The UK Fashion DEI Report - British Fashion Council & The Outsiders Perspective

The British Fashion Council (BFC) identified a critical need for more robust demographic data collection within the British fashion industry to establish a comprehensive baseline for developing an effective strategy. Jamie Gill, BFC Executive Board Member and Founder of The Outsiders Perspective, spearheaded a collaborative project involving the BFC, The Outsiders Perspective, and the Fashion (Minority) Report, with support from knowledge partner McKinsey & Co. McKinsey played a pivotal role in gathering, analysing, and presenting the data, ensuring it was delivered with the clarity and precision required to drive meaningful industry impact.

The report gives a snapshot of the here and now and then paints the picture of where we need to head—and why. The piece also includes interviews with 12 leaders from 12 businesses within the fashion sector, including Burberry, Mulberry and Fred Perry, to showcase voices from industry leaders.

The UK Fashion DEI Report is aimed at business leaders and those sitting at the C-suite and board level. It calls on leadership and majority groups to support EDI and gives minority groups the language they need to strengthen their voices. It aims to encourage more fashion and beauty businesses to make equity and diversity culturally central to their business strategy by addressing issues including attrition of young talent and tokenism at the top levels.

We interviewed The Outsiders Perspective team. We learn more about the group’s mission to increase representation in luxury fashion and beauty and catalyse a shift toward EDI as a must-have rather than a nice-to-have. We dive into the need for the industry to do better as a collective and the importance of holding a mirror up to us all, and considering the path forward from this point, together.

What are some of the early outcomes you’re seeing after publishing the report?

We’ve already been invited to present to over 20 businesses. So, we've been presenting why diverse teams are integral to business growth. Three brands have had us take the conversation to board-level. Brands have set goals, using the report to inform those goals and started to talk about how they can begin putting their ambitions in place.

The report has been integral in laying the imperative to widen the talent pool for who is the make-up of the workforce and why. Fashion has one of the most globally diverse consumers of any industry and growth markets are now India, Africa and the Middle East, but we have very little representation of those markets in decision-making roles in brand HQs. We are now seeing brands recognising this and what it means for their business.

What is one key element of the report that you want businesses to take away?

We built a model in chapter four of the report called Move to Deliver. It's a soft version of a model that we believe, if businesses lean into, is a really strong step forward into progress. The more we can get people to understand modelling around the implementation of this change, the more stakeholders within a company will start to take accountability.

The model has three sections with a fourth area for the company itself. It's a circular model. The first step is to lead from the top—so, rather than siloing DEI into a conversation that someone somewhere is struggling to have, have it at leadership level. Have a point at every board meeting. Have it written into your business strategy. Then, create accountability and reward through company culture to make sure that the conversation doesn't go anywhere.

Within the model and within the report, we share some recommendations on how to do that authentically—and we want to go deeper with it. The first recommendation is that you need leadership, involvement, and engagement. The second recommendation is about getting the data and not just collecting it for the sake of collecting it or ticking a box.

Basically, what we're asking people to take away is that you need to lead from the top. You need to get the data, and then you need to really analyse your systems and pathways and create a system and a pathway internally that will allow for all of those things to work together to reach the ambitions you set for your business.

How are you measuring the impact of the report?

For us personally, it's how many businesses have invited us to go deeper with their business, either at that leadership level or presenting it across the wider organisation. That's the first measure, and that has been substantial, which we're really pleased about.

We've had businesses getting in touch to ask how they can work with us to do better in this conversation and the more we're being invited to have these conversations elsewhere, the more we're realising the impact could be far wider reaching. The fact that we're having that ripple effect is an indication that this is going further than we had hoped.

We also measured press success and the coverage we got. We've had some mainstream outlets cover it, including The Guardian, which is a real accolade.

What have been your biggest challenges or limitations so far?

We think the fact that we called it an EDI report made people who recognise themselves as being a majority group feel immediately like they weren't bringing value to it. We think because it was an EDI census, a lot of people from diverse backgrounds were responding and majority groups didn't think it was for them. We had to do a big push to encourage more people from straight, white-identifying communities to respond. Our goal for next time is a far larger pool of people responding to the census and to have a far deeper demographic representation within that.

We’d also say the other challenge for us has been the noise of everything else. We are in a constant state of crisis and flux with so many other macro things that are challenging businesses, like the cost of living crisis, the effects of Brexit, and war in Ukraine. With so many other things going on, it's easy for someone to drop themselves into neutral or, worse, reverse. So, we're asking leadership to see EDI as a business imperative rather than a nice-to-have—and that's a challenge at the moment.

Plus, the press aren't talking about diversity as much as they used to. The Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 pushed it to the top of the agenda and gave some pretty powerful headlines, which allowed press to gain readership. However, I think there is possibly a sense of desensitization around the conversation happening. I think it's dropping down the agenda because of everything going on everywhere else.

What’s next for the UK Fashion DEI Report?

Our mission talks about creating fair representation in fashion, luxury and beauty. That's what we're putting our stake in the ground on. Have we put measures and timelines on that yet? No—and the reason for that is there's a lot to unpick in terms of where we have to focus, who we have to educate and how we have to move an entire industry along. We could make a bold statement that by 2030, we want fairer representation—but what does that actually look like and how would we measure it?

We're in the middle of trying to use this report to understand how we can repeat it over time. We're hoping to do a second one in 2026 in order to be able to show whether or not we're making any progress.

Within the report, there's also a three-tier model we're giving to businesses that we're hoping they'll adopt. One of them is about them getting the data. The hope is that, in the future, when we're seeing more people collecting data, we can potentially ask them to contribute their data anonymously so we centralise it through the BFC. This would mean we would be able to say, 'This is where the industry is right now based on X number of businesses contributing data and this is where we want to be’.

What do you believe to be the biggest risks of not tackling EDI issues in your industry?

The first risk is your consumer base. We know that customers are buying product right now, but we also know that customer belief in the brands that they purchase is changing. So, we know that Gen Z is asking brands to be more accountable for where their products are coming from a sustainability perspective, but they are also starting to ask about the culture of the brand that they're purchasing from.

We've seen brands make mistakes by putting products out there that aren’t appropriate or are culturally insensitive. The response to that demonstrates the power of the customer very quickly is to cancel brands. We've seen brands repair their reputation but even a blip has huge financial ramifications from the cost of reputational damage. Beyond the physical cost implications are reputational losses that brands cannot afford these days.

The second risk is the judgemental telling-off and negative fear-mongering going on around asking someone to create action. It creates so much fear in leaders, particularly those who come from majority groups, who are frightened to say the wrong thing, who don't understand their authentic voice in the conversation, and so shy away from it. It creates a paralysis around having or participating in the conversation.

In our report, we use language to encourage participation in a conversation that some people don't believe they belong in. We have presented it as risk mitigation as well as a business opportunity. We think a lot of people think it's a nice-to-have rather than a must-have, but we're trying to shift that.

What key advice or learning would you share with other organisations who are considering delivering similar initiatives?

Know your audience and understand how to deliver your message to them. Think about how to say it in the way they need to hear it, not just what you want to say yourself. We went through a lot of iterations of our report to remove emotion because it's hard not to be emotional in this conversation. We would advise having a body or a contributor—whether it be an individual or a group of individuals like we did with McKinsey—who can help guide you. You can't do it all yourself because you won't catch all of the emotion you're putting in there.

Have a really strong plan on how you're going to deliver it and then don't think of it as done when you're finished. You can celebrate the moment when it's written and when it's published but really, the hard work starts there. It's a tool that has to be used over and over—it can't just be something you expect people to actively seek out or find later on. You have to keep shoving it under the noses of those people who need to see it.

There's a reason why rhetoric gets picked up—because people who want it to be picked up repeat it over and over again. Sadly, so far, we've seen so many negative versions of that. You need to keep saying your message because you eventually want people to adopt it as their own. That's when you know you've succeeded.

To read the full UK Fashion DEI Report and explore all of the facts, figures and statistics around the current state of EDI in the luxury fashion and beauty sector, visit https://www.theoutsidersperspective.org/report and https://www.britishfashioncouncil.co.uk/Innovation/Diversity-Equity-Inclusion--Belonging.

Report Partners

The Outsiders Perspective

The Outsiders Perspective is a pioneering organisation committed to transforming the luxury, fashion, beauty and media industries with highly skilled diverse talent from alternate industries. Through the Accelerator Programme, a not-for-profit platform, The Outsiders Perspective enables the career transition of skilled, professional, people of colour with an existing knowledge base and passion to work in industry.

The Outsiders Perspective candidates bring fresh perspectives, innovative thinking, a wider global consumer knowledge and business rigour, offering a competitive advantage to our growing list of brand partners as well as creating level opportunities for all, offering additional support to businesses in their unique Talent and DEI journeys - from Search, Data & insights, Consultancy, Online learning and Bespoke talent programmes.

British Fashion Council

The British Fashion Council (BFC) is a not-for-profit organisation focused on the relentless innovation, responsible growth and local and global amplification of the British fashion industry. The BFC amplifies excellence in creativity and its role in the UK’s cultural influence through The Fashion Awards and London Fashion Week. The BFC prepares businesses for positive change through relentless innovation through its climate think and action tank The Institute of Positive Fashion (IPF), which includes a focus on social change through Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEI&B), and Digital. The BFC enables responsible growth through a dynamic, inclusive, and unified community that advocates for creativity, innovation and collectively supports the industry to grow talent to gain access.

The Fashion (Minority) Report

Launched in July 2020 by brand and marketing specialist, Daniel Peters, The (Fashion) Minority Report (FMR) exists to create equality within the fashion industry and creative sector for diverse professionals, by advancing the conversation around inclusion and diversity to a point of measurable change.

McKinsey & Company

McKinsey & Company is a global management consulting firm. McKinsey & Company is a trusted advisor to the world’s leading businesses, governments, and institutions. The firm works with leading organisations across private, public and social sectors including on topics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and fashion/consumer business.

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