I want to talk about the moment I realised the fashion system was broken.

But first I need to explain why I loved it.

My love of clothes started very early. I got my first sewing machine when I was seven a Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs machine. I loved dressing up. I loved how clothes made me feel. The colour, the texture, the transformation. Even as a child I could feel the confidence clothes could give you. My first arguments with my mother were about what I was wearing. Clothes mattered to me.

So following that passion into the fashion industry felt completely natural. I studied fashion design and marketing and then trained as a buyer. I loved the excitement of it all.  Putting ranges together. Choosing fabrics. Visiting factories. Seeing how clothes were made.  Watching products come to life in store.

And then there was the trading.

Learning how customers responded. Driving sell-through. Improving margins. Getting the most out of every line. Fashion was creative, but it was also commercial, and that combination fascinated me.

My first job was at Marks & Spencer, and later I moved to Bay Trading, which at the time was one of the early fast-fashion businesses.  It was electric. Design to shop floor in ten days.  Made in the East End of London. Fast, reactive, exciting. We traded hard and we made money. And I loved it.

Over time I progressed through the industry, eventually leading buying teams and large departments. But slowly something began to shift. Everything was getting faster. People were buying more. Clothes were becoming cheaper. And the value of what we were creating began to diminish.

More competitors entered the market and suddenly everyone was chasing the same customer with the same product, often at the lowest possible price. Discounting became normal. Margins were constantly under pressure. And so we pushed harder. Cheaper factories. Cheaper fabrics. Designs engineered to hit price points rather than create something beautiful. Fashion slowly stopped being about creativity or joy. It became about margin.

One moment that shook the entire industry was the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh. Over a thousand garment workers lost their lives producing clothes for the global fashion supply chain. For many of us inside fashion it was a brutal wake-up call. The system didn’t care about people. It didn’t care about the human hands making the clothes. It cared about one thing...

Profit..

That was the moment I realised something deeply uncomfortable.

The industry I once loved had become toxic.  

And I was part of it.It forced me to reflect on something bigger.

The systems we live inside shape who we become.

And I knew I didn’t want to simply accept that.

If we want a different future, we have to be brave enough to build different systems.

This reflection is the first in a series I’m writing called Truths From Inside the System exploring fashion, leadership, workplaces and the responsibility we all share to question the systems we’ve accepted for too long.

Because change rarely starts with systems. It starts with people willing to challenge them.

Gilly
X