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“Emerging talent is at the heart and soul of everything we do at Browns and by reintroducing Browns Focus as a platform for collaboration, we aim to showcase not only the designers but also their communities. I’m immensely excited about this line up, each designer brings something completely unique to the table and are true stars both today and for tomorrow,” says Buying Director Ida Petersson. And while Browns has recently taken up mentorships with Graduate Fashion Week, the Designers’ Nest, and partnerships with the BFC, this new Focus series will see the retailer bring young designers even closer into its fold.
Browns Focus relaunches to support the future of global fashion talent
Browns Focus relaunches to support the future of global fashion talent
London boutique Browns supports the next generation, relaunchings its talent incubator with a roster of burgeoning brands
Saul Nash x Browns Focus
In the annals of emerging fashion talent history, London boutique Browns is a repeated reference. Its co-founder Joan Burstein is credited with discovering and nurturing a host of British design talent, from Alexander McQueen to John Galliano, and introducing international designers to the UK market, from Comme des Garçons to Calvin Klein. In 1997, this supportive intent was reinforced with the introduction of Browns Focus, an incubator of next-generation talent as well as a physical space, which championed designers such as Christopher Kane and Simone Rocha.
For an industry built on innovation, dynamism and jaw-on-the-floor creative moments, there seems to have been a somewhat dull-witted shift towards diversity in fashion. At the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020, for instance, there were countless examples of social media-driven, pro-inclusivity tokenism on the part of brands, with very little in the way of meaningful subsequent change.
Indeed, according to a somewhat damning “Black Representation In Fashion” report compiled by the
New York Times recently, there is still only one black chief executive – Virgil Abloh at Off-White – working at any one of the 64 global fashion brands which were included in the study.
In this Article
Once a month, from her office at the Versace Headquarters in the north of Milan, Donatella Versace selects a piece of fan mail. She receives a lot of messages from young people, as many fashion designers do. Unlike most designers, Versace responds herself.
She talks to them about her brand: what they thought of recent collections, what they liked, what they didn’t. And she takes notes.
“That ‘macho-man’ thing is so over.
It’s not sexy.”
Versace began doing this around four years ago, just as the menswear at her brand entered a period of evolution. After several years of producing men’s collections that offered a high-glamour, high-camp, leather-chaps-on-the-catwalk aesthetic, the label was struggling to resonate with real consumers, and Versace herself felt estranged from what she was presenting. “I realized that I didn’t like it how it was,” she says now. “My taste had changed. And with a brand that’s been around for 45 years, at some poi