LONDON – Jamie Gill, chief executive at Roksanda and chair of the British Fashion Council’s Diversity Committee, is launching an incubation project, called Outside Perspectives, to tackle the issue of fashion’s diversity behind the scenes.
“It’s an incubator that nurtures people of color to ensure they’re equipped to join the operational side of the fashion brand, driving change in equality, diversity, inclusion in fashion,” Gill said.
While racial diversity has grown on the runway and on social media in recent years, Gill argued that those working behind the scenes have hardly changed.
Just 5 per cent of the workforce in the fashion industry comes from people of color, a study by MBS Group and the British Fashion Council showed.
“There is a huge lack of ethnic representation working in the less creative but no less essential roles – finance directors, sales directors and operations managers.
“Besides the macro fashion brands that most of us know, the reality is that the fashion industry consists of small and medium-sized brands, where there is no clear professional training ground for finding talent. I want to help change that,” Gill said.
Together with Burberry, the British Fashion Council, the Mayor of London’s Office, Deloitte, Karla Otto and Zalando, the project aims to provide a platform for people of color – like Gill himself, who was born to working-class British Indian parents in Midlands. — to join and perhaps one day lead the British fashion industry.
“I want to talk to professional talent, like bankers, lawyers, accountants, people of color and who have been in a career that they felt they had to do and always looked at fashion as an exciting and exciting creative. industry”, he said.
“The walls have always been up because even if they want to be a lawyer at Burberry, you don’t have five years of luxury and fashion experience to work in law, let alone anything else. And this is a talent that has an active passion and interest in the space and they don’t know who they all are,” added Gill.
Those interested in the incubation project can get in touch through the website Theoutsidersperspective.org starting Thursday.
“I already have some talent in the ring that I think could be really good. They go through a recruiter with all the partners together, and then we take them through a series of workshops and they also have to do a case study at the end of the workshop.”
With kindness
The platform will also provide a much-needed pool of talent for fashion businesses that are facing various talent shortages.
“It addresses two things. It’s a diversity project, but it’s also a talent project. You have brands like Roksanda, Erdem and Victoria Beckham looking for different talent, but you don’t know where to go,” Gill noted.
The reality facing the industry today is that “once a business starts turning over a million pounds, it can employ 11 people and scale. But where are you getting that salesman from? It’s more likely that they’ve been trained on another smaller brand, and then they’ve gone to another brand on another brand, but they haven’t really been built,” he said.
In comparison, talent coming out of The Outsiders Perspective may need a few extra months to adjust to industry knowledge, but “we’re going to give you someone who’s smart,” Gill said.
Having worked in architecture, accountancy and venture capital before joining Roksanda, Gill believes the British fashion industry could benefit greatly from welcoming people from more diverse backgrounds into the decision-making process, as the education of Their multicultural background can help brands approach challenges and opportunities from a more nuanced perspective.
“In addition, they understand how to budget. They have accounting and legal awareness and an innate understanding of this. And then in soft skills, they know how to communicate and be analytical. They can be thorough and they can be diligent. All those skills we could really do, but they just don’t know specifically about fashion,” he added.
At the end of the mentorship, Gill will match the talents with the brands and all the bodies in Foreign Perspectives will monitor them through this.
“If I can get 25 talented people of color through the first incubation in the next six months, finding them jobs and bringing on board 20 of the top British luxury and fashion brands, it will really create a solid foundation to scaled, and then we can be like, ‘Let’s go bigger now, because we have something that works,'” Gill said.
