The UK's arts sector is currently not in good shape. Unless you’re Damien Hirst or have a wealthy benefactor, you’re pretty screwed. According to a report commissioned by the Design & Artists Copyright Society (DACS) last year, the median income for visual artists is now £12,500 annually. Despite London's many world-renowned art colleges, experts predict this unliveable wage will only create a bigger creative brain drain, as graduates and working artists leave the country in search of more liveable conditions.

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Still, while there is no replacement for government intervention, cheap studio spaces and a manageable cost of living, there are a number of prizes, residencies and mentorships that can help. After all, an award or other form of institutional support can be that leg up you really need.

So, in the same vein as our fashion and photography resource lists, we’ve put together a handful of opportunities in the fine art world. It’s scary out there, so we’ve focused on awards with as few barriers to entry as possible. These offer both cash prizes as well as other forms of support because sometimes, cold hard cash isn’t quite enough to make a career – you also need to find the right audience.

Gilchrist Fisher Award

The Gilchrist-Fisher Award, established in 1987 in memory of Alasdair Gilchrist-Fisher, celebrates his love of life and landscape painting. Open to artists under 30, it recognises work exploring the theme of ‘landscape’. Originally a painting prize, it now accepts all media except video and installation. Past winners include Peter Doig and Angela Hughes.

Entry fee: Free

Deadline: 23rd May 2025

More info here

Drawing Year at the Royal Drawing School

Whilst not a prize per se, the Royal Drawing School offers this completely free one year postgraduate course every year at the Royal Drawing School in London. Successful applicants are judged on the basis of their work rather than their experience but require two referees to enter.

Entry fee: Free.

Deadline: 2nd April 2025

More info here

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Last Autumn, the Kunstmuseum Den Haag staged an exhibition titled Dior – A New Look. The tale it told was a familiar one. Like the Musée des Arts Décoratifs’ 2017 Christian Dior: couturier de rêve, which has since travelled in slightly altered guises to the Brooklyn Museum, the V&A, Shanghai’s West Bund Museum, and, most recently, Riyadh’s Saudi National Museum, it combined the adulatory thrill of a good origin story – in this case, Christian Dior revolutionising post-war women’s dress via big skirts and tiny waists – with a genealogical survey of the brand’s six subsequent creative directors; each tasked with conducting a delicate dance between homage and novelty as they paid fealty to the house’s founder whilst carving out their own vision (and revenue) for the famed French label.

In the Kunstmuseum’s exhibition, Maria Grazia Chiuri was given the largest spotlight, positioned not just as a creative director but a quasi-spiritual inheritor, a designer who, as the house’s first female lead, allegedly shared M. Dior’s “bold… progressive style” and had “modernised the fashion house, out of her desire to design for modern women.” The museum illustrated this facetious claim via a classic side-by-side pairing: Dior’s original 1947 Bar jacket sat alongside Chiuri’s lighter, looser interpretation, styled unbuttoned over her infamous "We Should All Be Feminists" T-shirt. Its claim to revolutionary progress was weak, the design limp and almost apologetic compared to a nearby interpretation by John Galliano, brazenly sat atop a puddle of blue ruffles.

The Bar jacket is one of those garments or accessories, like Chanel’s tweeds and pearls or Burberry’s trench coat, that tends to be tackled by all incoming creative directors. It becomes a test of design mettle, a timekeeping riddle in which all the tenses must be satisfied at once: due reverence for the past (without being dated), sufficient daring in the melding of present and near future such that the resulting designs feel fresh, relevant and, ideally, just ahead of the curve. But over the past couple of years, the line between reinterpretation and replication has grown fainter, many of the largest, most legacy-aware houses rummaging through their back catalogues, not for creative spurs or generative starting points but blueprints that can be safely followed again and again.

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Behind-the-scenes content is increasingly popular in fashion, communicating the PR-approved musings of this week’s creative director (gone the next). But what we really need is honest information about the inner workings of the top brands and conglomerates. We decided it was time to ask the experts who are never asked.

1 Granary has interviewed in-house designers at the height of their careers – the stalwarts who have been researching, conceptualising, designing, and producing every collection for the past three decades. Over the next few weeks, we will release a series of newsletters devoted to a different thematic area that emerged from our conversations: money, power dynamics, motherhood, equality, ageism and much more.

To kick things off, we’ll be discussing everyone’s favourite unspoken subject: salaries.

‘I never earned much money throughout my career. I also never interviewed for a job. When I got my job as a junior designer at a Parisian luxury house, I thought I’d made it. Then they called me: “How is 28k per year?” I earn more working at the pub! I was absolutely shocked. Since then, up until this year, I really had to negotiate every single round.

I was constantly talking about it with my colleagues. Because we’ve been good friends for a while, there was trust, so we could have that conversation. That is when you can learn that companies do not value you at all. An older colleague of mine is in a similar position but earning 30k less. They get away with it because they assume we’re not going to speak to each other.

You don’t want to be seen as the one rallying the troops, but you can achieve a lot by talking to everyone and asking them what they earn, sharing your HR experience, then encouraging each other to negotiate. In this case, it really helps to go for a drink after work. After two glasses of wine we’re shouting at each other: “This is how you ask for more money!"

Paris is the most expensive city in the world. I’m a certain age where I want to buy a house, and I want all the things that life can give me. I deserve to be able to go on holiday. If you’re in the core design team of a luxury brand, but you can’t afford the luxuries of life… then why are you doing it?

I had this realisation when I went back home to Australia. Everyone was talking about my job in Paris, curious to find out what it was like, seeing me as a star… but then I would have to lie that I’d already had dinner because I couldn’t afford the bill. I’m sleeping on a friend’s couch and drinking wine in a park. Is this the image you want for your brand?’

██████, Senior Designer at ██████

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Once the beating heart of avant-garde creativity, London Fashion Week (LFW) has felt different in recent seasons. Autumn/Winter 2025 was particularly quiet, with no 16Arlington, Molly Goddard, Chopova Lowena, JW Anderson, Nensi Dojaka, Ahluwalia, Knwls, Aaron Esh, Karoline Vitto, or Johanna Parv on the runway.

What’s behind this shift? The reasons are manifold, but the signs are impossible to ignore. Global economic instability, soaring production costs, and a lack of infrastructure are making it increasingly difficult for designers to sustain their brands. Add that to the post-Brexit business climate – rife with supply chain disruptions, higher tariffs, and reduced international collaboration – and it’s clear why many are rethinking their involvement in LFW altogether.

The price of a show vs. the value of a show

Staging a runway show isn’t cheap – £60,000 or more for a 10-minute spectacle. And with London’s Spring/Summer 2025 season pulling in a meager £20.9 million in earned media value (compared to New York’s £132 million, Milan's £250 million and Paris's whopping £437 million), according to research by influencer marketing firm Lefty, the maths simply doesn’t add up.

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For this month’s Reflections – a series of conversations aimed at developing our toolbox beyond creativity – we discuss self-advocacy and rethinking how we view silence.

Speaking up in a professional environment can feel intimidating, anxiety-inducing, and high-risk. Oftentimes, it doesn't feel worth the hassle, and thus unresolved problems become part of the fabric of our daily lives at work. However, it's crucial to remember that this is a skill that all of us can teach ourselves to improve at.

Elaine Hering wrote a book about just that. In Unlearning Silence, she draws from her background in communication, collaboration and conflict management – having worked as a Managing Partner of Triad Consulting Group and a Lecturer in Law at Harvard Law School, specialising in dispute resolution, mediation, and negotiation. She challenges the idea that speaking up is just about being louder – it’s about being heard in systems that often dismiss certain voices.

For fashion designers navigating an industry built on hierarchy, subjectivity and exclusivity, her work highlights how structural biases shape who gets visibility and influence. Hering emphasises that real change comes not just from individual confidence but from reshaping the systems that silence people, whether through leadership, workplace culture, or industry norms. For designers, the takeaway is clear: advocating for your work isn’t just about personal boldness but about recognising and challenging the invisible barriers that determine whose creativity gets championed.

Elaine, your work offers valuable insights for professionals in many fields, but what unique challenges do you see in the creative industry?

One big thing that strikes me about creative industries versus others is subjectivity. What is considered ‘creative’ or ‘novel’ is subjective, which amplifies biases. Decisions about whose work is valuable are based on personal judgment rather than clear metrics, like in finance.

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As any budding designer can attest, there are just some patterns, fabrics, techniques and factors involved with putting together a collection or capsule that inevitably leave you stumped. Perhaps you’re coming to the end of a breakthrough toile and can’t for the life of you remember what your art school seamstress said about pleating cuffs. Maybe you’re mocking up some range-building essentials to complete a line sheet when it dawns on you that, until now, you’ve never made a fly zipper. You might, more specifically, be fine-tuning your patchwork skills for added finesse.

As many designers know, sometimes your best friend in these moments can be YouTube. Sure, it's filled with distraction, but it's also brimming with clear, comprehensive guides from professional tailors, couturiers and streetwear nerds. Of course, nowadays, art schools and DIY designers are increasingly made up of digital natives, making online, video-based formats all the more important to one’s formal or self-taught training.

Granted, good, old-fashioned methods that the likes of the late, great Louise Wilson purveyed can’t be skipped – there’s no shortcut for graft – but you can always bolster experience and time in the studio with a little, at-home learning. And so, after speaking with some of today’s contemporary and student designers cutting their teeth or setting up labels for recommendations, we pulled together some of the trustiest tutorials, ticking off everything from basic, freehand tracksuit design to historied silhouettes like the Chanel suit, that seamless Balenciaga dress of Cristóbal lore or the best blanks suppliers.

How to know which fabric to choose

Niklas, the Cologne-based sewist behind YouTube account Vintagebursche is a die-hard traditionalist, favouring natural fibres over anything chemically tainted. Nonetheless, he does a fine job in distinguishing the make-up of your contemporary polyester and viscose from the age-old favourites like linen, wool (woolen and worsted) and cotton. Undoubtedly, for anyone – designer, tailor or streetwear entrepreneur – this explainer provides savvy hints regarding which fabric might be best for a garment. Want to design with wool, but keep it cool? Try fresco, a thick, tightly spun yet, due to its coarseness, breezy wool suitable for Spring suiting. As for tweed, Niklas is clear: opt for protected or trusted mills, such as Harris, Lovat and Abraham Moon and Sons.

How to get perfect seams

Guest couturier, Barbara Pesendorfer, joins costume and fashion history expert Bernadette Banner for an instalment focused on meticulously pressed garments. Guiding viewers through the protocol basics, she punctuates her tutorial with experience-gleaned details that take a jacket, blazer or corset from amateur to professional. This might be, say, her choice of fabric for a pressing cloth – silk organza for delicates, linen for wools and cottons – or simply some damage control, such as incorporating a cloth brush into one’s workflow to soften any garment fibres that have become shiny. Go against and with the pile, she advises.

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“It’s a boys' club. It always has been. It’s so boring to me that nothing has changed. You wonder why fashion feels so irrelevant at the moment – you have all of these womenswear brands with so much potential, but no women are invited in to shape them.”

12%.

That’s how many women* we calculated are currently creative directors at leading luxury fashion houses.

There’s absolutely no shortage of female designers in the industry or education. In fact, we enquired about the gender split at a handful of design schools worldwide, such as Antwerp, FIT, and Ravensbourne, and found a rough average of 74% of fashion programme students identifying as female. So, what gives? The following article contains excerpts of conversations with a dozen industry figures – Lucien Pages, Lauren Sherman, Katie Grand and many more – who give their thoughts on the current state of the divide.

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This article is part of our new series of newsletters offering advice for those brave enough to start their own brand. Read ‘You need a co-founder if you're starting a brand’ and drop us a message or a comment if you’re a designer with a question you want 1 Granary to answer!

A young designer’s dream is often simple: build a thriving brand. To achieve even a fraction of that financial and creative success, a talented team is essential. However, in fashion, bigger doesn’t always mean better. In fact, expanding too quickly can crush a brand before it has a chance to define itself. The excitement of early success – press coverage, viral pieces, a collection that sells out – can make hiring feel like the next logical step. More hands should mean more efficiency, right? Well, no...

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The following piece is part of our new series on how to become a photographer. Read 4 photo critics and curators on how to succeed as a photographer here.

The career of the fashion photographer can take off through complete and utter chance: perhaps through a random encounter, a serendipitous meeting of minds, or a fortuitous placement on Instagram’s Explore page. One thing is for sure, though – there’s no one single way to build your career as a photographer. Even if there’s no linear technique to finding success, it helps to know what’s worked for those who have come before. Do you need to go to art school? Does it work if you just go it alone? Who better to ask than those who have already gone and done it?

From Nick Knight, who started his career shooting skinheads in the 70s, to Anton Gotlobb, who got his first break shooting real estate, we asked four photographers we love to tell us how they got started, how it’s going and what they wish they’d known when they were just starting out.

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Welcome to AI’m Scared, a new series in which we explore the impact – good and bad – of AI on fashion and the creative industries.

Yes, AI is coming for our jobs. But it’s also coming for the mind-numbing, time-sucking tasks that no one wants to do (or can afford to outsource). And for emerging fashion brands fighting to stay in the game on a shoestring budget, that’s not to be dismissed.

Used strategically, AI can level the playing field, automating the tedious while freeing up creative minds to focus on what really matters: designing, storytelling, and building a brand that stands out. The real question isn’t whether AI has a place in fashion; it’s how small brands can use it to their advantage.

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The following piece is part of our new series on how to become a photographer. Read 4 photo critics and curators on how to succeed as a photographer here.

Whether your photographic work sits within the realm of fine art or photojournalism and everything in between, there’s a photography prize out there for you. While many prestigious prizes require entrants to be nominated by a photography professional, just as many (if not more) can be entered online with just the click of a button or two. With prizes ranging from $10,000 in cash to new cameras to prestigious exhibition spaces, we’ve picked out 39 of the most interesting photo prizes you can enter yourself in for 2025.

International

Le Stanze della Fotografia Open Call

This year’s award asks photographers to respond to the Mapplethorpe quote: “I entered the world of photography because it seemed to me to be the perfect vehicle to comment on the madness of today's existence”. Finalists' work will be exhibited at the Le Stanze della Fotografia stand at the MIA Photo Fair in Milan from the 20th to 23rd March 2025.

Entry fee: Free

Deadline: 2 March 2025

More info here.

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There’s a special kind of dread that comes with receiving feedback at university. Maybe your designs are deemed “too safe” in a group presentation, or your dissertation returns drenched in red ink. Perhaps your MA collection, the one you’ve poured a year of your life into, is met with a Miranda Priestly-esque “That, really?” – or worse, a silent purse of the lips.

No matter how thick-skinned you think you are, bad feedback has a way of lingering. And while the sting can leave you questioning whether you’ve designed a garment or a disaster, criticism – when delivered constructively – can help refine ideas and teach resilience in an industry where rejection is part of the fabric. It’s a trial by fire, but one that can leave you stronger, sharper and more prepared, as long as you’re equipped with the right tools and strategies to navigate it. So, how does criticism manifest, and how do you keep yourself from spiralling into a pit of self-doubt?

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This article is part of our new series of newsletters offering advice for those brave enough to start their own brand. Read ‘Why doing both men’s and womenswear from the start is a bad idea’ and drop us a message or a comment if you’re a designer with a question you want 1 Granary to answer!

What do Chopova Lowena, Stefan Cooke, KNWLS, Ottolinger, Eckhaus Latta and Area all have in common? Other than being beloved independent brands with a community of loyal fans, they are also all the result of a partnership. With two minds at the helm, these brands have built businesses despite the immensely challenging landscape for emerging designers.

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2024 was an absurd year for luxury fashion. Let’s take a moment to remember the number of creative director changes: Moschino, Valentino, Canada Goose, Calvin Klein, Lanvin, Blumarine, Ports 1961, Sergio Rossi, Givenchy, Tom Ford, Celine, Dries van Noten, Bottega Veneta, Chanel and Loewe. At this moment, Carven, Margiela and Fendi are all without new appointments, and changes at Jil Sander and Versace beckon.

For most of us, this was little more than the subject of idle chit-chat at fashion week. For the in-house design teams at many of these brands, however, the changes have brought chaos. When the exciting news breaks of a creative change for a brand, the impact on the larger workforce is rarely considered: redundancies, insecurity, layoff survivor guilt, increased workload, and lack of vision often become the reality. This is hardly a new phenomenon, but with creative directors moving more and more frequently, a culture of fear is becoming the norm.

Over the past three months, we have spoken with 20+ current and former designers of all levels across brands including Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Givenchy, McQueen, Bottega Veneta, Celine, Chloé, as well as industry professionals in talent acquisition, recruitment and psychology. We spoke with the designers on the basis of anonymity, allowing them to talk freely about their experiences. The resulting story illuminates a systemic issue much bigger than just one brand or group.

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How to ‘become’ a photographer is a bit mystifying. It seems, like most creative paths, there is no standard route to follow. What is essential to know, however, is how to make sure your work is getting noticed by the right people. From editors to critics, curators to agents, finding the right person to connect with can make or break a career. Plus, forging genuine relationships with those who can constructively critique your work is an essential part of learning and developing in any creative medium.

For the first edition of our ‘How to become a photographer’ series, we asked four people whose job it is to find and critique new photographers’ work about how they find new talent, what they look for and what makes an exciting new photographer.

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When was the last time you saw a magazine cover that featured the model wearing anything but a look straight from the runway of an LVMH or Kering brand? Perhaps you haven't really noticed, but once you do, it's hard to stop. Lean in closer to the magazine rack, and you may even spot the brand name on the cover, given the same prominence as the talent and photographer's credit. Welcome to the age of DMR.

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These days, seeking the support of a therapist is – thankfully – as normal as going to the GP. Many casual conversations down the pub begin with, ‘My therapist said the most interesting thing ...’, while self-help content on social media has skyrocketed in popularity in recent years. Indicating a tidal shift in attitudes, the well-being of our inner worlds is no longer the stuff of secrecy but a subject central to modern life. Less commonly sought and less still understood, however, is the guidance offered by a life coach. Shrouded in Americanised ideas of aspiration, perhaps what springs to mind is culty mentorship schemes promising financial success or the ecclesiastical seminars of figures like Tony Robbins. The reality is quite different, as Lewisham-born designer Bianca Saunders discovered three years ago, when she met transformational leadership coach Jackie G Michaels.

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This article is part of our new series of newsletters offering advice for those brave enough to start their own brand. Read ‘Why you shouldn't name your brand after yourself’ here. And drop us a message or a comment if you’re a designer with a question you want 1 Granary to answer!

When establishing a vision for a brand, it’s easy to understand why a designer just starting out would want to offer both womenswear and menswear. Imagining a customer united by taste rather than by gender appearance seems obvious. Plus, when you look at the current industry, most brands offer both, and aren’t stopping there, expanding into beauty, food, film... The bigger, the better, it seems. But for a small brand, if wanting it all is not a sin, doing it all is certainly unwise.

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“I'm not going to say names, but I worked at the brand of the time with the creative director, and that was a very druggy studio…” says James*, who has been working in fashion design for leading brands for around 15 years. He’s discussing his earlier days in the industry. During show prep, he says, “You'd go to the bathroom, and there'd be a big bowl, and you’d just lift it up, and there'd be lines drawn. It was more for the creative director and the stylist, I guess, but everybody knew it was there and that it was like a mountain.”

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Cast your mind back to the halcyon early 2010s, a time when the fashion industry was undergoing the great emerging designer boom. J-Dubs was rising the ranks, Matches Fashion was alive and well, and buyers were actually showing up to London Fashion Week. We even had a men’s schedule! Then, look to now: a time when myriad names have sold up, changed career trajectory, or fallen off the face of the earth, unable to thrive in a more challenging ecosystem. And yes, independent designers are still owed money from Matches.

Still, it’s not all doom and gloom. We heard the lamentations from virtually everyone who visited last year’s Rebel: 30 Years of London Fashion exhibition – a dedicated showcase of NEWGEN’s fashion support recipients – and we won’t repeat them. While it might have pointed to the increasingly precarious conditions of surviving as an emerging designer, it did also remind us that pressure makes diamonds. And now, more than ever, young creatives are feeling the pressure.

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