Fashion year 2025: Scott Lipinski, CEO Fashion Council Germany

2025 is drawing to a close – high time to reflect on the past months and look ahead to the coming year. To do so, we spoke with various industry experts about their expectations, wishlists and highlights.

First up is Scott Lipinski, CEO of Fashion Council Germany (FCG), who can look back not only on 2025 but also on the tenth anniversary of the German fashion association.

What expectations did you have for 2025 and were they met?

We had set ourselves the goal of healthy growth for the past year. We succeeded in many respects: we were able to expand our team further and bring several highly skilled employees on board in permanent positions.

Beyond the business aspects, we had also set ourselves the goal for 2025 of expanding existing projects and initiating new initiatives for our members. We achieved that too – for example with our internationalisation project "Berlin Fashion x International", which we expanded to the Asian region, or with Berlin Fashion Week, which will be even bigger and of higher quality next season.

We were also able to establish or strengthen important political contacts. We found supporters of fashion in and from Germany at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. All in all, we are closing the financial year in excellent spirits – and are already looking forward to the next one!

What defined the year for you?

The year was entirely marked by our anniversary – FCG turned ten in 2025. Naturally, this was a good time to look back at what we have achieved. It also helped that we produced a booklet for our birthday. Seeing once again in such a concentrated form how an association with initially just 11 members and no permanent staff has become a council with more than 260 active members and an operational team of 24 people makes us all very proud. The book project also reminded us of milestones such as our official visit to the Federal Chancellery – where representatives of the fashion industry had never been invited before – or taking over the organisation of Berlin Fashion Week.

A new highlight was, for example, being invited to a state banquet of His Majesty King Charles III in honour of Frank-Walter Steinmeier at Windsor Castle in early December. FCG was thus part of the Federal President's delegation on behalf of the German fashion industry, which also included several board members of companies listed on the DAX index.

In this respect, the year has naturally also encouraged us to continue looking forward, alongside reflecting on the past ten years. We are looking forward to many new projects in the coming year that will take the council and with it the entire German fashion industry a significant step forward.

What were the highlights of the fashion industry for you this year?

Personally, I have recently been delighted – not just in the past year – by various situations in which fashion in and from Germany was perceived internationally, and very positively! This applies both to events by other companies – such as Vogue Germany's "Forces of Fashion" conference at the end of 2024, for which Anna Wintour [Editor's note: chief content officer at US media group Condé Nast] travelled to Berlin, or the Berliner Salon at the Gemäldegalerie, which apparently – so it is said – inspired Jonathan Anderson for his first fashion show at Dior, as well as our own events.

As mentioned, we have expanded our "Berlin Fashion x International" initiative to Seoul and Tokyo in recent months. Supported by the Berlin Senate Department for Economics, Energy and Public Enterprises, we organised delegation trips to South Korea and Japan for various labels to facilitate their entry into these important markets. Seeing how well the labels' collections are received there and that buyers from stores such as Dover Street Market or Isetan came to a "Berlin Showroom" we organised in Tokyo was a real highlight for all of us.

Berlin Fashion Week is also becoming increasingly international and we can now welcome more and more high-calibre guests from the world's most important fashion media – from US Vogue to WWD Japan. This shows me that we are on exactly the right track with our commitment.

How does the fashion industry need to develop in the coming year?

Parts of the industry still have not found credible answers to many pressing questions, particularly regarding sustainability and fairness. I think and hope that these topics will be at the top of the agenda for many companies in the coming year – and that the major players in particular will recognise that small and medium-sized enterprises can serve as role models here. This is also why we want to make the progressive work that many of our members are doing in these areas increasingly visible.

At the same time, we want to encourage other labels that are still struggling with such issues to rethink and reorient themselves. In the summer of next year, for example, our "Sustainability Requirements" will come into force, which oblige every brand that wants to become an official part of Berlin Fashion Week to take appropriate measures. There will be more such initiatives in the future – hopefully not just from us!

You are also initiating thought processes on sustainability with various initiatives aimed particularly at the next generation…

I think it is very important that young people in particular are sensitised to these issues as early as possible, ideally while still at school. We have several education initiatives such as "Generation Zukunft" or the "Fashion Zukunft" conference in collaboration with The King's Foundation and the PVH Foundation, which is specifically aimed at teenagers. It is always impressive to see how open young people are to these topics and what creative solutions they formulate. I would like to see many more such projects.

What are your plans for 2026?

We want to continue growing in the coming year. By this I mean both our membership structure, where we want to focus even more on a healthy balance of large companies and small labels, as well as our team that ensures operational business. We also want to expand existing projects and initiate new ones in 2026, strengthen existing partnerships and win new cooperation partners.

All of this should always contribute to our overarching goal, which FCG set for itself at its founding: to make fashion equally comprehensible to decision-makers in politics and business as both a cultural and an economic asset. We have already achieved a great deal in this regard. Most recently, at our annual general meeting at the end of November, Gitta Connemann, parliamentary state secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, gave a very inspiring keynote speech and acknowledged our commitment.

We are also finding more and more of a hearing at European level, not least through the founding of the European Fashion Alliance. This brings together both long-established organisations such as the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode from France and the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, and I currently hold the chairmanship on behalf of FCG. However, ensuring that the value of the fashion industry is finally understood by all parties and politicians is not just our declared goal – it is an important building block for further strengthening and expanding the economy in Germany and Europe!

This interview was conducted in writing.

This article was translated to English using an AI tool.

FashionUnited uses AI language tools to speed up translating (news) articles and proofread the translations to improve the end result. This saves our human journalists time they can spend doing research and writing original articles. Articles translated with the help of AI are checked and edited by a human desk editor prior to going online. If you have questions or comments about this process email us at info@fashionunited.com