Next in Fashion

Next in Fashion

For those of you who have Netflix or have been seeing Next in Fashion all over your socials, if you love fashion or anything creative, it is definitely a show for you to watch. It’s like the Great British Sewing Bee and Project Runway all rolled into one. The show is presented by Alexa Chung and Tan France which was already enough to get me hooked and wanting more. It follows a group of designers through a series of challenges that could potentially land them with the chance to win a large cash prize in order to start a brand or put more money into their brand if they already have one.

The show is a rollercoaster, at times I even felt stressed for the designers having to create stunning outfits in such a short space of time. But my god do they pull it out of the bag sometimes. They start off in teams of 2 but every designer is so different that working together can prove incredibly difficult sometimes and heads clash but when two designers focus on their strengths together, they create some amazing garments. But later on, in the show they split off to work individually so their partner now becomes their competitor!

The show really gave me a proper insight to how some fashion brands start, it isn’t all sunshine and money it’s a lot of hard work, blood, sweat and tears (quite literally). To hear how some of the contestant had to almost give up everything in order to get their brands just one leg higher up the ladder really resonated with me. Or how their designs have been supressed due to partnerships within a company meaning that they can never truly express themselves. I began to wonder as to why I hadn’t really noticed this before in other fashion shows that I had watched, majority of them mainly focused on the designs produced and maybe a brief insight to these designer’s lives. Why is this? The fashion world is something that has been seen as very glamourous for many years but is it really that glamourous. There’s a lot that we don’t see, things that happen behind the scenes and what I can image to be a huge amount of stress and pressure on all designers.

I’m thankful that Next in Fashion has given me a chance to see a glimpse of this and I hope in the future I can begin to see more of this and I feel it is something that needs to be shown, not to tarnish the glamourous reputation that the fashion industry has but to show us that its a lot more than that. That it comes with its ups and downs but it still glamourous.