Fashion Scout at 20: How the path to building a fashion brand has changed

The latest London Fashion Week edition marked the 20th anniversary of Fashion Scout, the platform led by Billie and Martyn Roberts to champion emerging designers and create opportunities for UK and international talent. Iris van Herpen, David Koma, Phoebe English and Tolu Coker are just some of the names discovered by the platform, which has supported more than 1,500 designers from over 70 countries in the last two decades.

“Our first season was in a car park close to the Natural History Museum, where London Fashion Week was then based,” the founders of Fashion Scout told FashionUnited, remembering the beginning of a project initially created to solve a gap in access. “London Fashion Week had extraordinary creative energy, but independently producing a professional show required designers to assemble a venue, production, models, hair and make-up, technical teams and everything around it,” they said.

Fashion Scout debuted as a platform focused on infrastructure. Over time, it became known for discovering and supporting new talents, especially through programmes like Ones to Watch. “Did we imagine we’d still be doing it 20 years later? Absolutely not,” the founders said.

The platform continued to evolve over the years, promoting standalone designer catwalks, exhibitions and international collaborations. In 20 years, Fashion Scout has seen the industry go through a lot of transformations, including the advent of social media.

Social media

“It has become far less linear,” they said. “There was a relatively recognisable route through press, buyers, wholesale and retail. Those traditional gatekeepers held enormous influence over whether a young label progressed. Today, a designer can reach a global audience directly. That’s incredibly liberating, but it also means they’re navigating a much more fragmented ecosystem.”

Nowadays, emerging designers need to wear a lot of hats. “They can simultaneously be creator, communicator, content producer, retailer and entrepreneur,” they said. Social media gives designers the chance to reach new audiences, but visibility isn’t a business model.

“A viral image or collection can create extraordinary attention without solving production, cash flow, distribution, or customer retention. Access to an audience has become easier. Converting that attention into a sustainable business has not.”

The pressure to appear established

Young designers are also faced with the pressure to appear established very quickly, while dealing with pricing, production, margins, cash flow and distribution, digital commerce, content, community and communication without the infrastructure of the established brands.

“They’re doing that against rising production costs and a retail environment that has become considerably more fragmented. And the competitive landscape has changed. Large fashion businesses have become extremely sophisticated at absorbing cultural ideas, working with high-level creative talent and producing increasingly elevated design at a price an independent designer simply cannot compete with through scale,” they said.

Fashion Scout believes the advantage of emerging designers relies on “originality, specificity, quality, community, craft, service and relationship with the customer that a business operating at enormous scale cannot replicate in quite the same way.”

The platform works to help designers understand what kind of business they are trying to build and which opportunities will help them get there, the Roberts said. It introduces designers to an industry, gives their work professional context and creates opportunities for people to encounter it.

“Seeing a designer receive their first serious piece of press, meeting a buyer, securing an order or returning several seasons later with a collection where you suddenly realise they’ve found their voice. Those moments are perhaps more representative of what Fashion Scout has actually been about.”

In September, Fashion Scout hosted its three Ones To Watch catwalk shows during London Fashion Week, marking its largest emerging-talent programme ever. The platform also organizes international-focused projects, such as Beyond Limits: Polish Visionaries, Creative DNA work in Kenya, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, and Armenia and Yerevan Fashion Week.

“Internationalism has always been part of Fashion Scout rather than something we added later,” they said. “Talent has never belonged exclusively to the established fashion capitals. Opportunity and visibility have.”

The next 20 years

For Billie, the appeal of Fashion Scout lies in something that isn’t completely resolved yet. “With an established designer, you understand the language. With emerging talent, you’re sometimes watching somebody discover that language in front of you. There’s something incredibly energising about that,” she said. Martyn added that there’s an energy around emerging designers that is quite addictive. “They’re questioning things because they haven’t yet been conditioned to believe there’s only one way of doing them,” he said.

Billie and Martyn said Fashion Scout has been shaped by the teams, creatives, partners and collaborators they’ve worked with across 20 years of shows, events and projects. Now, they are focused in the future.

“We’re enormously proud of everyone who has been part of that journey. But we’re still just as excited about who and what comes next.”