The Policy Briefing: Ten Years On: What Brexit Has Cost British Fashion
And Like Cassandra at Troy, I Always Knew it Would
On the 23rd June 2026, it will be ten years since the UK’s Brexit Referendum that literally split the country, families and for 48% of voters felt like the nation had taken all leave of its senses. This year, there will be no Glastonbury Festival, which by all accounts was full of Millennials crying in disbelief when those early morning results came through. 83% of those attending had wanted Remain to win, so the 52% Leave vote would have understandably put a dampener on their weekend. For those of us with careers in fashion and textiles, the Brexit vote set in motion a slow, grinding economic attrition that Fashion Roundtable have spent every year since trying to document, quantify and ameliorate.
I launched Fashion Roundtable in November 2017, as I had spent the previous year working in the House of Commons ,and it was clear that the tsunami of white noise concerned about Brexit impacts to their business from the fashion community, was not cutting through to parliamentarians with enough expert insight. Indeed, our first sectoral survey showed that 96% of people working in the fashion sector had voted Remain. A figure so strikingly high that designer and activist Katharine Hamnett CBE, put it on one of her iconic slogan T-shirts.
This was for our first Brexit impact report in early 2018. Since then, we have researched and authored several. The stats don’t lie, as the fashion industry, for all it is creativity, at times eccentricity, is at its heart a business and it knew, with rare unanimity, what Brexit would cost for an industry based around goods and services. Like Cassandra, crying to the Trojans that the wooden horse in their midst was a threat, her voice falling on deaf ears; for ten years all too often I have watched on as what I most feared has come to pass.
Ph: Tamara Cincik in a Katharine Hamnett T’Shirt, “96% Don’t Want Brexit.”
So what has happened?