This article is part of our Vogue Business Membership package. To enjoy unlimited access to Member-only reporting and insights, our NFT Tracker, Beauty Trend Tracker and TikTok Trend Tracker, weekly Technology, Beauty and Sustainability Edits and exclusive event invitations, sign up for Membership here.
Fashion is never standing still. Behind the scenes of what’s considered the current status quo, founders, designers, freethinkers and visionaries are plotting what’s next. And with each new entrant, the industry grows, shifts and repositions itself to better serve the customers coming next. These innovators are the ones who see a different way forward for fashion and are making it a reality.
Founder | Taller Than Your Average and Senior director of artist brand strategy | United Talent Agency
As the music industry begins to recognise talent from Africa and the Global South — the Grammys introduced Best African Music Performance as a new category earlier this year — there’s growing interest from the luxury sector. Connecting luxury brands with next-gen musicians is Irene Agbontaen, senior director of artist brand strategy on the music brand partnerships team at United Talent Agency (UTA) and founder of London-based fashion brand for tall women Taller Than Your Average (TTYA). Agbontaen was the mastermind behind the Burna Boy x Burberry takeover in Heathrow Terminal 5 in late 2022. Agbontaen has since continued to strengthen luxury’s relationship with new-gen musicians, working with brands like Louis Vuitton and Robert Wun, as well as buzzy artists such as award-winning South African musician Tyla, Lagos’s Wizkid and London-based rapper Central Cee.
Founder | Tala and Shreddy and Co-founder | Retrograde
Entrepreneur Grace Beverley launched activewear brand Tala in 2019, aged 22, after making her name as a fitness influencer under the handle @GraceFitUK. Beverley had already founded online fitness platform Shreddy (where she remains CEO) but identified a gap in the booming activewear market for solutions-focused performance wear, primarily made from recycled materials. In 2021, Beverley severed ties with her licensing partner so she could have more control over product development and drop cadence. Today, Tala is an eight-figure business and doubled sales from 2022 to 2023. She’s open with her customers about the challenges of building a business, broadening the brand’s sizing range, and reconciling the need to produce activewear more responsibly with having a business model that encourages consumption. This candidness has helped Tala build a strong community of loyal customers.
This August, Beverley, along with co-founders Gary Meehan and Jake Browne, launched Retrograde with the aim to make it less laborious for creators to monetise their content. Positioned as an “AI talent agent”, it is designed to communicate like a person and can read contracts and digest creative briefs, communicating key takeaways with the creator through text message.
Founder | Flamingo Estate
If Erewhon is the food equivalent of a luxury conglomerate, Flamingo Estate might be likened to an Hermès or a Chanel. Founder Richard Christiansen is building out a luxury empire of produce and apothecary products — and he’s borrowing from luxury fashion’s playbook. Christiansen founded Flamingo Estate mid-pandemic, a small-scale operation offering produce and hygiene products. Since, with marketing savvy from years at the helm of his previous venture, communications agency Chandelier Creative, the Australian-born founder built out a lifestyle brand with a cult following of wealthy consumers, as well as a string of fashion collaborations from Mytheresa to The Elder Statesman.
Christiansen champions slowness, which he takes to be the ultimate luxury in a world where most big brands are fixated on efficiency. The produce is all small batches — in part to thank for the hefty price tags — and Flamingo Estate’s collabs are all in limited runs. What makes Christiansen’s approach unique is the “luxury lens” he puts on food. To him, food is a luxury good, just like — or even more than — a handbag or shoes. This comes through in Flamingo Estate’s branding: product images are editorial, styled and photographed as if for a brand campaign or a magazine spread. It also has a slew of celebrity ambassadors — not posing with the food as they would with a luxury bag, but ordering, eating and tagging it. This year, Christiansen is flexing this celebrity clout with a new book, Flamingo Estate: The Guide to Becoming Alive, featuring friends from Martha Stewart to Jane Goodall as he continues to expand the Flamingo Estate world.
Head of concepts and Head of creative vision | Selfridges
Having both spent a decade working and growing up within the team, Will Wyness and Emily Derrick now head up Selfridges’s creative direction department — the crew behind the innovative and playful concepts for which the retailer is best known. The team spends a lot of time with its head in the future, thinking about the next decade of retail and Selfridges’s place within that. They also steer the day-to-day delivery of a myriad of creative outputs, ranging from campaigns and social content to print products and research symposiums.
Since taking over in late 2022, Wyness, Derrick and their team have delivered on a number of highlights, our favourite one perhaps being The Joke Shop. Launched in February 2024 and situated in the Selfridges Corner Shop, it incorporated classic joke-shop tricks and curated products from Selfridges’s funniest designer friends. The idea was conceived to be accessible to all, with price points working for a pocket money purchase starting at 99p and extending to one-off pieces at more elevated price tags. The project also featured a window commission by artist Max Siedentopf and an art block commission by Mel Brimfield.
The team also ideated Selfridges’s new concept space within the beauty hall called the Beauty Spot, built for residencies and concepts that push beauty retail, as well as the campaign that celebrated the general revamp of the London Selfridges Beauty Hall, with images by Sam Youkilis.
Most recently, Sportopia, billed as “a storewide celebration of sports”, offered a reaction to the Olympics as London geared up to attract the luxury consumers that would usually occupy Paris at this time of the year. The project included a 10-metre climbing column in the London store designed by Playlab. Neither of these are things one would expect to find in a shop in 2024.
Co-founders | Known Source
Both avid thrifters in their youth, Theo El-Kattan and Henry McNeill-Njoku became frustrated with the oversaturation of low-quality goods and the impersonal nature of popular resale platforms. In 2019, the duo quit their respective careers in finance and medicine to launch Known Source, a curated fashion resale platform centred around a network of sellers who specialise in various brands and aesthetics, from techwear to Vivienne Westwood. This summer, El-Kattan and McNeill-Njoku will open a year-long pop-up store in London’s Westfield Stratford, with the aim of encouraging high street shoppers to invest in secondhand pieces. The plan is to provide an experience similar to traditional retail, with expert store staff who can provide style advice and constant product refreshment to create the feeling of newness.
Co-founders | Luxe Collective
Gen Z entrepreneurs Ben and Joe Gallagher launched luxury resale platform Luxe Collective from Liverpool, UK, in January 2018, when Ben was 17 and Joe was 21. The business turned over £7 million in 2023, driven by the brand’s clever TikTok strategy and modern approach to marketing. Ben started posting educational fashion TikToks during the pandemic, teaching audiences about the history behind key fashion figures like Karl Lagerfeld and Elsa Schiaparelli, garnering tens of millions of views. While the videos weren’t direct marketing for Luxe Collective, they drove the business and built trust and authority around its products. To date, Luxe Collective has 1.6 million followers and 78.1 million likes on TikTok. This year, the company became one of the first luxury resale platforms to join TikTok Shop, and so far has made thousands on TikTok live, selling bags from the likes of Bottega Veneta, Louis Vuitton and Hermès to TikTok audiences, paving a new future for luxury resale.
Co-founders | Represent
Brothers George and Michael Heaton launched contemporary menswear brand Represent from their dad’s garden shed in 2011, where they printed T-shirts and sold them online. Today, it’s a global contemporary brand — selling graphic tees, hoodies and trousers — that’s shooting for £250 million in revenue by 2025. Some 70 per cent of its business is direct-to-consumer, reflecting the brand’s die-hard community of fans, which the Heatons have cultivated around Represent and its sportswear offshoot Represent 247. The co-founders have documented the journey of establishing the brand from the very beginning via Instagram and YouTube, with honest and open communication about the challenges of scaling a business, the process of designing the product, and their fitness journeys and personal achievements. In a market struggling with the turbulence of multi-brand retail, the Heatons have carved a community-first path to fashion brand building.
Founder and CEO | ENG Concept Store
Understanding, and better still, predicting the retail consumption trends of China’s young consumers is shaping the strategy of C-suites all across the world. And it’s exactly her intuitive understanding of youth culture that puts Sherry Huang, founder and CEO of innovative business model ENG Concept Store, at the front and centre of this pursuit. Huang has devised a retail-by-day, club-by-night blueprint that positions itself as a hub for cultural exchange that is galvanising the country’s fashion-forward communities around it.
And it’s taken hold: since its inception in 2019, ENG Concept Store now boasts eight outposts spread all across the country, from Shanghai to Chengdu. Huang’s success lies in her ability to harness the concept of co-creation. In fact, she’s been at the forefront of introducing it to the Chinese market with projects like Archive, which featured early works of Raf Simons, Jean Paul Gaultier and Yohji Yamamoto, or a partnership with Chinese photographer and model Jiang Ruiqi to present exclusive Y/Project items. Huang’s motto? Every individual should be able to wear, share and create their own fashion. Looking to the near future, ENG will partner with Haus by Gentle Monster to present brand pop-up events from September 2024, further solidifying its trendsetting position as a pioneer in the intersection of fashion and culture.
Founder | Hender Scheme
‘Sukima’ is the Japanese word for gap or crevice, but it’s also a philosophy that Japanese brand Hender Scheme has brought to its retail offering. Under the vision of Ryo Kashiwazaki, who founded the label in Tokyo back in 2010, the stores bring to light the power of gaps with the aim of redefining shopping. Diverse spaces from large warehouses to industrial car part factories are creatively repurposed in its four flagship stores, each embodying sukima by not just occupying but by enhancing and adding depth to these locations.
Kashiwazaki’s approach goes beyond physical renovation; it’s about curating spaces that resonate with the gaps of existence, blurring the lines between traditional and contemporary, utilitarian and aesthetic. His choice of unconventional settings, such as Kappabashi Street, which is very different from usual fashion districts, aims to transform the stores into destination spots that offer unique experiences rooted in the philosophy of observing and valuing the overlooked ‘gaps’ in both life and design.
This concept extends to the brand’s newly launched ‘Circulation’ concept store in Tokyo, unveiled in February, which serves as a space for repair, resale, customisation and workshops, strengthening the label’s offering of product sustainability while retaining a focus on keeping fashion alive. Kashiwazaki’s approach to sukima illustrates a deeper connection with shopping: blending innovation with tradition to occupy spaces where every gap is an opportunity for discovery. — Emi Kameoka, fashion director, Vogue Japan
Founder and creative director | Palm Heights and Creative director | Water Street Associates
Have you been wondering why much of New York’s most exciting fashion talent — from Luar’s Raul Lopez to Bode’s Emily Adams Bode Aujla — is flocking to Manhattan’s financial district? You have Gabriella Khalil to thank. Designers — alongside restaurateurs, magazines and PR hotshots — have been setting up shop at 161 Water Street, better known as WSA. It’s one of Khalil’s many recently established fashion-friendly properties, alongside SAA Brooklyn warehouse (which hosts restaurant pop-ups and fashion shows) and Happier Grocery (New York’s answer to Erewhon; also stocked at The Row’s Amagansett store). Outside New York, she runs boutique hotel Palm Heights Grand Cayman, where Lopez is a creative director, Adams Bode Aujla designed the uniforms, and Christopher John Rogers designed his sarongs.
WSA only opened this year, but it already has a waitlist. It’s a testament to Khalil’s unique understanding of what makes creatives tick: an ultra-curated space in terms of both aesthetic and tenants. She also makes a point of fostering and amplifying talent: at WSA, rents are reportedly designed to increase alongside clients’ budgets. At Palm Heights, creatives can visit via the hotel’s artist residency programme. For those in New York, look out for events — and membership opportunities — at both locations as Khalil continues to develop them into the cultural hubs she has such a knack for cultivating.
Founder and designer
Dutch designer Duran Lantink launched his eponymous label in 2016, creating upcycled garments or accessories using existing pieces from Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Balenciaga. In 2019, he was an LVMH Prize finalist and presented an upcycled Vuitton x Gucci bag to the luxury group’s CEO, Bernard Arnault. For years, he operated a modest business from Amsterdam, producing one-of-a-kind pieces, working on commissions and creating upcycled capsules from unsold stock for brands and retailers like Browns in London. But after winning the Andam Prize last year, Lantink entered fashion’s “rat race” for AW24, joining the official Paris Fashion Week calendar with a more wearable ready-to-wear offering, which still upholds his commitment to upcycling. Now known for his bulbous, curved silhouettes, Lantink has relocated to Paris full-time to continue slowly scaling his ethical label.
Founder | Glass Factory
William Lasry’s Instagram bio reads “no more gatekeeping” — a term often used to refer to influencers who don’t share where they purchased a certain top or what skincare products they use. In Lasry’s case, he’s shedding light on the inner workings of fashion manufacturing with his 386,000 followers. It’s a much different type of gatekeeping: in Lasry’s view, we should all be more familiar with how our clothes are made.
His company, Glass Factory, was spun out of this idea. In his videos (it’s not just Instagram; on YouTube and TikTok, he counts a combined following of 900,000), he takes viewers inside luxury clothing factories in Colombia, India, Portugal and Italy. Gen Z audiences have responded particularly well, as younger consumers demonstrate interest beyond flaunting their outfits and in understanding where their luxury cops actually come from.
It’s a step in the right direction for getting fashion to be more open and transparent about where and how things are made. With more than 50 factories under his belt already and a team that’s grown from four to 18 this year alone, Lasry’s just getting started. Next, he’ll be building a website for Glass Factory to compile his work in one place and build a platform for manufacturing transparency.
Founder | Fantastic Toiles
The undoing of fashion retail has cast a pall over British luxury. But the silver lining is the introduction of so-called ‘horizontal’ fashion markets, which offer independent designers a way to sell their products while eschewing the demands of wholesale. One of these markets is Fantastic Toiles, which, under the care of designer Nasir Mazhar, “has become a lodestone for those who want to dress as individuals”, according to British Vogue.
No designer pays any commission to partake in the bi-monthly marketplace, just a nominal flat fee. They provide their designs, help dress the chosen shop location and contribute a shift manning the till, the shop floor or dressing rooms. All profits go directly to the designers, and any venue or set design costs are divided equally.
What’s especially promising about Fantastic Toiles is the frenzy it garners despite often basing itself in far-flung locations across London. “We’ve definitely grown since we’ve started. Even when we started, we had queues out the door,” Mazhar told Vogue Business earlier this year. “It’s a bit difficult to measure as it’s a different amount of designers every time and all the designers do different amounts of work, but I went back and looked at the very first till book. People’s sales have definitely grown — some have tripled, some have doubled.”
Is this the future of retail? It would be pretty nice if it was, wouldn’t it?
Founder | One Zero Eight by Save The Loom
Veteran journalist Ramesh Menon is renowned for his faith in India’s craft heritage and his dedication to advocating for the artisanal community, especially in his home state of Kerala. His passion led him to start Save The Loom, a non-profit organisation that provides crucial support to weavers and spinners whose homes and looms were destroyed during the 2018 Kerala floods.
Menon’s efforts didn’t stop there, however. He launched a pop-up store for designers using hand-loomed textiles at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which eventually found a permanent home in a heritage building in Fort Kochi. This space now collaborates with over 40 designers and has become a must-visit destination for tourists. It marries tourism with textile traditions, offering an innovative retail concept and serving as an experience centre with regular talks and workshops on craft conservation. Menon’s work demonstrates that retail can indeed be a powerful changemaker. He is also a mentor to young South Asian design talents.
Founder and creative director | Shabab Intl
Dubai-based designer Cheb Moha is a cultural connector who operates at the forefront of the Gulf’s nascent streetwear scene. Moha was born in Iraq and grew up in Libya before moving to Canada as a teen, where he encountered streetwear labels such as Supreme and LRG. In 2013, he founded streetwear brand Shabab Intl, which specialises in colourful, football-inspired jerseys, combat pants and printed hoodies. He took the brand to Dubai in 2014, where consumer appetite for streetwear has been slowly building; Moha acts as a mentor to younger streetwear founders across the region. A prominent photographer, he’s also worked on local campaigns and shoots for luxury players like Adidas and GQ.
Creative director | Marc Jacobs Heaven
Another luxury label that’s soared with Gen Z this year is Marc Jacobs. Partly owing to the work of Ava Nirui, the creative director of youthful diffusion label Marc Jacobs Heaven, who focuses on content across both brands. Nirui started out as a fashion bootlegger who became known for her unusual mash-ups of high fashion and everyday items. Jacobs met Nirui at an event in New York and noticed she was wearing a bootlegged T-shirt with his name purposefully spelt wrong. He saw the funny side and, after being introduced to Nirui’s work, tapped the young creative as head of special projects at his label before launching Heaven in 2020 with Nirui at the helm. Nirui has helped Jacobs speak to a whole new audience online, with viral tongue-in-cheek TikToks starring the designer himself (with crazy nails or his birthday cake on fire) and buzzy creators including Nara Smith, Gabriette and Sylvanian Drama. The brand has almost 300,000 followers and over 18 million likes on the platform.
Founder | Abra
You might not have heard of Abraham Ortūno Perez, otherwise known as Abra, but you’ve likely seen his work. He’s the innovative footwear designer behind Loewe’s cracked egg heels, Coperni’s kettlebell bag and Jacquemus’s mismatched block heels. Now, the Spanish designer has struck out on his own with his eponymous brand Abra, launched in 2023. After presenting off-schedule at Paris Fashion Week for AW24, the ready-to-wear and footwear label will make its official debut in September with an on-schedule presentation. Abra goes beyond gimmicks with sophisticated garments and signature, spiky footwear and bags. With a host of celebrity fans from Charli XCX to Rosalía, the backing of retailers like Ssense, and the backdrop of a fashion world ruled by novelty and uniqueness, Abra is off to a strong start.
Director and Creative director | Matter and Shape
Trade show director Matthieu Pinet and journalist Dan Thawley came together in 2023 after Frédéric Maus, CEO of Parisian trade fair WSN, invited Pinet to evolve the fashion and design website he’d launched in 2019 into a physical event. The result was Matter and Shape, a new design salon that debuted during Paris Fashion Week in March 2024 in the Jardin des Tuileries. Occupying a 3,000-square-metre space, it features custom-designed stands for up to 50 exhibitors, which this year included Rick Owens, Sacai, Flos, BD, Tolix and Alessi. The fair also featured a range of talks powered by Jil Sander, food by We Are One and a space designed by the multidisciplinary creative Willo Perron.
Launching a design salon in this climate is a bold move, but Matter and Shape welcomed over 8,000 visitors across four days in its first year, alongside capturing the hearts of the fashion crowd. “Matter and Shape have deliberately brought the design conversation at the heart of fashion week at a time the design world is more fashionable than fashion itself,” says Selfridges’s head of creative vision and fellow Vogue Business 100 member Will Wyness. “Dan and Matthieu have read the zeitgeist perfectly, landing best in show at PFW without a garment in sight.”
Matter and Shape will be back in March 2025 in the same location.
Founder and CEO | SukkhaCitta
A former economist with the World Bank, Denica Riadini-Flesch founded fashion brand SukkhaCitta in 2016 as a way to address key challenges she had been seeing in her work throughout Indonesia. The country has a rich artisan culture, but despite fashion being a major employer locally, women had little opportunity to deploy their skills; instead, they were working long hours in factories for poverty wages. Riadini-Flesch wanted to flip the script and use fashion to uplift women working in rural villages while also showing off their skills and local textile production.
Now a farm-to-closet brand offering seasonless designs, SukkhaCitta has lifetime repair guarantees and a zero-waste policy that allows all customers to return old SukkhaCitta products to the brand to be upcycled, recycled or composted. The brand, which only uses natural materials and dyes, is unique because it puts rural women, local materials and traditional craft techniques at the heart of its production model while taking responsibility for the end-of-life stage — and does so in a country that the West-dominated fashion industry views more as a manufacturing hub for export rather than an artisan-based production economy for local consumption. That makes it a success, given that it was founded specifically to be a solution to local economic challenges and not as an afterthought that inadvertently creates them.
Materials are grown using an Indonesian farming technique called tumpang sari, a regenerative practice where multiple crops are grown on the same land — and without chemical pesticides or synthetic fertilisers. SukkhaCitta works directly with women living in villages, never with middlemen such as factories, and has opened several craft schools to teach women skills such as handweaving, sewing, embroidery and natural dyeing, as well as business skills, with older workers training younger employees through an apprenticeship scheme.
Founder and creative director | Diotima
Rachel Scott has had a big couple of years. Since launching her brand Diotima in 2021, the founder and designer was nominated for last year’s LVMH Prize, won the CFDA Emerging Designer of the Year Award in November, and was named a runner-up in the latest CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund (CVFF). She’s part of a cohort of young New York designers making quality, exciting clothing in an environment that makes it hard to thrive. Accolades aside, Scott has been busy cultivating the Diotima design language, developing products and processes that are, as she puts it, not extractive. Never too literal, Scott takes her Jamaican heritage and imbues styles with Caribbean spirit. Scott is carving out a new way to approach production, which stems from practicality. She’ll only ever produce crochet pieces in Jamaica, for instance, but won’t have a collection solely composed of crochet; instead, she blends this with tailoring. It’s both a business and an aesthetic decision: you can’t scale — in sales or vision — with crochet alone.
Beyond the clothing, Scott has big plans for Diotima. At the end of last year, she opened up the brand’s first studio on New York’s Elizabeth Street with her CVFF runner-up prize money, where she now hosts showroom appointments and sales. It’s part of her 2024 DTC double-down. Along the line, she hopes to open a space in Kingston, not just for retail but at the cross-section of culture. An interaction of the Fondazione Prada, if you will.
CMO | Loewe
Loewe has continued to surge in popularity among Gen Zs this year, thanks in no small part to its standout marketing strategy. From internet-breaking campaigns with unlikely stars such as Maggie Smith to the brand’s killer TikTok, Loewe has moved away from the heavily polished, overly ambitious marketing favoured by other high-end luxury players to build brand awareness with younger consumers. The brand has leaned into TikTok trends, partnered with viral content creators and generated humorous celebrity content at its shows, garnering millions of views. And it appears to be working: Loewe has 1.9 million followers and 30 million likes on TikTok, and was declared the “hottest brand in the world” by Lyst for Q2 2024. Chief marketing officer Charlie Smith, who joined the company in 2018, has spearheaded the strategy, prioritising the ideas of his young, digitally native team and continuously adapting to digital trends to keep Loewe ahead of the curve.
Founder and designer
Michaela Stark’s eponymous couture label explores how corsetry and construction can change and complement the curves of the body. Despite scepticism around the commercial potential of her work — which can be sculptural to the point of resembling art rather than something wearable in everyday life — Stark has proven she can straddle both worlds. After collaborations with Jean Paul Gaultier and artist Sports Banger, in 2023, she created a size-inclusive collection for the Victoria’s Secret comeback show. Then, during Milan AW24, Stark launched Panty, a size-inclusive lingerie label supported by Fondazione Sozzani and 10 Corso Como founder Carla Sozzani. With Panty, Stark is hoping to build a broader audience for her direct-to-consumer business and continue to move the needle on body positivity in fashion.
Founder and designer
Few Taiwanese designers have made their mark on the global fashion industry, with Shiatzy Chen perhaps the only expectation. Chiahung Su is about to change that. Like a number of his global contemporaries, the former tailor set up shop during the pandemic in 2022. Su manages to stand out by his unique take on Taiwanese culture, which includes working with the Formosan peoples, also called the Taiwanese Indigenous peoples. His design practice sits at the intersection of craft and anthropology, foregrounding traditional heritage techniques such as weaving and dying. Chiahung Su is a contemporary, unisex label based on the imperfection of reclaimed materials and bespoke textiles in subdued, natural colour palettes using Taiwanese-grown cotton, linen and ramie. In less than two years, the brand was chosen for the 2024 LVMH Prize and secured a number of prestigious global stockists, such as Selfridges. It also sells direct-to-consumer from its retail/studio space located in what’s known as ‘Old Taipei’.
Founder | Dimepiece
Young women’s interest in watches is ticking up, and the female watch market is projected to rise to $26.7 billion by 2027. Enter Brynn Wallner, founder of female-focused watch platform Dimepiece. Wallner founded Dimepiece in 2020 as a resource for women to discover and learn about luxury timepieces, tapping an increasing demand that’s spiked since launch. At the time, young women’s watches was a relative white space. Now, the conversation has bubbled, and Wallner has grown Dimepiece as a resource for young women who have shown an increased keenness to get in on the category — and proven that watch talk doesn’t have to be intimidating or stuffy.
Wallner uses social media — namely Instagram — as Dimepiece’s key vehicle for sharing content and spreading information. Recently, she’s been increasingly active in the luxury space. Last year, she teamed up with vintage and antiques dealer Foundwell to curate a selection of vintage watches for Dover Street Market. Most recently, she hosted a workshop with Fashionphile on vintage watch resale — a prime category in women’s luxury watches.
Co-founder | Jacques Wei
Whether it’s the soft touch of styling, art references or the significance of props, brands need to be thinking visually. Few new brands in China understand the power of image quite like contemporary Shanghai-based brand Jacques Wei, whose identity goes beyond China chic and the trope of East meets West. It’s global but with Chinese characteristics. In fact, the label was chosen by international e-tailer Mytheresa to represent its new wave of Chinese designers for a retail initiative in 2023.
The buzzy brand is helmed by designer Donghui Wei along with stylist Austin Feng, also styling director of W Magazine China. In 2024, it launched a collaboration with local conglomerate Peacebird to widen its reach, and this year, Jacques Wei continues its heritage craft project with the traditional Chinese jewellery line Chao Hongji; based on the ancient Chinese wave technique, these sculptural pieces that accentuate garments are an integral component in expanding the visual language of Jacques Wei.
Founder and CEO | Rodinia Generation
Can a single factory overhaul the way we make fashion? That’s Trine Young’s goal with Rodinia Generation, a micro-factory in Copenhagen founded by the designer in 2018.
With a small team of engineers, Rodinia uses robotics technology to create fashion collections with zero waste while eliminating water in the dyeing and finishing stages. The factory boasts both fast lead times and scalability and counts past brand collaborators, including Isnurh, Mads Nørgaard and Underprotection. In December, the company won Denmark’s SDG Tech Award for Top Sustainable Digital Solution; months later, in March, it closed a €3 million seed round from investor Climentum Capital and the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark.
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
