1 Granary Newsletter

By Jorinde Croese. Photography Niko Studio On Sunday morning 10am, we arrived at the Christian Dior Couture studios to watch the team at work before their show the next day. The final fittings were in full swing, the air was filled with hushed whispers to keep a sense of productive calm. Jonathan Anderson, who had just gotten off a flight from New York, where he was for Taylor Swift’s wedding dress, walked around the studio, making last corrections to each look with the designers.

By Rosalind Jana Because this series relies on close viewing, MUBI is offering our student readers 60 days free: mubi.com/1granary. And don’t worry, if you’ve already graduated, you can still start with one month free, see here. Much of design education is built on the idea of precedent: find the references, build the moodboard, see what ideas emerge. This process is crucial, but it’s not the only way to resource your imagination and critical thinking.

By Giorgia Feroldi Patronage, in Italian, has a first name. Mecenatismo descends from Gaius Maecenas, the Roman who kept Virgil and Horace fed while they wrote, and the word never turned abstract in the language: a mecenate is still anyone who pays for talent before the market does. Fashion owes more to the practice than it likes to admit, although there is less of it than there once was. Margins are thinner, minimums higher, and the big groups often directly buy their suppliers.

No designer scales a brand alone, and yet fashion education rarely says much about the people you build it with. Who is the first person you hire, and what do you pay them when there is barely any money coming in? Which jobs belong in-house and which are better handed to a freelancer or an agency? When do you stop being the person who does everything and start being the person who runs a studio? How do you price the work so there is enough margin for you and the retailer?

Following our candid, anonymous conversations about having children, salaries, power dynamics, and internal politics, here we discuss commerce vs. creativity inside the often old-fashioned, hierarchical luxury brands of Paris, Milan, London and New York. When I graduated, I felt like a failure for not setting up my own brand. Now, I have really solid foundations and a much more secure financial situation, so I could do something more creative.

By Jorinde Croese Photographs by Erli Grünzweil Craig Green did not set out to become a professor. When the invitation came to lead University of Applied Arts Vienna’s Modeklasse – the fashion department shaped since the early 80s by a run of designers that includes Karl Lagerfeld, Helmut Lang, Jil Sander, Raf Simons, Bernhard Willhelm and, most recently, Grace Wales Bonner – what struck him first was the calibre of teachers that came before him. “It’s an honour to be part of that,” he says.

By Ryan White When Luigi Vitali and Luca Guarini founded Dust magazine in 2011, it felt as though one world was giving way to another. “The certainties that had defined the previous decades were falling apart, and for a brief moment it genuinely seemed possible to imagine something different,” Vitali says.

One question before we get into today’s newsletter: what do you wish fashion media actually covered? We’re listening. By Pedro Vasconcelos Fashion media thinks of commercial as a dirty word. It’s often deployed as shorthand for boring. More often than not, the term appears as a prelude to discussions of financial strain or the increasingly familiar economics of survival. Yet, brands that endure are rarely built on creative breakthroughs alone. They are built on product. On repetition.

By India Birgitta Jarvis We need new roadmaps in fashion. Leaving school with a mountain of debt and a dream is a strategy few designers can rely upon in 2026.

Back in 2016, for 1 Granary’s third issue, we published a guide to understanding the legal terminology and frameworks every designer should, but rarely do, understand. What is a patent vs. a trademark? Where should one register a company? We called it “fashion law 101” and all the advice came from lawyer Hugh Devlin.