Known and needed: building a practice in fashion

Would you rather be known or needed?

It sounds like a party game but it’s the question that could shape the next decade of your working life. In design, you can build a practice where your name is the asset, (think of all your favourite fashion designers for instance) and you can build a career where your skill is what is needed. They aren’t always the same thing. Fashion education tends to be very good at preparing graduates for the first and almost silent on the second. Most people discover this about eighteen months after graduating, usually while wondering whether their irrational passion for their industry will result in a job they could describe to their grandma. 

For fashion graduates part of the answer already exists thanks to the UTS and TAFE NSW Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Fashion + Textiles report, WORK: Fashion + Sustainability Jobs of the Future. This paper sorts those roles into three broad groups: business and strategy, design and circularity, and technology and advanced manufacturing (Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Fashion + Textiles, 2026).

This is an exceptional blueprint for future roles, but what it can’t do is to describe the space between the role and how you get there.

In September I was in Europe visiting circular textile facilities as part of my Women in Circular Economy Leadership fellowship, funded by Green Industries SA. Three of the people I spoke with in Berlin brought home the value of the report.  Between they represent each of the report's three groups and yet not one had arrived at their current role by the route that you might plan, expect and train for.  I introduce them here as examples of young professionals finding success in our future fashion industries. 

Josefina Coll: Josefina Studios, Kreuzberg, Berlin.

Josefina is a Uruguayan fashion designer, originally from Montevideo, who opened Josefina Studio in Berlin's Kreuzberg in March 2022. The studio repairs, alters, upcycles and makes to order. Josefina has developed sewing and upcycling workshops, she offers wardrobe upcycling and personal styling built around second-hand shopping, and has delivered corporate programmes including a four-day activation for New Balance at the Berlin Marathon in 2025. She has shown at Berlin Fashion Week and has taught more than six hundred students in person. Phew!!

Josefina is firmly on the “known” side, in that her name is above the door, which means that the skills she is offering (and those for which she is needed) are only half of her job: the workshops, the posts, the showing, the corporate outreach are all her own never-ending promotional labour. Josefina is unrelenting in her analysis of the business model and her willingness to continue innovating to scale her studio. She is currently retrofitting a second store in Savigny Platz, Charlottenburg where she will have a larger workshop space to ensure that she can.

Josefina is candid about what it took to get here, and particularly, how she needed to stop giving her work away at low rates. Repair and remaking are skilled labour that the market has been trained to treat as a favour.¹ The transition from doing this work as a favour to charging what it's worth has been the single hardest step and she is constantly checking the data to ensure that she has pitched each of her services correctly. I must admit to never having met a designer so focused on developing a durable business model. 

Like so many designers, Josefina started sewing and customising her own clothes as a young teenager. This led to a fashion design degree but unusually for a graduate, she didn't begin her business with a collection or a desire to create a brand. When she moved to Berlin 5 years ago she began by making and altering designs for people who found her, and by deciding what her time was worth before being told what someone might pay. Most graduates discount themselves because nobody has ever told them what to charge so the first paying customer sets the price for every customer after that.

Josefina’s route maps onto the WORK report's design and circularity territory, but what she actually demonstrates is an uncanny ability to make and remake a business model with services rather than products, community rather than wholesale, and returning customers who upcycle garments instead of buying new ones.² 

You can listen to Josefina talk about the process here: The Art and Business of Fashion Upcycling. You can follow her on instagram.com/josefina__studio and visit the studio here  www.josefina-studioberlin.com

Francesca Pedrini: Knitwear Designer and Programmer – Stoll Production Coordinator– VORN, Shift the MicroFactory/ Berlin

Where Josefina built her own studio, Francesca Pedrini moved her design studies into knitwear and learned to master industrial manufacturing processes. Francesca studied fashion design at Politecnico di Milano and then went onto Nottingham Trent to specialise in knitwear. Following graduation she spent 4 years at Knitwear Lab in the Netherlands and two years at Prada before moving to Germany in 2024 to work with VORN, the Berlin fashion hub at Bikini Berlin. She now leads the SHIFT Microfactory's Knit Studio, driving innovation in automated knitting solutions. In this role she programmes the industrial STOLL knitting machines, provides programming support and technical consultancy to clients alongside developing her own design practice. I am completely in awe of Francesca’s skills and ability to navigate the politics of global brands and local manufacturing all in the first decade of her career!

Francesca has an enviable CV and yet, like Josefina, she hasn’t taken the branded collection approach. Francesca is the ‘needed’ side of the equation: she has worked for one of the most recognisable fashion houses in the world and yet, anyone who has ever purchased Prada knitwear would never know that she took garments from concept to product through her skill as a designer and programmer. It is an approach to the fashion industries that is rarely discussed, particularly in Australia.

This is what the WORK report calls technology and advanced manufacturing, and Francesca is what it looks like in practice: a designer who didn't stop being a designer when she became an expert programmer. That combination is rarer than it should be, and it's the capability an Australian micro-factory sector will need if it is to succeed.

Importantly, she named a shortage in the industry that is rarely discussed, the skill of linking knitwear. Linking is the finishing step that joins knitted panels together. It is precise, slow to learn and not particularly well paid relative to design and programming. Linking doesn’t hold the same cachet as brand designer or even programmer but without it, a large part of the industry can’t exist.  A quick search of available roles at Silver Fleece in South Australia  reveals that the skills of programming and linking are not hopeful futures, they are available – and unfilled as of now. 

Francesca has drawn her own conclusion about how to maintain and grow her practice.  Like Josefina, Francesca used to provide her services to friends for free. Her line now is that if someone wants to cover the month's rent, she'll happily design, program and manufacture their knitwear for free.

It's a sweet response to what can often be seen as a favour. Knitting is, after all, something your nonna did for you, if you were lucky.

Industrial machine programming and knitting is a highly skilled, precise and well paid practice that might result in a jumper, but this one has been designed to be circular, has been tested for obsolescence, has been manufactured on highly specialised machinery that required knowledge and skills that have value today and for decades to come.

You can follow Francesca here, VORN on Instagram at vornfashionhub and SHIFT the Microfactory 

Shift is based in Bikini Berlin, an upmarket shopping centre in the heart of Berlin. If you are passing, knock on the door. I know that she will answer as that is how I met her!!

Alex Forrest: Art Director, Zalando, Berlin (Alex is my son)

Francesca and Josefina both work at a scale that is constrained by startup and artisanal practices.  Alex works at the other end, a multinational that represents some of the largest brands in the world.

Alex studied sound engineering and worked in music promotion in Sydney and Berlin for almost 10 years. COVID changed that. During those years he undertook his MBA an reconsidered his next move. After almost a year of re-imagining his knowledge and skills as transferable expertise, in 2024 he began work with Zalando, the largest fashion agency in Europe.

For Alex, this move was driven by a decision to work closely with brands and to make media content at a scale that he couldn’t possibly reach, even when promoting seriously impressive globally recognised bands.

In his current role, Alex forms part of teams that shape how fashion is presented to a European audience at scale – a place where image, knowledge, taste and reach meet. 

Of the three, Alex is the only one who is paid specifically to make fashion visible in such a way that the story behind the product becomes the outcome rather than his visibility as the designer behind the promotion.

Ten years in the music industry didn’t disqualify him from fashion, it was this experience that sharpened his ability to understand what catches audience attention and how to transfer that knowledge to fashion itself.

Alex produces stories about and around the brands and the relationship that those garments have with customers. In September 2025 Zalando turned a former C&A department store in Neukölln into Mall of Denim, a one-day Y2K shopping-mall fantasy with eleven brands, a runway and more than two thousand people through the doors. https://ra.co/events/2242029

 Alex was one of the art directors and through his recommendations, Josefina was brought on to create denim workshops and other activations.

And this is another important aspect of the discussion: neither Alex or Josefina were the big names on the day, those belonged to large legacy brands.

Their roles were focused on promoting the theme through their creative practice – Josefina through her workshops and Alex, the design and curation of the event and activations. 

What the three of them have in common

Looking back at the three of them, their ability to be known and/or needed continues to shift throughout their career. This ability to morph into the roles while using different aspects of the skillbase is a genuinely important skill.

And it matters because this work, quiet as it is compared to the behemoths, is often underpaid because it is not named.

Both women have already solved this problem  for themselves, and in the same way. Josefina stopped undercharging for work everyone can see. Francesca stopped doing invisible work for nothing. They arrived by believing in the value of their own practice rather than accepting the payment for skills as a favour. Alex's solution included working with a large corporate where opportunities to progress are built on producing excellence at scale.

For graduates, these choices are part of the practice. Decide early which practice you're building today and how it contributes to the practice that you want in the future, because the rate you accept in your first year will follow you for a decade either way. And remember that many paths can overlap because you can be both known and needed at any given time, if you are prepared to view yourself as such. 

This matters well beyond Berlin. Australia is having a serious conversation about sovereign manufacturing, about whether we can make things here again, and textiles keeps appearing in that conversation as a candidate sector.³  

The question of machinery is being explored but the workforce issue will take a decade at least.  We need to ensure that designers who choose these twenty roles know that their knowledge and skills will be valued and they will be paid as such.

We can’t build the future of our industries on volunteer service delivery. 

Our future workforce is sitting in final-year studios around the country. They are also running sewing classes at council community halls, volunteering at second hand stores, running their own rack rental collectives or, like V who I wrote about in July, seeking to understand how to work in theor preferred industry while studying for a profession elsewhere.

How we prepare their transition and promote the expertise they bring across the full supply chain will determine the success of our future industries.

Now for the Adelaide six

As part of Adelaide Fashion Week we are delivering Fashion Unlocks: six ways into fashion futures. Each speaker has made the known-or-needed choice, some deliberately and some by accident, and is willing to discuss their path. If you are in Adelaide you can find information about the event and book tickets here. 

I've been a designer for a long time, and I've rarely been as optimistic as I am now.

The roles for our future industries are now being named, the evidence base for the way that they operate is being built, and the people doing the work are willing to talk about them away from the champagne and catwalks. That's how a sector changes. 

I want to thank Josefina, Francesca and Alex for their time and candour. I'm also grateful to Green Industries SA, whose Women in Circular Economy Leadership fellowship made the European fieldwork possible. The report will be made available later in the year.

Professor Angelina Russo, PhD, MBAHEM
Founder, Fleurieu Made
Green Industries SA 2025 Women in Circular Economy Scholar
Adelaide University 2025 Venture Catalyst Alumna
+61 447 177860

¹ On the undervaluing of use, repair and maintenance skill relative to design and production, see Fletcher (2016).
² Service-based and product-life-extension models as circular business strategies are set out in Bocken, de Pauw, Bakker and van der Grinten (2016) and Stahel (2016).
³ For the sector's own framing of this, see Australian Fashion Council (2025).

References

Australian Fashion Council. (2025). National manufacturing consultation. Australian Fashion Council.

Bocken, N. M. P., de Pauw, I., Bakker, C., & van der Grinten, B. (2016). Product design and business model strategies for a circular economy. Journal of Industrial and Production Engineering, 33(5), 308–320.

Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Fashion + Textiles. (2026). WORK: Fashion + sustainability jobs of the future. University of Technology Sydney & TAFE NSW.

Fletcher, K. (2016). Craft of use: Post-growth fashion. Routledge.

Stahel, W. R. (2016). The circular economy. Nature, 531(7595), 435–438.