Imran Amed

The London offices of The Business of Fashion are located on Great Titchfield Street, north of Oxford Street, in Fitzrovia. Once a haven of artists and writers, including Virginia Woolf, the area has recently enjoyed newfound attention thanks to a mix of luxury homes and old and new economy businesses, many of them media or tech-oriented plus some fashion firms. It’s the perfect place to host the latest chapter in the remarkable adventure of The Business of Fashion, one of the most authoritative media companies in its field, made up of a frequently visited website, newsletter, series of events that includes its “Voices” gathering and a semi-annual print edition. In fact, The Business of Fashion (BoF) is now worth more than the sum of the activities listed above, and has allowed its founder Imran Amed to build a reputation that today makes him without doubt one of the most influential figures in the global fashion community. The official origin story places BoF’s start as webpages in the personal blog opened “from the sofa of his house in Notting Hill,” which in Amed’s epic is on par with the legendary garage startups of Silicon Valley. The year was 2007 and Amed, a Canadian of Indian origin, worked as a management consultant at McKinsey. He opened the blog to explore his passion for the fashion industry, which he started to look at from his viewpoint, that of a consultant with an MBA from Harvard. His take on things leads him to make BoF a lifetime project and business pursuit. In 2013, he raised a round of funding led by Index Ventures worth two and a half million dollars. An outsider’s take on things will, in a few short years, take him to the heart of the fashion system. “This is a fundamental point for me. At BoF we try to be insiders who maintain an outsider’s perspective,” says Amed on the couch in his office. “This feeling of having approached fashion by being part of another world cannot be canceled, it does not go away. What has completely

changed from the beginning, and what makes us insiders now, is that relevant people in this field want to sit down and talk with me, with us. I think this is very important. But I think it’s just as important to do it by keeping an open mind on things: not to talk about fashion as it is spoken in the bubble of that world, but to talk about it in relation to the bigger things that happen everywhere, from technology to the economy, from social and cultural changes to politics. I think this makes a difference: almost no one here at BoF has studied fashion – we now number seventy – some are lawyers, some engineers, some are English lit graduates, others did chemistry.” It’s a story about the fashion industry viewed from the outside; it’s a story about a startup, one without a glamorous editorial staff. Obviously, they are consciously looking to underline this difference and proud of the results they have achieved. There is a need to be perceived as different and special by those who live and thrive in the famous bubble. But it is true that, if you look at Imran Amed and BoF, what has made them what they are today was knowing how to combine a passion for everything fashion-related with the analytic models from the world of economics and technology. “Fashion,” continues Amed, “is similar to the music or film industry. At its base there is a creative element but then there is an industrial system and business model that support it. I remember growing up and seeing publications like Billboard dedicated to the music industry. I liked the commentary and rankings but I did not find anything there that can be applied to fashion on a global level. I started BoF for this reason. It was out of curiosity, a desire to understand and describe a world that fascinates me. There wasn’t this precise idea of filling a hole in coverage that just happened to be there already.” Indeed, this world, this El Dorado, is sought after today by almost anyone who deals in the consumption of nonessential goods. This is another strong point of BoF, which has built up its operation around this idea of a community. It’s a community divided into segments, as Amed describes it by drawing it on a piece of paper: in the first one, there are students and outsiders, those who want to be part of this world (and understanding his past, one can imagine how important this group is to Amed); in the second, there are professionals, those who work full-time; in the third, finally, those who make fashion, influence it, the decision-makers. Those who, as mentioned earlier by Amed himself, want to sit down and talk with him, “sometimes to tell me what they are doing, sometimes to ask for advice, other times simply to introduce someone.” The inner circle of the BoF community is undoubtedly that of the BoF 500, the list of the five hundred most influential people in fashion, one of the most sought-after lists in the industry. When we ask Amed about the selection criteria, by his own admission the rigorous approach of a McKinsey consultant leaves space for the passion for this world and for those who live it. “We accept nominations from those who are already part of the five hundred and then we do our research, always with the aim of representing the industry on a global level. Sometimes the same name is put forward several times, and then we see who it is and how relevant he or she is. The same influential people on the list contribute to bolstering it.” Since we are on the topic, we ask Imran Amed who are the personalities today that influence fashion from a creative point of view. At this point, he gets up from the sofa, walks toward the covers of the semi-annual BoF publications hanging behind his desk and points to two, looks for a third, and answers: “I think today these three people: Alessandro Michele, Jonathan Anderson and Demna Gvasalia. Between Gucci, Balenciaga, Vetements, JW Anderson and Loewe, they are leaving a mark that will endure.” It’s delivered without any hesitation. Are these three enough? Amed thinks and adds: “Then there are others like Virgil Abloh with Off-White.” Here, I interrupt him to point out how Abloh is one of those figures who divide observers: some think he is a genius; others turn up their nose and don’t consider him one. On this, Amed has a strong opinion: “I get it but it is not for me to judge. I think customers with their choices make the judgment that matters most. If you talk to shop owners, they are enthusiastic. Those who buy his things are interested in him; they are not watching how insiders judge it. Is it my aesthetic? No. Is it relevant today? Very. And we are not here writing about what we like but about what is relevant and influential and what works. It’s based on the facts and information we have. At BoF we produce a ranking based on a cross section of data and various parameters of the best performing brands: Off-White a few months ago was at number thirty four, today it is in third place, after Balenciaga and Gucci. I want to reiterate a concept: taste and creativity count, but then there are facts, data. And the data says this. Fashion can no longer ignore them.” After all, we live in the age of data, the fuel at the base of the ongoing technological revolution. According to Amed, fashion does not use data sufficiently or persuasively. It’s precisely this aspect of fashion, that which is not inclined to fully embrace technological innovation that is one of the strong themes of BoF and its founder. When we ask him what he thinks of the great changes afoot, of the future of shops, for example, or of the fashion seasons and fashion shows, Amed responds with enthusiasm: “Shops will never disappear. They play a role in the shopping experience of people that is completely changing. The seasons, and with them in part also the fashion shows, are a more difficult thing to change because you have to rethink everything. But I think the moment of rethinking has arrived. Fast fashion chains compete on price, of course, but their real strength is another: they always know what their customer wants and always let him or her find it in the store. The lesson for the brands is to understand that this is possible only by having continuous feedback from those who buy, interacting and analyzing data better. Move quickly and responsibly, this is the direction in which we are going.” Does this go for Italy as well? “Sure. At McKinsey, when we analyzed a company we started by identifying what made it unique and special. Now, put aside all the debate about which fashion capital is more important – I think it’s a sterile game that does not hit the mark, we live in a global setting: to think that Paris, Milan and London are in competition is archaic, outdated. But the question remains: what makes Italian fashion genuinely unique in the world? The ‘Made in Italy’ manufacturing, the tradition, the know-how to create incredibly beautiful things. But the story sometimes becomes a dress that risks being a little tight and restricting one’s movements. The challenge for the Italian system is to find a balance between tradition and the contemporary values and priorities of consumers, sustainability, technology and vision.” *Founder and Editor-in-Chief of “Rivista Studio” magazine. original text page 268