City shows it’s a hotbed for fashion
30 BUSINESSES TAKE PART IN EXPO
FASHION and textiles businesses have joined forces to showcase Leicester’s place as a hotbed for clothes design and technology.
Social enterprise Fashion-Enter brought together 30 businesses for an expo at Leicester’s Athena, highlighting the quantity and quality of products manufactured in and around the city.
The organisation set up the Fashion Technology Academy (Leicester) a training and skills centre backed by £300,000 of city council funding, and offering apprenticeships and accredited training for people working in, or who want to work in, the industry in November.
The Athena event included displays by garment factories and textile businesses as well as seven designers.
Fashion teams from brands including Asos, I Saw it First, Quiz, Solander, the Very group, Missy Empire and Boohoo attended.
Fashion-Enter chief executive Jenny Holloway said: “It’s time to be proud of Leicester manufacturers.
“Proximity sourcing is the only way forward for transparency and speed of response and thanks to the council’s successful bid to the government’s Community Renewal Fund, we were able to host this factory exhibition and showcase the factories’ work.
“We want to engage with schools, too, to encourage pupils to consider how great manufacturing is, and educate the next generation about the different jobs there are in the sector.
“Over the past five months we have been working with a wide range of factories and undertaken business diagnostics to ensure they are fit for purpose to supply retail chains and retailers.
“There really are some excellent highly skilled manufacturers in Leicester and we’re proud to be working with them.
“We’ve also recently launched Leicester Made, a fantastic resource promoting our garment businesses.
“It’s a free online directory for anyone, UK or overseas, who would like to source and make clothing in Leicester.”
Since opening in November, the academy has welcomed more than 140 students.
Courses cover skills such as sewing, tailoring and pattern cutting, as well as workers’ rights and labour exploitation, and are free for unemployed people.
Apprenticeships are available to employers.
Deputy mayor Councillor Adam Clarke said: “Our engagement with Fashion-Enter is part of our strategic approach to redefining Leicester’s garment industry.
“We’re determined to promote what the sector does well and to raise standards through this partnership while working with partners with enforcement powers to drive out exploitation and maladministration as we await more decisive government action to be taken nationally to tackle these problems.
“The fashion academy is doing great work, not only in training local people to enter the industry, but also in making links between local suppliers and industry buyers, ensuring that factories and brands are operating at the high standards we want to see.
“Shorter supply chains are surely the way forward in making the garment industry more sustainable, ethical and accountable.”