London-based womenswear brand Chopova Lowena has been named the winner of the 2024 British Fashion Council/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund.

Founded by Central Saint Martins graduates Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena in 2017, Chopova Lowena is known for its mixture of folksy and sportswear design elements — seen in its popular pleated and pinned kilt-style skirt — and use of deadstock fabrics.

The designers will receive a cash prize of £150,000 ($190,000) and access to mentorship. Ahluwalia, Knwls and Nensi Dojaka were among the labels shortlisted for the prize.

”This duo has built a real community around their brand and the cult of their signature carabiner skirts is a testament to what they do,” said Chioma Nnadi, British Vogue’s head of editorial content. “When it comes to a creative vision, they’ve fearlessly marched to the beat of their own drum, challenging conventional fashion system rules.”

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16Arlington Wins BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund 2023

Emerging British label 16Arlington, founded by Marco Capaldo and the late Federica “Kikka” Cavenati, has been awarded this year’s BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund prize, receiving a £150,000 cash prize and business mentoring.

Five years after lighting firms Flos and Louis Poulsen merged with Italian sofa maker B&B Italia to form “Design Holding,” the luxury furnishings group owned by Carlyle and Investindustrial has rebranded its operation as Flos B&B Italia Group.

The moniker hardly rolls off the tongue, but the rebrand could help to boost the group’s profile as it seeks to scale its brands in the fragmented design space. Unlike the vaguer, more passive “Design Holding,” the new name trades on the appeal of the group’s two biggest and most internationally recognisable units, as well as helping to set the company apart from competitors including Cassina-owner Lifestyle Design Group and its licensing subsidiary Luxury Living (which manufactures the furniture extensions for Versace, Dolce & Gabbana and Bentley).

“It made more sense to go out in front with our two best-known names,” said chief executive Daniel Lalonde, who joined the group in 2021. “It says more exactly who we are… It helps to clarify things — including that we’re not in the licensing business. We’d rather own and develop our own brands.” (The company does operate one luxury fashion extension, Fendi Casa, but as a joint venture with LVMH rather than a licence.)

Lalonde is no stranger to acronyms, nor to the power of leveraging a group structure to accelerate growth: the Canadian executive worked at LVMH for 10 years before joining French contemporary group SMCP, where he led a period of rapid international expansion and orchestrated a sale to China’s Shandong Ruyi at a billion-dollar-plus valuation.

Since joining Design Holding in 2021, the executive has been working to understand how a group structure could have similar benefits for luxury design, a sprawling, fragmented market in which few players have managed to achieve global scale. “As an example, Flos is the global leader in lighting, and it’s only reached around $300 million in revenues,” he said.

The group’s other businesses include Arclinea kitchens, Maxalto furniture and Danish brand Audo.

While design sales slowed amid rising interest rates last year, the $4.4 trillion lifestyle segment — including homeware and hospitality — is nonetheless expected to grow at a compound average rate of 7 percent through 2026, according to a BoF Insights analysis of Euromonitor data. Interest in the high-end design segment has boomed since the pandemic — with events like Milan’s Salone del Mobile drawing record-beating crowds from around the world — but distribution has struggled to keep up. In the last year, design emporiums like The Conran Shop shuttered in France (and will soon close its store in London’s Marylebone), while Habitat declared bankruptcy in both France and Switzerland. Such shifts underscore the tricky retail economics of the design category—as well as abundant white space in the market.

In March, Flos B&B Italia opened a flagship to house the group’s brands on Madison Avenue in New York, a strategy it has also pursued in Washington DC, Miami’s Design District, Tokyo and Dubai. Those locations can leverage the group structure to cross-sell its products to end consumers, as well as architects and designers looking for a “one-stop shop” to supply hotel, restaurant and real estate clients, Lalonde said.

Still, retail expansion only makes sense in certain key locations, as the economics of showcasing large, infrequent purchases like sofas is radically different to selling shoes and bags. “Our journey has been to accelerate directly-operated stores, but only in certain design hubs,” Lalonde said.

Elsewhere, “brandisation” is the focus: setting up branded shop-in-shops within wholesale doors at a clip. Last year, the group added 200 shop-in-shops, versus 30 freestanding stores. The group has also sought synergies in its e-commerce business, sharing resources and best-practices across brands as well as acquiring US online design emporium Lumens.com.

Design sales boomed during the pandemic in 2021 and 2022, and then faltered amid rising interest rates and slowing construction last year. 2023 revenues at Design Holding/Flos B&B Italia fell 9 percent year-on-year to € 785 million ($852 million).

Lalonde expects the first half of 2024 to remain sluggish before trends improve in the second half: housing starts have begun to pick up in the key US market, while slowing inflation has fuelled hopes of interest rate cuts on both sides of the Atlantic this year.

High-end coat maker Canada Goose Holdings Inc. reported higher-than-expected sales growth on strong retail results in China and the US. The shares jumped more than 12 percent in early trading in New York.

The Toronto-based company reported revenue of C$358 million ($263 million) for the fiscal fourth quarter ended March 31, compared with the average analyst estimate of C$316 million.

Sales grew 22 percent from a year earlier.

The company, which sells parkas that cost as much as $2,000, has focussed on improving performance in Asia. The region is home to over 40 percent of Canada Goose stores and recovery there from the pandemic has been slow. The company has also been opening more locations, added three new permanent stores in the fourth quarter.

Canada Goose issued a new outlook that sees slow growth in revenue but higher profitability in fiscal 2025. The company expects sales to grow in the low single digits compared with 2024 as it continues its shift away from the wholesale business to focus on selling products directly to consumers.

But it plans to increase prices, and margins should expand, the company said, projecting that adjusted profit per share will grow “by a mid-teen percentage” over a year ago.

The outlook “assumes global consumer spending will continue to be pressured amid persistently high interest rates and geopolitical uncertainty,” the company said in a statement. “Within our business, we assume continued operational discipline and execution of initiatives focused on delivering further cost efficiencies.”

Sales increased about 30 percent in greater China and nearly 25 percent in North America in the fourth quarter compared with the same period a year earlier.

Canada Goose shares had dropped 3.6 percent so far this year through Wednesday’s close.

By Monique Mulima

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Haider Ackermann Is Canada Goose’s New Creative Director

The luxury parka maker is aiming to elevate its image as it faces strong competition.

Fashion’s carbon footprint inched lower in 2022 thanks to a flattering data refresh, but the industry’s planet-warming emissions are still on track to grow by more than 40 percent by 2030, according to new analysis by trade coalition Apparel Impact Institute.

Any potential progress driven by large brands’ efforts to meet high-profile climate commitments have yet to show up in the numbers.

Instead, the sector saw its carbon emissions dip by just over 1 percent in 2022 compared to a year earlier on the back of updates to the impact associated with polyester and nylon, according to AII’s estimates. The analysis pegged fashion’s carbon footprint at 879 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, or nearly 2 percent of the world’s total carbon footprint.

The fact that the data is getting better is important in itself, said Leonie Schmid, AII’s director of sustainability reporting. But the time lag also means the latest analysis doesn’t fully reflect initiatives the industry has undertaken in recent years, she added.

Nonetheless, assuming business continues as usual, fashion’s carbon footprint is expected to reach 1.2 gigatonnes by the end of the decade. That’s slightly lower than previous estimates, but to keep in line with efforts to stave off the worst effects of climate change they need to nearly halve from current levels.

“The data is clear,” AII’s report said. “While the apparel industry is making progress, the pace of change is far short of what is needed.”

Though hundreds of companies from across fashion’s value chain have now made commitments to drastically lower their emissions and some have begun to make real progress, new technologies that could help deliver on these goals are struggling to scale and investment remains limited.

AII has been trying to raise a $250 million fund to help cut fashion’s emissions since 2022. So far, it’s raised just $89 million. Last year, initiatives it backed helped save nearly 200,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. It’s aim is to increase that number 500-fold by the end of the decade.

Meanwhile, the risks of inaction are becoming more apparent. Over the last two months Southeast Asia has sweltered under a brutal heatwave, with many of the world’s largest garment manufacturing hubs experiencing days on end of temperatures in the vicinity of 40C. Combined with humidity, that’s well above dangerous levels for even moderately taxing manufacturing work.

A report published last year found that such weather extremes could threaten export earnings worth $65 billion in just a handful of key manufacturing hubs by the end of the decade.

Time is running out to reverse these trends and the industry needs to amp up efforts across the value chain to achieve more than incremental gains. On the positive side, much groundwork has been laid over the last few years that could now enable accelerated action, trade groups say. Large parts of the industry are aligned on broad goals, like shifting to lower-impact materials, with ambitions increasingly underpinned by government regulation.

“We are collectively behind the curve, but every industry is collectively behind the curve,” said Michael Sadowski, a sustainability consultant and the author of AII’s new report. “The apparel industry has a really good understanding [of its hotspots] and money is being driven towards the right places.”

Victoria’s Secret is bringing its runway show back, the company announced Wednesday.

In an Instagram post, the intimates retailer said the show will “reflect who we are today, plus everything you know and love.”

The televised lingerie fashion show began in 1995 and was last hosted in 2018. At its peak it drew over 10 million viewers and featured top models including Gisele Bundchen and Kendall Jenner. In the late 2010s, however, the event saw its viewership dwindle as it faced scrutiny for its casting of predominantly white, thin and cisgender models as calls for inclusivity were gaining steam in the fashion industry. In 2019, the event was put on an indefinite hiatus.

Since then, the company has attempted to revamp its image through a push for diversity — it added more women to its board, increased its size range and cast more diverse models. Despite the shift, Victoria’s Secret continued to lose market share to new lingerie upstarts including Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty, which also produces its own fashion show.

Last year, in an attempt to offer a modern update to the show, the company produced a feature-length film showcasing fashion collections from artists in four cities around the world which was available to stream on Amazon Prime. The film missed the mark with viewers who felt the documentary was not in line with the brand’s image. One Amazon Prime reviewer wrote, ”I have never been less interested in the brand itself until after watching this. As a teen, when VS was at its height of success, I was obsessed ... Now as an adult who actually can afford to spend the money I wish I had 10 years ago, I wouldn’t step foot in the place after this catastrophe.”

The revival of the runway will “deliver precisely what our customers have been asking for — the glamour, runway, fashion, fun, wings, entertainment,” the company said in an email.

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Why Victoria’s Secret Is Bringing Sexy Back

A much-hyped image revamp has failed to win back customers. On Thursday, the company told investors about Plan B: spruce up stores, expand into new categories and bring back a bit of the old Victoria’s Secret. As one executive put it, “sexiness can be inclusive.”