THE NEW GROWTH EQUATION
The Friday Review
Three weeks. Three cities. Hundreds of shows, presentations, launches, collaborations and conversations.
But step back from Fashion Month and a much bigger question emerges: where will fashion’s next growth actually come from?
It is tempting to answer that question through the usual language of fashion: the next market, the next customer, the next store, the next channel, the next product. But what has been particularly interesting over the past three weeks is that many of the strongest commercial signals are pointing somewhere else.
The next phase of fashion growth may be less about finding another place to sell and more about building the right system to grow.
Look at what happened this week. M&S and Sephora announced a partnership that will bring Sephora into 100 M&S stores and onto M&S.com from spring 2027. M&S brings its trusted brand, national store estate and omnichannel platform; Sephora brings its beauty expertise, brand relationships and discovery proposition. M&S says the partnership is designed to create a more diversified and scalable model for growth.
On the surface, it is another retail partnership. Look closer and it says something much more important about how expansion is changing. Neither business needs to build the entire proposition itself. They can connect existing strengths to create something neither would have in quite the same way independently.
The same principle is playing out internationally. US activewear brand Fabletics has just entered India through an exclusive partnership with Reliance Brands, opening its first store at DLF Promenade in Delhi. Fabletics brings an established international brand and digitally native proposition; Reliance brings local market infrastructure and access to a substantial retail network in India.
Again, the interesting story is not simply that Fabletics has opened a store in India. It is how it chose to enter India. International expansion is rarely just a question of whether the product works. It is about local knowledge, distribution, physical infrastructure, relationships, customer acquisition and the economics of getting the proposition into the hands of the right consumer.
Then there is Zara and John Galliano. Their new Re{form} collection launches this week, bringing together one of fashion’s most recognisable creative voices with one of the world’s most sophisticated commercial fashion businesses. Galliano’s work reinterprets archival Zara and Galliano references, creating a very different proposition from a conventional mass-market collection.
Three very different stories: M&S and Sephora, Fabletics and Reliance, Zara and Galliano.
But together they point towards the same idea.
Growth is increasingly about connecting the right assets.
That does not mean creativity has become less important. In many ways, the opposite is true. But creativity now has to do more than generate attention. It has to create relevance, and relevance has to translate into customer behaviour.
Dior provides an interesting example. Jonathan Anderson’s SS27 collection continues his contemporary interpretation of one of fashion’s deepest archives, working with established Dior codes while pushing them into a different creative direction.
That distinction matters for every heritage business.
Heritage is an asset. But heritage alone is not a growth strategy.
The commercial challenge is turning what made a brand important in the first place into something that feels relevant to a customer who may not have been there for the original chapter. That means understanding which codes are genuinely valuable, which can evolve and which need to be reinterpreted entirely.
This is where creative direction increasingly becomes commercial strategy. The question is not simply whether a collection looks new. It is whether the brand feels new enough to create another reason for someone to engage, discover, buy and come back.
And then comes the other side of the equation.
Growth is not the same as scale.
Shein’s latest results are a useful reminder. The company reported $11.08bn in second-quarter sales, but adjusted net profit fell by roughly two-thirds to $228m, while revenue growth was just 0.9% year on year. European sales fell by about 14%. The point is not that Shein has suddenly stopped growing. Total sales were still slightly higher year on year. The point is that scale does not make economics disappear. At a certain point, logistics, fulfilment, customer acquisition, pricing, regulation, returns and margin become just as important as the top-line growth story.
Kering is confronting a different version of the same issue. CEO Luca de Meo has been restructuring the group’s supply chain because of its complexity and fragmentation, with Reuters reporting his comment that 25% of suppliers account for 98% of sourcing. That is not really a Fashion Week story. It is a growth story. Because for any global fashion business, the question is not simply can we grow?
It is can the infrastructure underneath the brand support that growth?
And there is now another layer to that infrastructure: discovery. For years, brands have invested in being discovered through Google, social media, marketplaces, influencers and paid media. Now AI is beginning to change the customer journey again. That matters because the definition of digital visibility is changing. The next customer may not search Google for ten brands and compare them. They may simply ask an AI assistant:
“What should I buy?”
If that becomes a normal part of shopping behaviour, product information, reviews, brand reputation, content, availability and relevance all become part of the acquisition infrastructure. Your website is no longer the only place your brand needs to be understood.
The machines recommending products need to understand you too.
THE TFTT INSIDER VIEW
From inside the industry, the shift we are seeing is not really about one new market, one new channel or one new technology. It is about the connections between them.
A brand can have extraordinary creative equity but lack distribution. A retailer can have millions of customers but need new categories or propositions. An international brand can see enormous potential in a market but lack the local infrastructure to enter it properly. A heritage house can possess decades of equity but still need to make that equity meaningful to a customer who has never bought it before. And increasingly, a business can have a great product and a strong website but still struggle if the customer discovers that product somewhere else.That is why the stories emerging from Fashion Month are more interesting when you look underneath them.
M&S does not need to become Sephora. Sephora does not need to build an entirely new UK store estate. Fabletics does not need to construct an Indian retail network from the ground up. Zara does not need to become a couture house to access creative authorship. Dior does not need to abandon its heritage to become relevant to a new customer.
The opportunity sits in the connection.
And that, for us, is the bigger commercial signal. Fashion has spent years talking about disruption, new channels and new markets. But the next stage may be less about adding more and more components to the business and more about making the components work together.
The right brand with the right product. The right product with the right customer. The right customer with the right discovery mechanism. The right market with the right local partner. The right attention with the right commercial infrastructure.
And all of it connected to economics that actually work. That changes the question for fashion leaders.
It is no longer simply:
“Where can we grow?”
It is:
“What are we missing from our growth engine — and who already has it?”
That is a much more interesting question. Because the opportunity is not simply to open another store, enter another market, launch another channel or create another collection. It is to understand which parts of the growth system you already own, which parts you are missing, and where a partner, technology platform, distribution model or new route to customer can accelerate the business. And perhaps this is the biggest shift we have seen across these three weeks.
Fashion is moving from a model where distribution was often the primary route to scale towards one where growth increasingly depends on connection.
Creativity creates attention. Brand gives that attention meaning. Technology changes discovery. Distribution makes the product accessible. Partnerships unlock markets and capabilities. Data improves the decisions. And economics determine whether the whole system can keep working.
That is the new growth equation. And it is why the most important stories of Fashion Month have not necessarily been the biggest shows. They are the stories underneath them.
The partnership that unlocks a customer. The creative relationship that makes a brand relevant again. The local infrastructure that makes an international market accessible. The supply-chain decision that protects the economics. The technology that changes how the customer discovers the product.
Different businesses. Different challenges. Different solutions. But one direction of travel.
The brands that create attention will still matter. But the businesses that know how to convert that attention into discovery, customers, repeat behaviour and sustainable profit will matter even more.
Fashion Month may be over.
The growth question is only getting started.
TFTT SIGNALS
THE GROWTH MODEL: Build the system, not just the channel. The opportunity increasingly sits between brand, customer, market, partner, technology and distribution.
THE PARTNERSHIP MODEL: Ask what capability or market access a partner unlocks — not simply what the collaboration looks like from the outside.
THE HERITAGE QUESTION: A strong archive is an asset. The commercial challenge is making it relevant to someone who has never owned the brand before.
THE SCALE QUESTION: Revenue growth is only one part of the equation. Margin, fulfilment, supply chain, customer acquisition and cost-to-serve ultimately determine whether growth is durable.
THE DISCOVERY QUESTION: As AI becomes part of product search and recommendation, brands need to think about how they are understood by machines as well as consumers.
THE TFTT INSIDER QUESTION:
What is the missing connection in your growth engine?
TFTT Inside Fashion. Not Observing It.
