Reclaiming Your Thoughts
Curated reading guide across access, visibility, and navigation, built to help you develop your own thinking on the systems shaping fashion and your place in them.
This edition is part of the bi-weekly newsletter series. Each edition explores how we make sense of leadership in an industry that often rewards visibility over sustainability; this newsletter is shaped by my lived-experiences and observations from within the fashion industry.
We’re at our 25th edition of [Reimagining Fashion Leadership], and it’s almost been 1 year since we published the first edition called ‘Access Over Aesthetics’. The goal of RFL has been to challenge my own thinking, to find my own voice after years of working from a commercial angle within the fashion industry. After years in senior marketing and communications roles, representing brands across different contexts, I found myself adapting to their narratives more than questioning them. Along the way I lost my own critical thinking and this is something I’ve been rediscovering here on Substack.
Start With Reimagining
For this edition, I’ve developed a guide to support your own process of reimagining what the fashion industry could become, and how it might evolve with more intention, awareness, and depth.
We hope this overview offers more than a reflection on the industry as it stands, and instead becomes a starting point for you to gather your own critical thoughts across the themes that shape fashion today. It is an invitation to move beyond surface-level observations and to engage more deliberately with the systems, assumptions, and dynamics that influence how work is created, recognised, and sustained. Forming an opinion within this context is not about arriving at quick conclusions, but about taking the time to question what feels given, to test ideas against research, and to remain in dialogue with others who are navigating similar environments from different perspectives. Through that process, thinking becomes something that is developed over time, informed by both individual experience and collective exchange, allowing for a more grounded and considered understanding of the fashion industry and your place within it.
01 - The Architecture of Access
Across the past year, a recurring question has surfaced around who gets to enter, who gets to stay, and who gets to move forward within the fashion industry. What often appears as a matter of talent or timing reveals itself, upon closer observation, as something far more structured. Access is shaped through networks, proximity, and forms of recognition that are rarely made explicit, yet consistently determine outcomes.
By exploring this theme, you’re invited to shift your perspective from individual effort to systemic design, and to understand how opportunity is distributed rather than assumed. It opens up a more grounded awareness of the environments we operate in, and the conditions that quietly shape progression. We recommend you to dive deeper into this question: What forms of access have shaped your path, and which ones remain just out of reach?
RFL reads:
No More Gatekeeping - This essay explores the gates that quietly protect fashion, which highlights how progression is shaped less by talent than by who is willing to build bridges for others to cross.
Education Is The Real Luxury - This essay explores what happens when education becomes a performance instead of a pathway, which highlights how time, support, and emotional safety remain the unspoken privileges that determine who actually gets to stay in, and grow through, the systems meant to level the playing field.
The Broken Pipeline - This essay explores why fashion can forecast trends with precision yet remains underdeveloped in forecasting talent, which highlights how shrinking entry points and outdated role definitions are quietly narrowing access for the next generation, even as the industry continues to position itself as future-facing.
Is Mentorship Just Trending - and Is It Still Enough? - This essay explores whether mentorship has become a buzzword rather than a system, which highlights how much of what passes for guidance still depends on chance encounters rather than designed support.
Other recommendations (magazines, podcasts, articles, accounts, books):
1granary - Fashion Education Is a Luxury Item - A direct counterpart to Education Is The Real Luxury, this piece reinforces how the cost of fashion school has become one of the industry’s most powerful gatekeepers.
Dazed - How I Became - A useful counterweight to opaque career narratives, this series highlights how first-hand accounts can demystify entry into creative industries for those without inherited networks.
Cecilie Thorsmarsk - Followed for her perspective leading Copenhagen Fashion Week, which highlights how institutional access can be redesigned around responsibility rather than prestige.
Aurora James - Wildflower: A Memoir - Recommended for her account of building the Fifteen Percent Pledge from the outside in, which highlights how access has to be demanded structurally before it becomes available individually.
Frederica Brooksworth - Followed for her work expanding fashion education and research across the African continent, which highlights how access widens when the geography of the industry itself is reimagined.
02 - The Economy of Visibility
Visibility has become one of the most dominant currencies within the fashion industry, often positioned as both a requirement and a reward. Over time, it has started to blur the line between presence and credibility, creating a dynamic where being seen can accelerate authority, sometimes faster than experience can sustain it.
This theme invites a closer look at what visibility actually represents, what it asks in return, and how it influences the way we define value and leadership. Engaging with this perspective allows you to reconsider your relationship with exposure, and to question whether visibility is something to pursue, to resist, or to approach with greater intention. A question to sit with: Is visibility reflecting your work, or is your work adapting to visibility?
RFL reads:
The Illusion of Equal Opportunity - This essay discusses what the latest wave of creative director appointments really reveals, which highlights how visibility rarely translates into access for women and others still treated as the exception rather than the norm.
The Cost of Visibility - This essay explores how visibility has become fashion’s most celebrated currency, which highlights how reputation now moves faster than responsibility, and what that costs the slower work of leadership.
Borrowed Authority - This essay points to the gap between holding a creative position and actually building authorship, which highlights how titles are increasingly assigned at the speed of influence rather than the pace of vision.
What The Classroom Reveals - In this edition I wrote about what teaching inside fashion has shown about the systems we work in, which highlights how the conditions for growth are visible long before they become professional realities.
Other recommendations (magazines, podcasts, articles, accounts, books):
1granary - Women make up 74% of fashion courses, but 12% of creative directors - Included because the gap between who studies fashion and who leads it makes the visibility economy measurable rather than theoretical.
Vogue Business - Debunking The Dream: Who is allowed to succeed in fashion? - A direct examination of who the system actually rewards, which highlights how the meritocratic narrative obscures the structural reasons certain people remain visible at the top.
Perfect Magazine - How Edward Buchanan Wove The Foundations For Bottega Veneta’s Ready-to-wear. - Included because Buchanan’s contribution went largely uncredited for years, which highlights how foundational creative work can be made invisible even as the brands built on it become globally visible.
03 - The Practice of Navigation
Beneath formal roles, job descriptions, and educational pathways, there is another layer of learning that shapes how people move through the industry. You can see it in how relationships are built, how rooms are read, and how decisions are made in moments that are rarely documented or explained.
This theme brings attention to the gap between what is taught and what is expected, and to the skills that are developed through observation, experience, and proximity rather than instruction. By exploring this layer, you’ll begin to recognise patterns that once felt intangible, and gain a more active role in how you navigate systems that are often difficult to interpret. Recommended question to reflect on: What have you learned to navigate that was never formally taught to you?
RFL reads:
The New DNA of Fashion Jobs - This essay explores the rewriting of work across fashion between AI-driven layoffs and the romanticised pull of freelance freedom, which highlights how navigating the industry now depends as much on human infrastructure as on technical skill.
The Myth of Creativity - This essay examines what it actually means to be creative and who gets to claim that position, which highlights how prioritizing visibility over process makes navigation harder for anyone whose creative contribution isn’t immediately visible.
The Future Is Relational - This piece speaks on the interpersonal shift quietly reshaping how we work, which highlights how the next decade of leadership will rely less on authority and more on how we show up for the people around us.
Learning How To Learn In Fashion - This article talks about how to design a personal curriculum for an industry that never slows down, which highlights how staying oriented depends on building your own rhythm of learning rather than waiting for one to be given.
Other recommendations (magazines, podcasts, articles, accounts, books)
Business of Fashion - How To Get Ahead In A Stagnant Job Market - Included for its practical read on the current job market, which highlights how navigating fashion right now requires strategies that formal education rarely prepares people for.
Vogue Business - Inside LVMHs AI Factory - Recommended because understanding how the largest player is restructuring around AI is part of reading the room, which highlights how the unwritten skills of navigation now include literacy in the technologies reshaping every role.
Ashantea Austin (@mustbemargiela) - Followed for her sharp commentary on the industry’s inner workings and developing the creative director(y) tracking shifts within each luxury fashion house, which highlights how much of what is rarely taught is being addressed in real time on social platforms.
Fashion Forward Careers on Substack by Erin Moronell - Valued for her work decoding the unspoken rules of corporate fashion, which highlights exactly the kind of invisible curriculum this edition is trying to bring into focus.
The Cutting Room Floor Podcast - Included because honest, long-form industry conversation is itself a form of navigation training, which highlights how much learning happens in the spaces between formal education and formal experience.
What’s To Come Next
Over the past months, [Reimagining Fashion Leadership] has grown beyond writing into a space that continues to open new doors, from collaborations with Harper’s Bazaar Netherlands and Modefabriek to conversations with Vogue Poland, the Business Fashion Environment Summit and Copenhagen Fashion Week, with more partnerships taking shape. Through this process, and by staying closely connected to students, educators, and professionals across both commercial brands and the wider industry, a consistent pattern has begun to surface.
There is a layer of knowledge that shapes who moves forward and who remains unseen, a set of unspoken rules, behaviours, and forms of access that are rarely taught yet constantly expected. This is what I have started to understand as The Invisible Curriculum™. It sits beneath formal education and job descriptions, quietly informing how to navigate rooms, build relationships, and position oneself within systems that are often difficult to read from the outside. As this platform continues to evolve, the next step is to bring that layer into focus, not only by naming it, but by exploring how it can be understood and navigated more consciously. I will expand on this in more detail in the next edition.
Until then, thank you for reading and for being part of this reimagining.
— Stephany Goncalves
Strategic Advisor, Fashion Academic & Board Member