenny Holloway, CEO of UK social enterprise and manufacturer Fashion Enter and chair of the Apparel and Textile Manufacturers Federation (ATMF), says skills are ready and waiting to be tapped into. “In 2017, 15,000 people were employed in Leicester [a city known for its garment manufacturing], now it’s a fraction of that,” she says. Factories need a pipeline of work, Holloway adds, which could be helped by an industry-wide directory connecting UK brands and designers to mills, weavers, dyers, cut-make-trim facilities and circularity services. “Without a strong factory base, we haven’t got a fashion industry.”
For British fashion to be truly decentralised, there must be recognition of the breadth of what fashion represents beyond design, as well as significant policy shifts to drive investment into new sectors and regions.
The BFC alone cannot preside over such a shift; it will take many hands and strategies. This might include culture secretary Lisa Nandy making good on her promise to replicate the Paul Smith Foundation model — which provides studio space and business support for designers — to different parts of the UK. For this to be made possible, support from the two new regional landowner patrons in Manchester and Newcastle, announced by the BFC in its last annual report, would be a welcome move.
Decentralisation will require cooperation between organisations such as the BFC, UKFT, ATMF, universities, central government, and local councils to avoid disconnect and replication of efforts, says Holloway. It would also need a baseline acceptance that regional fashion isn’t secondary or substandard, says Cantrell.
Many sources Vogue Business spoke to expressed the view that replicating the fashion week model in different places around the UK won’t necessarily help with decentralisation. LFW is a unique, place-based global draw, and other regions would do well to lean into their unique, place-based values and contributions, these sources argue, creating a diverse and nuanced industry.
“No one city, no one place, has hegemony on culture and arts and media,” says Anderson. “All these places have unique expressions, and have something interesting to add to the conversation.”
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