The Business of Fashion Podcast

For more than a decade, activewear shoppers largely looked to Lululemon and Nike. But as the post-pandemic boom cools and growth becomes harder to find, a new crop of brands is gaining traction.

Smaller labels like SetActive, 437 and Oner Active aren’t reinventing activewear. They’re winning customers through social media, creator-led marketing and a deep understanding of today’s fitness culture where consumers move fluidly through workouts like pilates, Hyrox and tennis on any given week.

In this episode of The Debrief Podcast, retail editor Cathaleen Chen joins senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young to discuss why these newer brands are resonating, whether their momentum is sustainable, and what their success reveals about the challenges facing industry leaders Nike and Lululemon.

Key Insights:
The era of Lululemon as a status symbol may be ending. "Lululemon in the past two decades effectively cornered the market on activewear as a status symbol," Chen says. "I do think the era of Lululemon as a status symbol is ending ... if you're not going to be a status symbol, what will you be?"

Consumers are craving something new. The rise of brands like Set Active, 437 and Oner Active is being driven less by breakthrough product innovation than by a broader desire for novelty. "The answer that I got overwhelmingly from my reporting is that, honestly, we are just in this moment of desire for newness," Chen says. "People were like, ‘okay, I have Lululemon in my closet, what's next?’"

Founder-led social media is helping challengers compete. Rather than relying on big marketing budgets, many emerging brands are building audiences through creator-style content — from behind-the-scenes glimpses into product development to founders who function as influencers in their own right. "What they have done incredibly well is build organic followings on social media and be able to capitalise on certain TikTok trends," Chen says. “They have the benefits of … the founder coming in every day, trying on the products herself... it makes a big difference in being visible to the customer”.

Activewear is entering its own version of the indie beauty era. As consumers build wardrobes around multiple activities rather than a single sport, the category is becoming more fragmented and open to new players. "What's happening in activewear is very similar to what happened in beauty a few years ago," Chen says. "Where the category was dominated by a handful of brands … but we reached this inflection point where people want something that feels new."

Additional Resources:
The TikTok-Savvy Activewear Brands Stealing Market Share | BoF Professional
Why Every Fashion Brand Thinks It’s a Sportswear Label Now | BoF Professional
The Reign of Leggings Is Over. What’s Next? | BoF Professional

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Fashion’s book obsession is no longer subtle. What started as the occasional literary reference has become a broader wave of book clubs, salon-style events, campaign imagery and products designed to signal that a brand — and its customer — has cultural depth. It’s all happening as reading rates are declining, but the image of the reader has never looked more fashionable.

This week on The Debrief, BoF reporters Haley Crawford and Shayeza Walid explain how books became fashion’s latest flex, and when the trend starts to look less like culture and more like marketing.

Key Insights:


Books have become fashion’s new status symbol: Literature has always inspired fashion, but both reporters argue the relationship has become far more explicit. “We felt like books were being productised by fashion itself,” says Walid. In a world saturated by digital content, books now function as markers of cultural literacy and intellectual identity. As Crawford puts it: “You actually have to take the time to read a book from cover to cover. Fewer people are doing that today, so it is more of a flex to have read the book and actually understand the reference.”

TikTok is fueling an analogue revival: Ironically, fashion’s literary turn is being accelerated by social media. Online subcommunities like BookTok have transformed reading into a visible identity and community marker for younger consumers. “Social media, the stores, the products you’re buying and this analogue signalling, are all coming together,” says Walid. “ I don’t think this is happening in a silo. I think it’s very interconnected to other forms of analogue connection that people are finding nowadays.”

Not every literary collaboration resonates equally: Both reporters argue that the strongest examples are those rooted in genuine engagement with literature rather than surface-level branding. Crawford points to Prada’s collaborations with authors and literary scholars as examples of brands building deeper cultural worlds. Walid highlights Chanel’s funding of a library at a Shanghai art museum. “It was actually creating or funding something which allowed people to engage with books and literature,” she says.

The trend risks losing its cultural power: Fashion using books as a cultural signal is likely to lose some potency if every brand adopts the same strategy. “The ones that have been doing it for quite some time will continue to do so. But those that have maybe slapped a book name on a T-shirt or created a book tote might see less success,” says Crawford. “The second consumers start noticing the corporatisation of this trend, it is going to start to become stale,” adds Walid.

Additional Resources:
How Books Became Fashion’s Favourite Flex | BoF
When Taste Is All Over TikTok | BoF

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Anoushka Shankar has spent three decades building one of the most distinctive bodies of work in contemporary music. She has taken the sitar — an instrument rooted in centuries of North Indian classical tradition — into completely new territory, blending the ancient Hindustani raga system with electronic, flamenco and Western orchestral influences.

At a time when we're bombarded — wars, looming AI risk, a constant churn of uncertainty — her music is a salve. It carries echoes of long road trips with my family, listening to her father, Ravi Shankar, play the sitar.

But this is not just nostalgia; Shankar’s music is rooted in her personal journey. At BoF VOICES 2025, she explained how she has written from joy, from pain, from outrage — and in each case, the impulse to release something into the world is inseparable from the belief that it will matter to someone. Every act of creation is an act of hope.

“I believe that any creative act is a hopeful act, because we wouldn't send anything out into the void if we didn't have a hope and belief that it was gonna reach other people,” says Shankar. “By nature, it is about hope.”

Shankar spoke about how she found her way back to music after prolonged creative numbness following the pandemic, and what the ancient discipline of improvisation has taught her about adapting to a world in constant upheaval.

Key Insights:

Creativity is an act of hope: Shankar argues that to make anything is to believe it will reach someone. For her, the impulse to create is inseparable from the belief that it will matter. “I've written from a place of joy, from a place of pain, and from outrage about global events, but each of those times there is some shred of hope that means it's gonna make some kind of a difference to bother putting something out into the world,” she says.

Small moments of presence can become a way through crisis: After the pandemic, Shankar entered a protracted period of creative silence, unable to write — caught, as she puts it, in “a period of very, very numb and debilitating pain.” The way back was not an act of will but a gradual process, beginning with a single moment in the garden with her children she kept returning to in the days that followed. "If I was truly present, not caught up in my head or in worries or thoughts, that I could really fully experience these moments of joy, even in the hardest of times, and they would give me the strength to move through."

Hope is a choice made before certainty arrives: As Shankar moved into the second chapter of the trilogy, she began to feel that moments of solace were not enough. Against the backdrop of global violence and grief, including the devastation in Palestine, she says she had little faith that the world would change. The album How Dark It Is Before Dawn became her attempt to make music for that space: “I had to trust that things do eventually change, even if I’m in that moment where I can’t see it. I had to choose hope. I have to choose to hope in the moment when I don’t know it’s going to work, or that anything is going to happen. It’s an act of faith.”

Tradition only lives when it is made current. In explaining Hindustani classical music, Shankar describes a form rooted in oral transmission, apprenticeship and improvisation, and links the discipline of improvisation to a broader way of navigating change. Having learned under her father from the age of seven, she sees the sitar tradition as both a weight of history and a space for freedom. “It is about … assimilating all this stuff that could be a weight – the history and how much there is to learn – but finding a way to have freedom within it,” she says. “It doesn’t really live unless it’s present as well. I have to make that tradition current and real to me in order for it to resonate with other people who are here with me today.”

Additional Resources:
Anoushka Shankar: We Return to Light | BoF
BoF VOICES 2025: Live Your Best Life

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The rise of GLP–1 drugs, such as Ozempic and Wegovy, is forcing fashion and beauty companies to rethink everything from sizing and fit to product development. With one in eight Americans having tried a GLP–1 medication, brands are grappling with how to serve consumers whose bodies may be changing more rapidly than traditional product cycles were designed to accommodate.

In this episode of The Debrief, senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young sits down with BoF senior news and features editor Diana Pearl and The Business of Beauty news and features editor Brennan Kilbane to discuss how fashion and beauty brands are responding to the GLP-1 boom — and why the industry's apparent willingness to adapt to these consumers is raising difficult questions about its long history with size inclusivity.

Key Insights:

GLP-1s have turned into a fashion infrastructure problem: GLP-1 drugs are creating a new kind of consumer need — not just smaller sizes, but clothes and products that can accommodate rapid physical change. For fashion, this exposes the limits of systems built around relatively stable bodies, from fit models to inventory planning to alterations. As Pearl puts it, the industry may be talking more openly about fit, but real change will be slow because the underlying systems are deeply entrenched. “I don’t think it’s going to be a change that happens overnight or even in the next few months,” she says. “This is something that’s going to take years to fully address.”

The best brand responses meet customers where they are: Brands such as Soma offer one model for how to respond: create products for bodies in transition without framing that change as something to fix. Pearl says that approach works because it centres practical need rather than aspiration or shame. “It’s really just making it about: ‘okay, your life has changed, your body has changed, let’s meet you where you are,’” she says. Kilbane adds, “It's possible that we’re going to continue to see more people fluctuating in their weight and it’s quite forward-thinking for a fashion brand to accommodate that changing body.”

Beauty is already speaking more directly to the GLP-1 consumer: Beauty and wellness brands are moving faster than fashion in addressing the physical effects of rapid weight loss, from skin laxity to changes in facial volume. According to Kilbane, the category has to have a clearer product rationale for entering the conversation and respond to specific consumer concerns with products and treatments that feel practical. As Kilbane says, “I’ve talked to a lot of plastic surgeons and dermatologists and even some skincare executives. There are things that happen to your skin when you take these medicines,” he says. “I think especially beauty and wellness brands do need to talk to this customer differently, because they are going through a different transformation.”

Fashion’s unresolved relationship with thinness: The GLP-1 conversation has provoked scepticism as plus-size consumers have long argued that fashion sizing is broken, yet the industry appears more willing to change when bodies are getting smaller. For Kilbane, this criticism is fair: “It’s hard to not see any of this as the fashion industry’s excuse to champion thinness once again,” he says. Pearl adds that the debate cannot be separated from fashion’s deeper history of exclusion. “On the surface, it’s about sizing, but you can’t talk about what’s going on and not talk about fashion’s history of championing thinness,” she says.

Additional Resources:

How Ozempic Is Forcing Fashion to Rethink Fit
Novo Nordisk Looks Beyond Weight Loss to Longevity and Aesthetics
At Wellness Resorts, Ozempic Becomes Part of the Menu
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Born in the leafy enclave of Bedford, New York, designer Conner Ives, a self-professed “country mouse,” grew up in a household that taught him two things early: that quality is worth protecting, and ambition is worth following.

At 16, a connection through his mother's dental practice landed him an internship with Wes Gordon, and soon after he moved to London and set about becoming a designer.

In his first year on the BA at Central Saint Martins, a garment from a school project — a duchess satin duster coat adorned with swans — was requested and worn by model Adwoa Aboah to the 2017 Met Gala. The moment announced him to the industry before he graduated, but back at school, the reception was rather cool:

“I remember my tutorial after [the Met Gala], being sat down and told, ‘It’s nice that you can make dresses for people’ – reducing doing the Met Gala as a 20-year-old first-year BA student to that – ‘but school has to come first,’” Ives recounts.

Now, almost six years into building his label, the designer is navigating what it takes to turn creative instinct into a functioning business. His label began with one-of-a-kind reworked vintage pieces and deadstock materials — a proposition that gave the clothes their character, but was not always easy to translate into the wholesale system.

“We would do 1,500 T-shirt dresses and no two were the same. That was always the selling point of it, but that is a very difficult business pitch to get to a Net-a-Porter, let alone a Net-a-Porter buyer, or a Net-a-porter customer,” he says.

This week on The BoF Podcast, Conner Ives joins BoF CEO and founder Imran Amed to discuss what it means to build an independent fashion business without losing the instinct that made the work resonate in the first place.

Key Insights:

Ives’ brand is built on an American idea of high-low dressing: Ives describes his label as shaped by family memory, American fashion imagery and a belief in clothes that can carry time. His mother’s care for old Frye boots and his father’s instinct for wearing things until they wore out helped form a design language that values both glamour and durability. “Things of quality have no fear of time,” he says.

Central Saint Martins gave him confidence by forcing him to defend his taste. Ives arrived at CSM with a clear instinct for American glamour, spaghetti-strap dresses and debutante references – ideas that did not always fit the school’s preferred mythology. His “White Project” from his first year at the BA later became the basis for Adwoa Aboah’s 2017 Met Gala look, but the response from school was muted. “I think that struggle made me a better designer,” he says. “It made me also have to defend what I did so much more so.”

“Protect The Dolls” worked because it came from instinct, not marketing. “My whole aversion to fashion being involved in politics sometimes is that it oftentimes can feel quite self-serving,” he says. Made the night before his Autumn/Winter 2025 show, the T-shirt only clicked when Ives moved from affection to urgency. “My love for trans people was not what was being threatened here right now. Their safety was being threatened,” he says. The final phrase – “Protect The Dolls” – was printed on at-home transfer paper, ironed onto a T-shirt, and went on to sell over 600 units in a day.

Ives’ advice is to trust the instinct before you overthink it. Looking back, Ives says the clearest lesson was learning not to override his own internal signal. “If you are a creative person, you are probably also a reactionary person,” he says. “That reaction is coming from somewhere really pure and really whole – so listen to it.”

Additional Resources:
Conner Ives | BoF 500 | The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry
‘Protect the Dolls’ T-Shirt Becomes a Fashion Symbol for Trans Rights | BoF
Unearthing the New at London Fashion Week | BoF
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