Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.

How to Future-Proof Your Fashion Career in 2025

Soft skills like agility, intellectual curiosity and an ability to work across departments and categories will be crucial in 2025 — but true success will mean playing the long game.

Fashion-industry talent who can adapt quickly and help brands find solutions to complex issues will fare best. (Getty)

Sheena Butler-Young

07 January 2025

BoF PROFESSIONAL

In December, Teodora Nicolae, a seasoned marketing executive, most recently at a fashion trade show group, took to LinkedIn to share a popular year-end refrain: “Today is my last day ... I am simultaneously very excited to step into a new chapter.”

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Is Fashion Done With Diversity Departments?

DEI programmes, widely adopted across the industry in 2020, now face a backlash from conservative activists and internal doubts about their effectiveness. To survive, they must evolve, experts say.

Fashion’s Most (and Least) In-Demand Skills

An industry-wide reckoning is leading fashion firms to prioritise soft skills like critical thinking and curiosity over once in-demand technical proficiencies.

What Fashion’s Advocacy Will Look Like in the Trump Era

Many brands have stopped engaging with social and political issues, fearing a conservative backlash. That calculus may change when Trump returns to office.

About the author

Sheena Butler-Young

Sheena Butler-Young is Senior Correspondent at The Business of Fashion. She is based in New York and covers workplace, talent and issues surrounding diversity and inclusion.

In This Article

Topics

Workplace & Talent

How to Protect Work-Life Balance in the Fashion and Beauty Industries

Industry insiders share advice on how employees in notoriously competitive fields like fashion and beauty can protect their working hours and set professional boundaries while achieving career goals.

What It Takes to Lead a Challenger Brand

As insurgent brands gain ground in fashion and beauty, their leaders are developing distinct approaches to hiring talent, sustaining momentum and scaling beyond the underdog phase.

Underdays and Foundrae Are Hiring on BoF Careers

Check out this week’s new partner and job openings on BoF Careers, the global marketplace for fashion and beauty talent.

Why Fashion’s Next Generation Is Rethinking College

Hefty tuition prices, unclear career pathways and new routes into the industry are reshaping how young people invest in education.

The Industry That Eats Its Young

Small fashion labels have always been shortchanged by their wholesale partners. A wave of high-profile bankruptcies has turned a structural injustice into an existential crisis. There is a better way to do business, writes Imran Amed.

The Zara-Fication of John Galliano

Fashion’s enfant terrible is trading exclusivity for the mass market. Is it the ultimate fashion coup, or the final surrender of prestige?

The Impact of War on Fashion’s Supply Chain

Textile hubs are already feeling the cascading risks of the conflict in Iran as Washington ramps up forced labour probes to revive tariffs, while decarbonisation in fashion’s factories might finally have a standard to go off of.

Bella Freud on Fashion and the Art of Getting People to Open Up | The BoF Podcast

The designer and podcaster joins Imran Amed to reflect on the emotional power of clothes, what Vivienne Westwood taught her about rebellion and how Fashion Neurosis has unlocked a new chapter in her creative life.

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Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.

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