ASPEN, Colorado — One of the best things about my job is that while I am deeply immersed in all things fashion, I also have the opportunity to meet people outside the fashion bubble to learn and expand my mind, and bring the insights I take away back to my work here at The Business of Fashion. This combination of insider access, with an outsider’s perspective, has always informed my take on fashion and luxury.

This week, after attending Dries Van Noten’s final show for his namesake brand on Saturday evening, Vogue World on Sunday evening and five haute couture shows on Monday — Schiaparelli, Dior, Rahul Mishra, Thom Browne and Giambattista Valli — I flew to Aspen, Colorado where I was invited to speak at the 20th annual Aspen Ideas Festival by former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown, who curated this year’s event.

This meant I missed some important fashion moments at the Paris couture shows, including Nicolas di Felice’s beautiful guest turn at Jean Paul Gaultier and Demna’s annual couture collection for Balenciaga, both of which I had to experience through Tim Blanks’ review on BoF, just like the old days when I would carefully read every word of what Tim wrote during his time at Style.com.

They say everything in life is about making trade-offs. So was this one worth it?

Going from Paris to Aspen felt a little like whiplash, and not just because of the 14 hour flight (via Dallas) and the eight hour time difference. The first thing I saw when I arrived at the tiny Aspen airport teeming with private jets was a warning about bears! But once I settled into my hotel and began attending talks scattered across the campus nestled in the Colorado Rockies, I got into the rhythm pretty quickly.

It was 75 years ago this week that Walter Paepcke, founder of The Aspen Institute, first convened leaders here to mark the 200th birthday of noted German polymath and writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. This gathering eventually gave life to the first Aspen Ideas Festival in 2005, drawing expert speakers and leaders from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds to engage in deep discussions about the forces shaping the world around us.

For the thought leaders and business moguls gathering in Aspen, anxiety is rising about the outcome of the US election in November, and the impact that the potential return of Donald Trump to the White House would have in exacerbating the challenges we face from the most serious technological, geopolitical and ecological issues of our times.

A wide-ranging and expertly curated opening session examined the latest thinking from OpenAI founder Sam Altman, the global leader in the race for developing artificial intelligence, and his friend Brian Chesky, co-founder of Airbnb; the complex “American Vortex” characterised by bitter partisan divides, a broken immigration system, vast income inequality and lack of faith (and participation) in the democratic process; and the worsening climate crisis with 86 year-old actress-cum-climate activist Jane Fonda, who in a rousing conversation with Katie Couric implored attendees not to vote for Donald Trump who could take the US out of the Paris Climate Accord again.

As the festival progressed, it also became clearer to me how deeply intertwined all of these topics are. As the world is once again experiencing the hottest year on record, climate-driven migration is dividing societies in North America and Europe who fear they cannot accommodate all of these asylum seekers, leading to the rise of far-right political movements which prey on the fears of populations still contending with higher cost of living brought on by high inflation and high interest rates following the pandemic. In the United States, this is most acutely felt by people in marginalised Black and Native communities who often don’t participate in the democratic process because the system as it stands has never worked in their favour.

Meanwhile, the artificial intelligence revolution is being led by the same already dominant tech companies in Silicon Valley which are competing to develop AI. Unchecked by global regulation, AI leaders say we need to ensure that the technology doesn’t break democracy and divide societies in the same way social media did in 2016, enabling Donald Trump to be elected in the first place.

In a session called ‘The Iconoclast’ on Thursday afternoon, Peter Thiel, former CEO of Paypal and founder of data analytics company Palantir Technologies, said he would be voting for Donald Trump and thinks Trump will handily win again this year.

“I don’t think it’s going to even be close,” he said, even before President Joe Biden’s halting performance in a debate with Trump later that evening. “It’s these two different hate factories that we have targeted at each other. That’s the way politics works. My judgment is that Trump will easily win that.”

On Friday, in a conversation with Tina Brown, Endeavour CEO Ari Emmanuel said that legal issues at the State level may prevent from Joe Biden from dropping out of the race as many Democrats are now hoping he will to save the country from a second Trump term.

“We’re in a pickle,” he said. “The lifeblood to a campaign in politics is money. Maybe the only way this gets [sorted out], with smart lawyers looking at it, is if the money starts drying up. If this is, as Biden says, the fight for our democracy, man he gave us a bunch of malarky. And I’m really pissed. We all should be really pissed. I cannot believe we are in this situation. We’re in fuck city.”

Reflecting on all of this made most of the dinner table conversations in Paris this week seem rather inconsequential. While everyone in Paris was chattering about Vogue World (“Why is Conde Nast even staging this event?” and “How much did people pay to attend?”) and succession planning at Chanel (“Would they really hire Hedi Slimane?” and “It’s the only job Sarah Burton wants.”), the world is quite literally years away from a point-of-no-return climate catastrophe, extreme political divides in Western democracies are threatening to elect a far-right government in France, and there is no clear path to manage an unprecedented new technology that will fundamentally change how we live and work as a global society.

That being said, though the festival seems to have made great efforts to make the event more inclusive, global and diverse, it can sometimes feel like a very privileged group of American people mostly talking amongst themselves. It was hard not to notice that most of the attendees were older, wealthy and privileged. (Aspen has one of the highest concentrations of billionaires in the United States, underscored by some sponsors shilling retirement services and new healthcare solutions.) An important talk I attended on LGBTQIA+ issues examining transgender rights was sparsely attended and there was little discussion about the ongoing wars and resulting humanitarian crises in Gaza and Sudan.

So, in the end, the crowd gathering in Aspen is in a bubble too. We are all in our own bubbles. That’s why I try to break out of mine whenever I can. It’s the best way to learn and form a more well-rounded view of the complex, multi-faceted, fascinating world we live in, all of which has a direct impact on the global fashion industry, too.

This Weekend on the BoF Podcast

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From her miraculous birth as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor to becoming a fashion powerhouse with her signature wrap dress, Diane von Furstenberg’s remarkable journey is one of resilience, innovation, and empowerment. She has broken glass ceilings and inspires women worldwide.

In a new documentary about her life called “Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge,” Academy Award-winning filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy combines archival footage and intimate interviews with some of Diane’s closest friends and family to paint a vivid picture of a woman who has always been true to herself.

For this week’s episode of The BoF Podcast, Diane and Sharmeen spoke to me at the London premiere to share their experience of making the documentary and the new learnings this process surfaced about leading a life well lived.

Wishing you all a great weekend!

Imran Amed, Founder, CEO and Editor-in-Chief, The Business of Fashion

Plus, join me and the BoF Professional community in Manila on Tuesday, July 9 for a special event with Vogue Philippines. Secure your ticket now.

Here are my other top picks from our analysis on fashion, luxury and beauty:

1. Is Gap’s Turnaround Finally Working? Signs of recovery at the American retailer have convinced some analysts that its stock may be undervalued. Others say it’s too soon to tell, but even the sceptics note improvements on product, merchandising and markdowns.

2. Dries Van Noten: So Long, Farewell. But after 38 years, 150 collections and 129 shows, is it possible that the best is still to come for Belgium’s finest? In an in-depth profile, Tim Blanks explores the departing designer’s past, present and future.

3. In Paris, a Season of Big and Small. A sense of monumental scale dominated the Paris men’s shows, but bigger wasn’t always better, writes Angelo Flaccavento.

4. Why Influencers Want You in Their Group Chats. Instagram’s broadcast channel feature is becoming a favourite for online creators and brand founders as a place to seek feedback and share a more unvarnished look at their lives. It’s also proving to be a powerful marketing tool.

5. How the WNBA Tunnel Walk Became a Fashion Marketing Gold Mine. Superstar rookies-turned-pre-game models like Angel Reese and Cameron Brink have transformed the league’s tunnel walk into the hottest runway in town, with brands like Balmain, Prada and Versace clamouring to cash in on its newfound fashion appeal.

To receive this email in your inbox each Saturday, sign up to The Daily Digest newsletter for agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice that you won’t find anywhere else.

Since the pandemic’s upending of employment trends, from mass redundancies and hiring freezes before a huge re-hiring movement and the so-called “Great Resignation”, the current job market has stayed “in constant flux,” according to Korn Ferry, one of the world’s largest hiring and recruiting firms. Indeed, with weakened global economies affecting businesses, and mass elections contributing to further market uncertainty, companies remain cautious in their hiring.

After all, it’s expensive to hire talent — benchmarking data in 2022 from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) found the average cost per hire was nearly $4,700, although many employers estimate the total cost to hire a new employee can be three to four times the position’s salary.

Consequently, many HR teams and hiring managers are reframing recruitment strategies to ensure they find the right talent from the offset. For instance, there is an increasing emphasis on skills-based hiring, looking at what candidates know over past experiences and names on a CV — allowing for a more inclusive recruitment practice while also more thoroughly testing candidates capabilities and potential during the interview process. Recent LinkedIn data revealed recruiters on the platform search for candidates by their skills five times more often than by their degrees.

To discuss how recruiters and HR teams are approaching hiring in fashion today, BoF Careers sat down with JW Anderson’s HR director, Angela Okoro — who has previously worked at Versace, Bally and Ralph Lauren — at Graduate Fashion Week this June. Discover key insights from the interview on how to impress a fashion recruiter as emerging talent today, from demonstrating your eagerness to learn to showing an alignment with business needs.

Focus on the skills you have and want to acquire

AO: You need hard skills, even if you’re creative. So, for design, you need to know Photoshop, because a lot of the concept generation for us, in order to be more environmentally friendly, is done on tech on computers. [...] So, it’s important to update those skills. For other roles, it could be flexible, but Excel is vital if you want to go down the merchandising route, or if you’re working in a commercial team, around sales and everything like that.

Being able to navigate your way around tools [is important,] things like your emails — nobody’s got time to show you those things, so I think it’s about being open [to learning,] doing some research and getting some practice before you enter into the job market.

It’s a long game and it’s a strategic game. So, be patient, be flexible, have a bit of a plan. Careers aren’t so linear anymore.

Go on LinkedIn, find someone who’s doing the job that you want; look at their resume and see what you have that they have, as well as what they have that you’re missing. Maybe, while you’re waiting [to land a new job,] update your skills in that area. Because being able to research [is a skill] — and sometimes you get a role with the head of a department who just wants you to do research for them. You’ve got to be able to get lots of bits of information, put it together in a succinct way and present it to somebody.

Demonstrate your ability to learn

AO: I [often] say, “a job is a thing that pays you to learn from us.” Over time, somebody is giving you all the skills they have learned. So, I think people should maybe change what they’re looking for — they should look for structures that are in proximity to learning.

[...] If you’re an integral part of a team of four, these four people are going to transfer their knowledge to you and then you’ve got to make that knowledge your own. That’s what we’re looking for in the interview process.

You’re usually talking to very stressed out managers who need someone to come and help them. [...] That’s why skills are important first because if you’re great and you’re nice and you understand fashion, but you can’t do Excel, [for example], it’s just not going to work.

Consider a non-linear approach to kickstart your career

AO: I think there’s many ways to get to where you want in the end — but what I find with a lot of candidates that we interview is that they haven’t actually thought through and strategically planned where they want to go, even as a starting point. I’m not saying you have to understand your end point, but what’s the start?

For people who are creative, we need knitwear designers. You need to be able to knit and crochet, the elements that people aren’t [often] so fond of — but we do need it. It’s the same for accessories — you have to build your craft. Don’t be averse to doing an internship at an atelier, don’t be opposed to production — in that sort of work, you learn how to be in a business environment, you learn how to build a network.

Our head of design [at JW Anderson] started in retail — he went into a brand that he loved and he started to understand what the consumer wanted from that end of the chain. It’s a long game and it’s a strategic game. So, be patient, be flexible, have a bit of a plan. Careers aren’t so linear anymore.

Be open to — and ask for — constructive feedback

AO: When you come into a [work] space, even before you finish your course, ask for feedback about the work, but also [reflect on] your personality — are you okay with people telling you that [something] was bad, that it was not the standard that they wanted?

You have got to remember that you are building into someone else’s vision. The time will come when people will work towards yours, but that’s not [often] what you’re doing in an entry space.

What’s really important, which a lot of junior talent underrate, is how important it is to be nice to work with and to understand that we don’t have time for divas.

So, I find that sometimes people struggle with being given negative feedback and it’s hard because it’s not personal and it delays everything. Then, we have to coach that emotional space that could be quite entitled, if I’m honest. And it’s difficult when we have businesses to run.

Show intentionality and alignment with a business

AO: Another thing is being attentive [to] who you want to learn from and why. Why do you want to be at JW Anderson? Why do you want to learn from Jonathan Anderson? Is there a trait, a skill, a talent, an aesthetic that resonates with you? Because if you prefer Chloé styles, for example, you’re learning maybe from the wrong place, which means that you’re not aligned with the vision of the creative director. [...] I think it’s an intentionality of actually understanding what you want.

Impress with preparation, a positive attitude and emotional intelligence

AO: When you do get the interview, do your research, be prepared, share your skills, share your personality and show that company that you’ve invested some time in understanding them, that you’re a good match for the role and you have the passion to do well in the role.

Where skills come into view and what’s really important, which a lot of junior talent underrate, is how important it is to be nice to work with and to understand that we don’t have time for divas. Be kind, be good, be proactive and be disciplined. People are desperate to get an interview, but how are you going to keep the role? We’re not going to keep you for a year if you don’t meet the company’s expectations. It’s important that everybody is working together, thinking about emotional intelligence and awareness of the bigger picture.

We’re invested in what you want, but we’re not hiring you for that. We’re hiring you for what we need. And along the way, we’ll go down the same path together and when you get to the end of the line with us, we’ll be very excited for you and we’ll help you along to the next step.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Patagonia CEO Ryan Gellert has been mulling a peculiar problem for a top executive at a billion-dollar brand: Can a business be successful if it’s not growing?

While it’s become fashionable for business leaders to talk about “stakeholder capitalism” — the notion that businesses should be oriented to serve society as a whole — shareholder supremacy remains a dominant principle in the vast majority of boardrooms, meaning companies are primarily measured on how much money they can return to investors and whether this number is increasing every year. For fashion, that generally means selling more stuff to more people, more often.

This “more is more” model has proved wildly successful, spawning a multi-trillion-dollar industry led by some of the world’s wealthiest families, from LVMH’s Arnaults to Zara-owner Inditex’s Ortegas. It’s also fueled excess consumption and the rise of an environmentally destructive system of overproduction that sucks up natural resources and spews out pollution.

This has always been a source of tension for Patagonia. For more than half a century, the outerwear business founded by rock climber and environmentalist Yvon Chouinard has cast itself as a live-action case study in “conscious capitalism.” It’s stated aim: to prove companies can balance profit with purpose.

Sales that hit $1.5 billion in 2022 have enabled the business to donate more than $200 million over the years through its One Percent for the Planet programme, which devotes one percent of each year’s sales to causes that protect and restore the environment. Chouinard took this to a new level in 2022, when he made “earth” the company’s “only shareholder.” The business is now nearly wholly owned by a nonprofit whose mandate is to use any earnings not reinvested in the company — some $50 million in 2022 — to protect the environment and fight climate change.

There’s a tension around growth … the biggest magic trick in business [is figuring out how to] be impactful and ascendant while standing still.

That puts Gellert, who became chief executive in September 2020, in charge of running a business that is something of a paradox: While its profits are intended to preserve and protect its biggest stakeholder, the planet, its means of generating them — making and selling more stuff — do exactly the opposite.

“There’s a tension around growth, and certainly around growth for growth’s sake,” Gellert said during a recent interview in Copenhagen, where he was due to attend the Global Fashion Summit, an annual industry conference focused on sustainability. “The biggest magic trick in business [is figuring out how to] be impactful and ascendant while standing still.”

That doesn’t mean the company wants to shrink. Though this line of thinking flirts with some of the ideas put forward by the increasingly trendy anti-capitalist degrowth movement, there’s no “let’s get smaller mandate,” Gellert hastened to add. But growth, at least as a function of selling more new products, is simply not going to be at the top of the executive’s agenda.

The ‘Biggest Magic Trick’ in Business

Exactly how Gellert plans to balance these competing priorities is still a little murky. “Resale is top of the list for me,” he said. “At scale, I would like to really make it a central part of the business.”

That’s a bold bet on a complex model that has proved challenging to operate profitably and has yet to demonstrate its environmental benefit; the rapid rise of third-party and branded resale initiatives in recent years has so far done nothing to diminish the production and consumption of new products. In some circles, it’s even been pitched as a way to attract first-time consumers to a brand and encourage them to make “investment” purchases they know they can later flip.

Patagonia’s resale programme, Worn Wear, has been around longer than most and has always been linked to the brand’s long-standing messaging encouraging consumers to buy less. It launched in 2013, with the addition of used clothing sections in select stores. In 2014, the company invested in resale-as-a-service platform Trove, debuting its own re-commerce offering three years later.

Today, it offers thousands of pre-owned Patagonia fleeces, jackets and flannels at a neat discount to new gear. Consumers are incentivised to sell back their old Patagonia products for up to 50 percent of the retail price in store credit, while shoppers on the company’s main site get a prompt to browse used when they click to buy a new garment.

Unlike repair, which Gellert described as a “complete cost centre” with “karmic value,” the resale business is profitable and growing. But the CEO acknowledged it’s still a “tiny” slice of Patagonia’s overall business. A Reuters report last year pegged it at just $5 million, or less than 1 percent of the company’s total sales.

Gellert doesn’t want to be pinned down on exactly what proportion of the business secondary sales might ultimately become, or when. The company said it’s still a work in progress.

“We’ve worked through the small problems,” said Gellert. (These include shifting the company’s cotton supply to organic and ratcheting up its use of recycled materials and Fairtrade-certified suppliers). “We’re now at the bigger problems. Repair was a bold step. Resale is the next frontier.”

Curbing Consumption

But even if Patagonia never made another new product, a wholesale shift to secondhand would only ever be a drop in the vast expanse of fashion consumption. That’s why Gellert is as interested in what his company can do to influence the way people shop as he is in changing the way it operates.

“The single biggest question,” he said, “is how does a company in the consumer goods space, that makes stuff people want but don’t need to survive, influence consumption?”

That’s as tricky as it sounds.

Though the CEO said the company is “not in the business of telling people not to buy our stuff,” it has, in fact, told them to do just that. It famously took out a full-page ad in The New York Times for Black Friday in 2011, showing an image of one of its fleeces under the strapline “Don’t buy this jacket.” The upshot: It sold more jackets.

Last month it released “The Shitthropocene,” a 45-minute mockumentary that was part educational PSA, part marketing. The title was a tongue-in-cheek nod to the Anthropocene — a term commonly used to describe the era in which humans have had a significant impact on the planet. The rise of fast fashion and overconsumption, for their part, have resulted in an age “characterised by things that are shitty,” the film’s narrator explains as it opens.

The humour, which took aim at Patagonia as well as the industry at large, was intended to address a frequently cited problem with brands’ sustainability messaging: It’s often boring, preachy and forgettable. But for some pundits, the film landed flat, reading like performative and promotional virtue signalling.

“There was plenty of criticism,” Gellert acknowledged. What cut deepest was the sense some viewers took away that Patagonia was positioning itself above the issues plaguing the rest of the industry. In Gellert’s view, the company’s never tried to suggest it doesn’t get things wrong. It’s just constantly trying to get more right.

The executive’s favourite saying — one he’s quoted often enough to generate eye rolls whenever it gets repeated internally — is that the reward in life for solving a problem is a bigger problem.

The Patagonia Paradox

Some of the problems facing Patagonia aren’t just big, they’re seemingly intractable.

The company campaigns against oil pipelines while making jackets out of plastic; its anti-consumption messaging often results in more sales; and its path to new business models is uncertain.

It has been vocally critical of big businesses that advocate for more climate-friendly policies while remaining members of lobby groups that are campaigning against them. This is an issue the company has largely managed to sidestep itself, because until recently fashion has faced so little regulatory scrutiny. But it’s becoming a more live consideration. Patagonia sits on the American Apparel and Footwear Association’s working group on the New York Fashion Act, a landmark piece of fashion-focused sustainability regulation that the company has publicly endorsed, but that the AAFA says pushes too far, too fast.

The single biggest impact we’ve had … is modelling a more progressive version of a business and proving it can be ascendant. I think that’s made a little dent.

Navigating such contradictions is becoming increasingly complex and increasingly fraught. Solutions, such as exist, are invariably imperfect in a world that is ever more polarised. Increasingly savvy consumers are also more critical of sustainability messaging they view as inauthentic or lacking credibility. In the US in particular, corporate climate action has become a political issue, with Republican politicians taking aim at so-called “woke capitalism” — a movement for which Patagonia is one of the most prominent poster children — ahead of elections in November.

“I don’t think people can be too cynical about what they hear from business,” Gellert said, acknowledging that all the efforts Patagonia makes to align its values and its business operations come with trade-offs and new challenges.

The company has said it remains supportive of The New York Fashion Act but shares some of the AAFA’s concerns about the bill to ensure consistency in environmental reporting requirements. How that shakes out is likely to become clearer next year, since the New York legislative session ended in June with the proposed legislation still pending. A compromise on the bill wouldn’t necessarily be a “divorce-level conversation,” Gellert said.

When it comes to plastic, the company is aiming to only use recycled polyester by next year, a move that’s more of an improvement than a solution. At present, most recycled polyester in the world comes from plastic bottles, which means it does nothing to tackle textile waste and instead turns items that could be recycled multiple times into fabrics that are likely to wind up in landfill. Patagonia is eyeing opportunities in textile-to-textile recycling, but innovations in this space have yet to reach commercial scale. It’s also invested in research to address microplastic pollution. The tiny plastic particles that shed from many of the synthetic fabrics Patagonia and other fashion brands use have been found everywhere, but represent yet another challenge without a clear, satisfactory solution.

Ultimately it comes down to quality and durability for Gellert. “It’s too simplistic an argument that all organic is good and all plastic is bad; we are a technical outdoor apparel company and we want to build the best product,” he said. “How do we balance that? It’s hard to imagine a world where synthetics are not a part of what we do and also one where virgin synthetics are any part of it.”

A fresher issue is the industry-wide downturn buffeting Patagonia’s bottom line. Its last financial year, which ended in April, was “tricky” Gellert said. But with no banks or financial investors breathing down his neck, the CEO said he has the freedom to think more long-term than most competitors. He’s trimmed the company’s marketing budget and slowed hiring to help navigate the sluggish environment, rather than pulling back on sustainability initiatives.

Over the years, those have consistently put Patagonia at the forefront of efforts to craft a more climate-friendly form of capitalism. “[The company] is an authentic sustainability paragon,” said Ken Pucker, professor of the practice at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. “At the same time, any business that’s a multiple of its size a decade ago is going to have a nastier environmental footprint.”

Perhaps the easiest way to understand Patagonia’s position is to take its mission statement on face value. The company is “in business to save the planet.” It’s conscious capitalism tinged with Realpolitik; not profit at any cost, but there must still be profit.

“The single biggest impact we’ve had … is modelling a more progressive version of a business and proving it can be ascendant,” said Gellert. “I think that’s made a little dent.”