There was a point in my career when I realised something had gone very wrong in fashion.

My days had become a blur of meetings. Meeting after meeting. A conveyor belt of trade meetings, trend briefs, product buying meetings - signing off product after product to go in to production....

The samples weren’t always even ready to be bought yet, they were often still in development, but there was an open-to-buy that needed filling, so the pipeline had to keep moving. Designers were already working on the next round of samples as the current ones went through the sign off and buying process. 

And it suddenly hit me.  This was the machine. A giant system that never stopped moving. And everything was speeding up. Faster seasons, faster trends, faster turnaround. We were constantly trying to keep up with it, but the truth was no one really could.

The ranges got bigger. The cycles got shorter. The pressure got heavier. Everyone was competing with everyone else, yet somehow everything on the high street started to look the same.

The same trends.  The same colour palettes. The same silhouettes. 

And then social media poured petrol on the fire. Suddenly people weren’t just buying clothes because they loved them. They were buying them for a moment. For a photo. For a post.

Buy ten dresses from a fast-fashion website. Keep one. Send the rest back.

When you step back and look at it, you realise how insane that system is. The waste. The carbon. The mountains of returned clothing that can’t even be resold.

And for what? A photo. A moment.

I remember sitting in one of those endless meeting rooms, looking around and thinking:

What is this really about?

This wasn’t the industry I thought I had joined all those years earlier, when I fell in love with fabrics and design and the joy clothes could bring. Somewhere along the way fashion had stopped being about creativity or human expression. It had become a machine. And it felt like a monster.

I found myself dreading my days. Back-to-back meetings. Endless pressure because the sales were never quite good enough. Targets rising, margins tightening, everyone pushing harder and harder just to keep the system moving.

Some days I realised I hadn’t even seen daylight. It started to feel suffocating, like being in a prison.

And at the same time, many of us inside the industry knew something had to change. We talked about sustainability. About slowing things down. About building better systems. But trying to change the system while still surviving inside it is incredibly hard.

Prices have to stay competitive. Margins still have to work. Sales still have to come through. Competing KPI's within business silos.

The pressure on buying teams and designers is relentless. Which is when I realised something uncomfortable. The system wasn’t just flawed. It was broken.

And the longer it continued, the bigger the damage it was causing, to people, to creativity, and to the planet.

Fashion had become a monster. And monsters don’t change unless someone is brave enough to challenge them.