Nowt Fast About It: Manchester’s Fashion Reset
Manchester has always known how to spin a good yarn. In the 19th century, the city’s mills earned it the nickname Cottonopolis, clothing half the world in calico and muslin. Today, the looms may have mostly fallen silent, but the legacy of textile ingenuity, grit, and reinvention remains part of Manchester’s warp and weft. This September, that spirit resurfaces as Manchester Fashion Week (MFW) returns after a ten-year hiatus, promising not just a catwalk, but a culture and climate focussed reset.
Chanel Metiers d'Art, Manchester 2024 Runway Show. Photo: Ik Aldama
From 9–11 September 2025, MFW will unfold across the city with its official hub at Campfield, a newly refurbished cultural space in the St. John’s district. The three-day programme is stitched together around themes that feel both timely and timeless:
- Heritage & Future-Proof – where the city’s industrial past meets its future-facing creativity, echoing the mills while asking how fashion might endure in a warming world.
- Health & Wellness – reframing fashion as more than surface, from colour therapy couture to much-needed conversations on mental health.
- Tech & Innovation – spinning new threads through AI design, 3D prototyping, and digital-only garments that might one day hang in our virtual wardrobes.
Safia Minney, Founder of People Tree, Fashion Declares, and Indilisi.
MFW is not short of bold voices. Carry Somers, founder of Fashion Revolution, and Safia Minney MBE, pioneer of fair-trade fashion through People Tree, will spearhead debates on sustainability and social equity. Media partner Eco Age lends its weight to the event, reinforcing its focus on “forever fashion” rather than the disposable kind.
“Manchester has always led – in music, in manufacturing, in movements. And now it’s time to lead again by future-proofing fashion from the ground up,” says Gemma Gratton, Executive Producer of MFW. John Higginson, CEO of Eco Age, is more blunt: “There is a fight between flimsy fast fashion and the beautiful things you want to keep forever. Manchester Fashion Week is all about future fashion – forever fashion.”
Workers at John A Wood Ltd, Mount Street Mills c.1920. Credit: Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester.
It’s a fitting sentiment for a city whose fortunes were built on fabric meant to last, and whose story is woven as much from rebellion as from industry. Manchester’s textile past was never just about profit – it was about progress, from workers’ rights to women’s voices. The return of Manchester Fashion Week taps into that same thread: fashion not as fleeting spectacle, but as a vehicle for cultural change and social imagination.
For Selvedge readers, the appeal is clear. Manchester’s mills once clothed the world. Now, the city is preparing to dress the future – with creativity, conscience, and no shortage of swagger. And in true Mancunian style, this revival is less about looking back than about re-threading history into something bracingly new.
-
Further Information:
-
Image Credits:
LEAD: Carry Somers, co-founder of Fashion Revolution. Somers will be taking part in an opening day Fireside Chat on
Full Circle Fashion - The Nature of Fashion / Fashion Revolution, at Manchester Fashion Week's Campfield House Venue. Photo by Dvora Photography.
All other images as credited in photo captions.