This article first appeared on Vogue Business.

It was a tight squeeze inside the pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery in London on Monday night, as scores of designers, retailers, press, PRs, educators and others from across the industry gathered for the British Fashion Council’s annual summer party. Always a fun affair, this year’s event had fresh energy as members of the BFC community waited to hear from its new CEO, Laura Weir.

She did not disappoint. “Tonight, we are here to celebrate not the next British fashion season, but the next British fashion era,” said Weir, to cheers from the crowd. “I can’t help but feel that since Brexit and Covid, we have been sleeping on the creative British asset that quite literally touches everyone. It is time to reset.”

The British Fashion Council summer party at the Serpentine Pavilion and BFC CEO Laura Weir and chair David Pemsel pictured together.

Photos: James D Kelly

Eleven weeks after she took over from Caroline Rush, Weir used the summer party to announce her first major moves in the role. Among the crowd-pleasers, she revealed that, starting from this September, designers who are members of the BFC will no longer have to pay a fee to show at London Fashion Week. The move will align London with some of the smaller fashion weeks, like Berlin and Stockholm.

“Fashion week is a valuable piece of national IP and our shop window for what creative Britain looks like,” said Weir in the speech. The BFC will also double its investment in the London Fashion Week guest programme, with the aim of encouraging more global press and buyers to attend.

She noted that government representatives from Hong Kong, India and the Middle East have requested meetings with her to find out more about London Fashion Week, and are investing millions in building their own local platforms. “They understand that investment in culture leads to the commercial and reputational success of a nation,” said Weir. “We have all of that in spades, we’ve had it for years — we have the fashion week, the creativity, the ambition — and yet we are losing design talent to Paris, Milan and Berlin, not because of a lack of creativity, but because of a lack of infrastructure to support our designers to make, create, show and importantly, to scale in this country.”