The UK-based activewear brand made the job cuts as part of a restructuring at its US offices in Denver, a spokesperson for the company told BoF on Thursday.

”We are taking this move purely for commercial reasons to centralise our operations and continue to safeguard the future of the business,” the spokesperson said in an email statement.

The direct-to-consumer business, which was valued at £1 billion ($1.2 billion) following an investment from growth equity firm General Atlantic in 2020, opened its first flagship store on London’s Regent Street in October.

Gymshark joins a growing number of fashion companies, including Everlane and H&M, who reduced corporate headcount in recent months.

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The UK-based luxury resale company announced the £7.5 million ($9 million) raise Monday.

EBay’s venture arm participated in the funding round, while Cudoni also raised capital from existing investors such as The Daily Mail Group Ventures and veteran retail executive Andrew Jennings.

Resale remains a fast-growing fashion market, despite profitability challenges for large players as they scale. It’s also an area where eBay has been looking to expand its market positioning.

“It is an outstanding vote of confidence in the brand and our ambitions, to receive investment from recommerce pioneer, eBay, during what has been an incredibly tough year for the consumer sector,” said founder and chief executive, James Harford-Tyrer, in a statement.

The latest investment brings the total raised by Cudoni to £14.3 million since its founding in 2017.

The platform says it connects “millions of buyers and sellers worldwide” and has items from over 4,000 brands available for purchase on its site, across categories such as luxury handbags, watches and jewellery, and streetwear.

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Cudoni Hires Former The RealReal Retail Lead as Chief Commercial Officer

The luxury resale site has hired Michael Groffenberger as its first chief commercial officer. Groffenberger previously served as head of retail at The Real Real.

Nabil Aliffi and Stefanie Tsen Ward have been appointed to the newly created roles of chief brand officer and chief retail officer, respectively, the US luxury retailer said in a statement Monday.

Aliffi, formerly global chief creative officer of Soho House & Co, and Tsen Ward, who has worked for the retailer since 2018, will report to Ryan Ross, president of Nieman Marcus Brand.

The two senior executives will be responsible for all areas directly related to elevating customer touch points and building engagement across all channels, the statement added.

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The renowned stylist and current fashion director of Vogue Australia, will replace Edwina McCann in the publication’s top job.

McCann will take the role of the magazine’s editorial director and publisher at News Corp Australia.

Centenera’s first issue as editor-in-chief will be March 2023, the publication said in a statement Tuesday.

“We have worked together for more than 13 years and Christine is my natural choice to succeed me in this role,” McCann said in a statement.

“While I will continue as the magazine’s editorial director and publisher, this change will allow me to focus on our expanding and successful Prestige publishing business at News Corp Australia, which also includes Conde Nast titles GQ Australia and Vogue Living.”

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System Magazine Launches New Bi-Annual Beauty Publication

The beauty push is part of a wider strategy by CEO and publishing director Mike Obenson to turn System from a single print product into a broader media proposition.

Nike’s Jordan brand, created in collaboration with NBA All-Star Michael Jordan, is set to open its first dedicated retail flagship in Milan later this month.

Until now, Jordan products including sneakers, tracksuits and backpacks have been only available in Nike stores, on Nike.com or through the retailer’s SNKRS app.

The 360-square-metre store, named “World of Flight,” is set to open on Dec. 16, and will be located on the city’s Via Torino, a popular retail destination in the Italian capital. The retail concept, which will also host events, was designed to be “at the forefront of streetwear and basketball culture,” according to a statement shared by the company.

Nike may be leveraging physical retail as a way to drive sales of Jordan products after demand for items like sneakers began to cool off this year after peaking during the pandemic. Market analysts anticipate a potential slowdown in sales for sportswear brand, as rising inflation and cost of living affect discretionary spending.

Jordan is the gem in Nike’s crown, accounting for just over 10 percent of the sportswear giant’s overall revenue, and is pivotal to its cultural cachet in basketball and streetwear, thanks to coveted products such as the Air Jordan sneaker line. Jordan brand sales have more than doubled since 2015, topping $5.1 billion in the fiscal year ending in May.

The brand grew out of a collaboration between Nike and NBA Hall of Famer Michael Jordan in 1984, when Nike produced a pair of sneakers for the then-Chicago Bulls player to wear during games in his rookie season. Released for general sale the following year, the model later became known as the Air Jordan 1, one of the franchise’s most in-demand sneakers.

German sportswear giant Adidas confirmed it plans to still use Yeezy designs as it continues to confront the fallout from a messy and costly split with Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West.

The company slashed its profit forecast for the fourth time this year as the end of its lucrative Yeezy partnership and falling demand for its products in China weighed on its third-quarter earnings.

Still, investors are more upbeat about the company than they have been since early October, when Ye released a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt at his controversial YZYSZN9 show in Paris and made subsequent antisemitic statements that saw him lose other brand deals and got him suspended from Instagram and Twitter. Adidas’ shares were trading up more than 2 percent early Wednesday, already buoyed by the announcement that Puma chief executive Bjørn Gulden will join the company in January.

Adidas also provided guarded updates on some of the big outstanding questions around the end of its Yeezy partnership on an earnings call Wednesday morning. The sneaker line accounted for as much as 8 percent of the brand’s annual revenue and Adidas has already said the termination will cut up to €250 million ($251 million) from the company’s net income this year,

Chief financial officer Harm Ohlmeyer, who will become interim chief executive when Kaspar Rørsted leaves the business on Friday, reiterated that the brand owns all IP, designs and colourways relating to the Adidas-Yeezy products — save for the Yeezy name itself — and “intends to make use of these rights” as early as 2023. He added that a dedicated team is working on various options for plans to “leverage the existing [Yeezy] inventory,” with further details to be provided at some point in 2023.

The brand declined to provide detail on how much of its unsold inventory is made up of Yeezy products.

The company anticipates savings of €300 million in 2023 in royalty and marketing payments that would have been paid to Ye and the Yeezy business, Ohlmeyer said Wednesday.

The Yeezy dispute is just one of a handful of long-term concerns affecting the business that Gulden will need to tackle when he begins his tenure as CEO at the beginning of 2023. Its shares are down around 50 percent since the beginning of the year.

Adidas now anticipates net income of €250 million this year, down from the brand’s previous target of around €500 million set in October (the pre-October forecast for 2022 was originally €1.3 billion).

Stay tuned to BoF for updates on this developing story.

This month, as a growing number of businesses sought to distance themselves from Ye, the company that had the most to lose was also the slowest to act.

Adidas’ decision to end its partnership with the artist formerly known as Kanye West and his Yeezy brand will bear a heavy financial cost for the company. The brand’s line of Yeezy sneakers accounted for nearly 7 percent of its annual revenue in 2021, according to Bloomberg. Adidas expects its move to terminate the deal will slash up to €250 million ($246 million) from its net income this year, it said in a statement.

While Ye had business ties to Gap and Balenciaga through the short-lived Yeezy Gap partnership, neither of those companies had invested nearly so much money or time when they distanced themselves from the artist in recent weeks. (On the heels of Adidas’ announcement, Gap said yesterday it would pull its remaining Yeezy items from sale in stores and online.)

The pressure on Adidas to cut ties with Ye had grown too great as the company remained silent while others moved to act. Adidas hadn’t made any public comments since its Oct. 6 statement that the Yeezy deal was under review after Ye targeted company executives by name on Instagram, even posting a fake news image saying chief executive Kasper Rorsted had died, and debuted a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt at Paris Fashion Week. Ye’s comments grew more controversial and veered into antisemitism while he goaded the German sneaker giant, which has a sensitive history with antisemitism as its founder, Adi Dassler, and his brother Rudolf were both members of Germany’s Nazi party.

“I can say antisemitic things and Adidas can’t drop me. Now what? Now what?” Ye said during the Oct. 16 episode of Drink Champs, a podcast that is popular in the hip-hop community, in a clip that circulated on Twitter earlier this week.

Yesterday, saying it would not tolerate hate speech, Adidas announced it would “terminate the partnership with Ye immediately, end production of Yeezy branded products and stop all payments to Ye and his companies.”

Now the company has to chart a course forward without Ye, though not necessarily without past Yeezy designs. In its announcement that it would terminate the deal, it noted that it is “the sole owner of all design rights to existing products as well as previous and new colorways under the partnership,” suggesting it could continue to release Yeezy styles without Ye’s involvement or Yeezy branding.

A Major Sales Driver

The company’s financial challenges make giving up entirely on such a substantial part of its business difficult to bear. Recently it lowered its sales forecast for the year and warned of a hit to its profit as demand for its sneakers and activewear weakens in its western markets and China. It is currently in the process of searching for a replacement for its outgoing CEO. Its share price has fallen to its lowest since 2016.

The tie-up, meanwhile, was a major sales driver. In recent years, the line has “disproportionately contributed” to Adidas’ growth, UBS analysts said in a recent research note cited by Bloomberg.

Ye owns the majority of the Yeezy brand. (His ex-wife, Kim Kardashian, holds 5 percent, he said on Drink Champs.) The deal between Yeezy and Adidas was set up as a profit-sharing arrangement rather than a licensing agreement, Bloomberg previously reported, though it was jointly run with Ye as the creative head and Adidas handling manufacturing and distribution. But Adidas and Ye kept the exact structure of the deal and any other obligations each entity bears closely guarded.

Online, Ye claimed Adidas offered $1 billion to buy him out of the agreement, adding it would cost the company “billions” to keep him or let him go. Ye had also previously accused Adidas of reproducing his ideas in non-Yeezy products without his consent.

The success of the Yeezy line is not something Adidas has been able to easily replicate, however.

“There was a lot of discussion about how other business units could look like Yeezy and produce like Yeezy did,” said a former designer at the company who left in 2021 and asked not to be named.

In 2013, when Adidas first partnered with Ye, then still known as Kanye West, the company’s sales growth had slumped and it was looking for a way to reignite its business. Ye had just parted ways with Nike, and Adidas promised him more creative freedom.

In the years that followed, Adidas’ growth took off as it rode a wave of demand for retro styles like its Stan Smiths and Superstars, as well as novel styles it introduced with its cushy new Boost midsole. The Yeezy business started small, releasing in limited quantities as the brand scaled it slowly to keep demand high, but it quickly became a hit with sneaker fans, providing Adidas with a product whose hype could rival Jordans. In 2016, Adidas cemented the partnership, which was scheduled to last until 2026.

Adidas’ sales growth peaked in 2018, however, and while the Yeezy business has remained strong, many of the company’s other styles have cooled.

Whether shoppers will still snap the products up with the same fervour remains to be seen. The resale market for Yeezy sneakers had remained strong in recent weeks, despite the controversy around the artist.

An analysis by Altan Insights, a data and research provider focused on alternative assets, found only a slight dip in Yeezy resale values on the marketplace GOAT, in line with a broader downturn in the secondhand sneaker market. On StockX, several Yeezy styles appear to be selling quickly and their prices beginning to tick up, presumably as buyers look to grab up what Yeezy stock remains, either to wear or flip later.

For Adidas, whether it can sell Yeezy designs without the Yeezy name may depend on whether shoppers wanted the designs themselves or the association with the artist.

Internal and External Pressure

In the wake of Ye’s comments, Adidas staff had begun to express their concerns about the partnership, according to an Adidas employee who asked not to be named because of the sensitive nature of the subject.

“I have to say I am hurt and disappointed by the complete silence of this company after the horrendous anti-semitic comments from someone that acts as a brand ambassador, Kanye West,” another employee who identified themselves as Jewish wrote in a post on Adidas’ internal communications platform on Oct. 10, according to a screenshot of the message shared with BoF. “There has been no distancing ourselves as a company, no condemnation, and perhaps most importantly, no reaching out to those like myself.”

After the message was posted, executives jumped in to reassure the employee they were seriously evaluating the relationship, according to the Adidas employee who spoke with BoF.

On Monday, the day before Adidas announced the end of the Yeezy partnership, at least two Adidas employees, Phillip Matos and Sarah Camhi, posted public messages on LinkedIn addressing Adidas’ silence.

“As a member of the Jewish community, I can no longer stay silent on behalf of the brand that employs me,” wrote Camhi, a director at the company according to her LinkedIn profile. “We have dropped adidas [sic] athletes for using steroids and being difficult to work with but are unwilling to denounce hate speech, the perpetuation of dangerous stereotypes and blatant racism by one of our top brand partners.”

Adidas declined to offer any additional comment.

The comments may not have rivalled the outpouring of anger Adidas faced from employees in 2020 in protests against a company culture they said sidelined Black and minority staff, even as it publicly claimed solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. But they added weight to the public scrutiny Adidas faced over its inaction on its ties to Ye. Adidas may have faced little choice but to end the Yeezy collaboration, valuable as it was to the brand.

Now the company has another challenge ahead. It needs to reimagine its business without the Yeezy sales it had come to rely on.

Investors are undoubtedly waiting to hear its plans too. The company’s stock at one point fell more than 6 percent after news broke that it would cease its Yeezy collaboration.

The German sportswear giant has broken its silence over the dispute with Ye, the artist and designer formerly known as Kanye West, who accused the brand of effectively shutting him out of his namesake sneaker line in a series of now-deleted Instagram posts in August and early September.

“After repeated efforts to privately resolve the situation, we have taken the decision to place the partnership under review,” an Adidas spokesperson told BoF in an email Thursday.

“We are proud of our team that has worked tirelessly throughout our collaboration with Ye and the iconic products that were born from it,” the statement added. “We also recognise that all successful partnerships are rooted in mutual respect and shared values.”

Ye’s representatives were not immediately available for comment.

The news comes days after Ye courted controversy once again at Paris Fashion Week, unleashing a torrent of Instagram posts attacking industry figures, some of whom had criticised the Monday night presentation of his YZYSZN9 collection, which featured a T-shirt emblazoned with “White Lives Matter,” a slogan widely associated with hate groups.

Terminating the Yeezy deal, which is set to run until 2026, would constitute a significant dent in Adidas’ revenues. Sales for Yeezy’s Adidas sneakers grew 31 percent year-on-year to nearly $1.7 billion in 2021, accounting for nearly 7 percent of the brand’s annual revenue, according to Bloomberg News, which cited private documents from banking firm UBS.

On Sept. 4, Ye claimed to his 17 million Instagram followers that Adidas had offered him a $1 billion buyout from his Yeezy venture.Ye also targeted Adidas’ chief executive, posting an image of a mock New York Times obituary, which read “Kaspar Rorsted also dead at 60.” Later, he posted a series of images singling out the brand’s senior vice president, Daniel Cherry III, as well as screenshots of the bios of members of the Adidas executive board.

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Luxury is over its streetwear obsession.

This season, sneakers and hoodies rarely graced the fashion week shows of megabrands in Milan and Paris as they did in previous years, while luxury-streetwear tie-ups such as Air Jordan and Dior or Supreme and Louis Vuitton have become less frequent.

Balenciaga, which under creative director Demna made hoodies and chunky sneakers luxury essentials, has since widened its focus to couture and red carpet dressing. Off-White, too, has recently pursued a style closer to traditional luxury than streetwear, incorporating tailored suiting and launching an haute couture line. Boots and loafers far outnumbered sneakers during the label’s Spring/Summer show in Paris on Thursday, its first under the artistic direction of Ib Kamara.

There’s a reason so many brands are pivoting. After dominating fashion for the better part of the last decade, streetwear is finally falling out of style. It’s partly down to the natural ebb and flow of fashion trends: retailers note that hoodies and sneakers, while still popular, now face competition from loafers and oxford shirts as the menswear silhouette evolves in a more preppy direction. (Men currently make up the majority of streetwear consumers.)

Meanwhile, many consumers see pure streetwear brands as having become overly commercialised and having lost connection with their roots in 1980s street culture, hip-hop and skateboarding.

“Streetwear has switched from being what people on the street are wearing, as an organic thing, to what big corporations are telling them to wear,” said writer Derek Guy.

But just like the skinny jean, another seemingly immortal trend that was recently knocked off its perch, hoodies and sneakers aren’t going away any time soon. These items have been absorbed into brands’ offerings — Bernstein analysis in July noted that sneakers continue to “dominate men’s footwear.” Streetwear’s deep cultural history too means it will always have a place in fashion: menswear brands like Aimé Leon Dore and Noah that combine tailored looks with cargo pants, casual shirting and workwear are heavily influenced by streetwear without falling neatly into that category.

And there are still plenty of die-hard fans of 2010s-era streetwear. Supreme, under parent company VF Corp., is expected to generate $600 million in revenue in 2022, up from $500 million last year. Supreme remains the number one traded brand for apparel on StockX since 2020, according to the resale platform.

There’s also a new generation of independent brands like London-based Corteiz, Dutch label Daily Paper, Ghanaian brand Free The Youth and Nigerian skate collective Motherlan that have found success by harkening back to the original paradigm of streetwear: align with niche communities and their values, and rely on them as the first and most passionate ambassadors of the brand.

To put it another way, streetwear isn’t dead, it’s evolved.

“In menswear especially, it’s now more about people wanting to pair tailored trousers or a polo with a pair of sneakers, rather than a whole streetwear ‘fit,’” menswear consultant and Twitter pundit Chris Black told BoF in July.

Rise to the Mainstream

Streetwear emerged out of powerful cultural movements in the New York City hip-hop scene and the skate crews of Los Angeles. Rappers like Lil Kim and Biggie Smalls pioneered early streetwear staples like bucket hats and baggy tracksuits. In the 1990s and early 2000s, this particular style was commercialised by designers like Daymond John of FUBU, James Jebbia of Supreme, Shawn Stussy, and by Nigo and Hiroshi Fujiwara in Japan, where a vibrant scene grew out of Tokyo’s Harajuku district.

It wasn’t until the 2010s that streetwear began to infiltrate the world of luxury fashion. One watershed moment was captured in a now-famous image of Ye (the artist and designer formerly known as Kanye West) and Virgil Abloh outside the Comme des Garçons showroom during Paris Fashion Week in 2009, posing in eye-catching — and at first, heavily ridiculed — streetwear looks.

In 2013, Abloh founded Off-White, an evolution of his previous label, Pyrex Vision. Off-White went on to become one of fashion’s most in-demand brands, and embarked on high-profile collaborations with Moncler, Nike and countless others. Abloh popularised his trademark quotation marks — Jordan sneakers with “AIR” printed on the midsole — a gentle ironic knock at the conventions of the fashion industry.

Five years later, Louis Vuitton would go on to hire Abloh — a self-proclaimed fashion outsider — as its artistic director for menswear. In 2019, Dior collaborated with Nike’s Jordan brand, a capsule inspired by rapper Travis Scott. Last year, LVMH took a 60 percent stake in the trademark of Abloh’s Off-White.

But luxury’s newfound love of streetwear had a limited shelf life. The cyclical nature of fashion and the persistent demand for newness meant that hoodies, puffer jackets and sneakers couldn’t stay in style forever. Collaborations between luxury and streetwear brands also began to lose their novelty as they became more common. Abloh’s death may have marked the end of an era: Off-White, which for years reliably topped Lyst’s index of the most-searched brands on its platform, fell to 19th in the July edition.

“This shift away from streetwear came about because many [luxury] brands and designers rushed to the streetwear space, therefore diluting its authenticity,” said Chris Kyvetos, menswear buying director at Mytheresa.

New Champions

Culturally, the current streetwear market is now back to being dominated by small but influential brands. Much like Abloh nearly a decade ago, these labels’ big online fan bases, who reliably turn out in person for drops too, allow them to attract collaborations with bigger players. Last month, Daily Paper partnered with Adidas to design a playing kit for Dutch football team Ajax, while UK-based sneaker start-up Clints partnered with Patta to introduce its latest shoe, earlier this year. Free The Youth has collaborated with Off-White on limited edition products and community initiatives like building Ghana’s first-ever skatepark.

“These smaller brands are successful because regardless of the product, you can guarantee they have highly engaged audiences who will buy into whatever they are selling,” said Black.

Atlanta-based streetwear boutique A Ma Maniere has become another coveted collaborator. It is regularly tapped by Nike’s Jordan brand for collaborations and product launches, and co-designed a capsule collection with Lanvin in January that featured tailored tracksuits, fleece hoodies and sneakers.

“Streetwear is still a very in-demand category for Gen-Z consumers … it definitely has become more democratised with far more options [brands] now,” said Joe Wilkinson, co-founder and chief executive of Heat, a mystery box retailer which has sold over 30,000 boxes containing clothing and footwear from brands like Heron Preston, Palm Angels, Balenciaga and Off-White since the company launched in 2019.

Meanwhile, new brands are still finding success in the classic streetwear playbook of selling logo-heavy merch — which can range from one-off graphic tees to random branded objects like trucker hats, tote bags or skateboards — related to a niche interest group or subject matter before reaching a wider range of consumers.

Patta and Daily Paper began as a cult sneaker store and a style-culture blog, respectively, before branching out into apparel production. These brands also use a scarcity-driven drop model before flooding the market when demand peaks.

These brands reflect streetwear’s irreverence to fashion — creatives without formal design training selling their merch and clothing directly to their fans, operating outside the industry’s confines.

Corteiz, which launched in 2017, is recognisable on the streets of London and beyond by its Alcatraz logo — resembling the outline of the former prison island in San Francisco Bay. It has rapidly gained attention over the last two years, with high-profile retail pop-ups and influential fans like British rapper Stormzy and Abloh, who wore the brand’s logo-emblazoned socks to the Met Gala in 2021.

This new phase of streetwear is being fuelled by the growing cultural power of start-ups that speak to specific communities and are able to sustain themselves through their global online audiences, said Jian DeLeon, Nordstrom men’s fashion and editorial director.

Corteiz’s media-shy founder, Clint, is outspoken as to his label’s principles: “no free clothes to shit influencers, no paid insta ads [sic], no magazines, no asslicking, no big brand collabs,” he wrote in an Instagram story earlier this year. The brand continues to grow its audience by promoting its niche west London identity, the uncompromising, anti-establishment aesthetic of which appeals far beyond its local community.

Displaying the brand’s now global appeal, Clint turned up unannounced in Melbourne, Australia, last week and sent hundreds of young people rushing to the location for a chance to get their hands on Corteiz’s “Down Unda” merch.

It’s too soon to say whether any of these emerging brands will be the next Off-White or Supreme, or if they will remain relatively niche as streetwear’s moment as a dominant force in mainstream fashion is receding, for now.

“Streetwear has died more than a thousand deaths at this point, which to me demonstrates more of a misunderstanding of what it is than anything,” said DeLeon. “It is clothing inspired and created by specific communities with shared codes and value systems, largely influenced by counterculture and subculture.”

In July, Mr Porter took over an edgy bar on New York’s Lower East side to celebrate the launch of its newest capsule collection. Super fans drove for hours for the event, which by the end of the night had spilled out into a block party.

Mr Porter’s buzzy collaborators? Not the creative team of a luxury brand, but Lawrence Schlossman and James Harris, co-hosts of the cult menswear podcast Throwing Fits. The 70-piece collection — which included merch, footwear, technical outerwear and casualwear — was co-designed by the pair with an assortment of emerging brands they handpicked.

The collaboration is one of many recent partnerships between big fashion players and niche interest groups like podcasts, menswear mood board pages, or nerdy digital publications. Such tie-ups, which can range from product drops to longer-term working relationships on marketing campaigns and consultancy services, are becoming increasingly common as brands look to tap into engaged and culturally influential communities to drive both sales and hype.

“These deals are low risk, high reward for brands,” said Chris Black, a menswear and culture specialist who consults for brands like Thom Browne, New Balance and Stüssy through his agency, Done to Death Projects. “If the community is big and engaged enough and you can sell 10,000 pairs of sneakers to avid fans of an Instagram page, then it doesn’t even matter if it’s not picked up by regular consumers or mentioned in the press.”

In April, New Balance released a new colourway of its 2002R sneaker, in collaboration with The Basement, a UK-based digital community (and frequent Nike collaborator) which operates a 143,000-strong closed Facebook group dedicated to discussing all things fashion, streetwear and youth culture. In August, Nike and Ambush tapped Sabukaru — a digital publication spotlighting Japan’s creative subcultures — to facilitate a campaign and launch event for a sneaker collaboration between the two brands.

Elsewhere, menswear mood board JJJJound released a sellout footwear tie-up with Asics in August. Puma has also tapped the platform’s founder, Justin Saunders, for an upcoming sneaker collaboration. Homecoming, a UK-based cultural platform which promotes the West African creative scene, has in recent months created exclusive capsules with the likes of Patta, Stüssy, Off-White and Ambush for sale online and at the organisation’s annual festival in Lagos, Nigeria.

“Over the last two or three months, we really saw things going crazy in this space,” said Adrian Bianco, founder of Tokyo-based Sabukaru. The digital magazine, which has almost 150,000 Instagram followers, has grown from a small blog with 3,000 readers eight years ago and has a long-running collaborative relationship with revered Japanese streetwear brand Verdy.

It’s a trend that serves as an antidote to mega-brand label swaps, offering a direct line to engage with culturally influential communities in new and organic ways. For instance, Mr Porter’s tie-up with Throwing Fits plugged straight into the show’s 250,000 monthly listeners and 100,000 Instagram followers.

“We were talking about it on the show for weeks leading up to it — people were fucking hyped,” said Harris. “It allowed Mr Porter to market a collaboration in a way that it never could have done before.”

Shifting Balance of Power

The emerging partnerships require a new kind of approach, with the balance of power shifting away from big brands.

Instead, they are ceding agency to dictate the look and feel of projects to their new collaborators, whose youth culture insights, die-hard online communities and cultural cachet have empowered them to call the shots when big brands come knocking.

Throwing Fits’ founders were clear in initial discussions with Mr Porter that they would only agree to a collaboration that spoke to their sizeable community’s interests, and reflected exactly what the podcast was about, rather than being “a quick cash grab deal,” Schlossman told BoF.

“For us we needed to feel that Mr Porter backed our taste and understood what our community is about: unbridled enthusiasm for the segment of menswear that we are mouthpieces for on the show,” said Schlossman.

The pair were given full control over the types of clothing and merch they created and carte blanche to handpick the brands they wanted to be part of the capsule. The final selection included brands like Japanese menswear label Beams and minimalist made-to-measure casualwear label Stòffa.

Mr Porter’s role was limited to placing wholesale buys for the collections, promoting the collaboration on its website and social media and funding activations like the New York launch party in July.

This approach paid dividends for both parties, according to the Throwing Fits founders — generating sales — and hype — which exceeded expectations “with extremely robust sell through rates” from within both the podcast’s listenership and among consumers in general, said Harris.

A Question of Values

The rising stable of influential platforms also aren’t afraid to say no; if a proposed collaboration won’t resonate with a platform’s audience, it’s a non-starter. “We say no to about 70 percent of these brands who now knock on our door asking for collaborations,” said Bianco of Sabukaru.

“It’s very important that brands don’t just drop some money and dictate what end product they want, because then we just create what they want and they put our name on it and then our audience doesn’t like it,” Bianco said.

Often, this kind of insight is part of what brands are looking for in such collaborations, which are also used to signpost support for causes and communities they want to associate with. That, plus social media, is also helping re-balance brand-partner relationships.

“The playing field is now a little more equal,” said Black of Done to Death Projects, who added that the bargaining power of smaller collaborating parties is so much stronger because of the ability to mobilise their youthful and engaged fans to either endorse or reject a certain brand or product, if it doesn’t resonate with the platform’s values.

For example, instead of (or as well as) investing in a high-budget marketing campaign to tell consumers what to think, Nike invests money into a working relationship with a group like The Basement, whose core missions are youth empowerment and the promotion of underrepresented creatives — causes which benefit the Nike brand by association.

“Any big brand can buy an audience, but you really have to build a community — that’s the value that our platform has: a genuine community,” said Alex Williams, co-founder of The Basement.

Dubbed “The Outsiders Perspective,” the programme seeks to address the underrepresentation of minorities in the fashion industry.

Created by former Roksanda chief executive and BFC executive board member Jamie Gill, the initiative will provide mentoring opportunities to people of colour seeking to break into the fashion industry in various fields, such as sales, merchandising, operations, marketing and legal.

The programme has three financial backers in total, including the Mayor of London’s office, Deloitte and Karla Otto.

Participants will also benefit from networking sessions with industry leaders from ethnic minority backgrounds, including “chief marketing officers and merchandising experts from leading British fashion brands,” who will also run structured workshops to introduce candidates to the industry’s key business functions, Gill told BoF.

“Beyond being important for representation, The Outsiders Perspective will address a genuine business need in fashion,” said Gill. “So many companies tell me they want to hire diverse talent, they just don’t know how to go about it yet.”

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Dubbed “The Outsiders Perspective,” the programme seeks to address the underrepresentation of minorities in the fashion industry.

Created by former Roksanda chief executive and BFC executive board member Jamie Gill, the initiative will provide mentoring opportunities to people of colour seeking to break into the fashion industry in various fields, such as sales, merchandising, operations, marketing and legal.

The programme has six financial backers in total, including the Mayor of London’s office, Deloitte and Karla Otto.

Participants will also benefit from networking sessions with industry leaders from ethnic minority backgrounds, including “chief marketing officers and merchandising experts from leading British fashion brands,” who will also run structured workshops to introduce candidates to the industry’s key business functions, Gill told BoF.

“Beyond being important for representation, The Outsiders Perspective will address a genuine business need in fashion,” said Gill. “So many companies tell me they want to hire diverse talent, they just don’t know how to go about it yet.”

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