In an industry where the gap between creative recognition and commercial viability has never been wider, RaiseFashion’s 2026 Masterclass cohort represents a laboratory for an urgent question: how does an independent designer scale without compromising the vision that made them desirable in the first place? The Business of Fashion profiled six designers from the program in late May — Daveed Baptiste, Greg Jackson, Haoran Li, Hiywet Mimi Girma, Mark Grattan, and Olivia Cheng — each at a different stage of navigating this tension.
The Masterclass, now in its third year, is designed to address the operational blind spots that most creative entrepreneurs share. Tariff navigation, supply chain complexity, AI-driven discoverability, and distribution strategy are not subjects typically taught in fashion school, yet they increasingly determine which independent brands survive beyond their first few seasons. RaiseFashion bridges that gap by pairing designers with industry mentors who have walked the path before them.
The Masterclass’s impact will be measured not in press coverage but in the survival rate of its alumni. If even a fraction of its graduates build enduring businesses, the program will have achieved something that the fashion education establishment has struggled to deliver: a bridge between creative potential and commercial reality.
What unites the six designers is a refusal to compromise on the qualities that make their work distinctive — even as they learn the hard skills necessary to translate that distinctiveness into a sustainable business. In an era when the fashion industry is consolidating around a shrinking number of mega-brands, their persistence reads as a quiet form of resistance.
For Haoran Li, whose sculptural approach to womenswear has earned comparisons to early Hussein Chalayan, the challenge is less about creativity than capacity. ‘I can design ten collections,’ he told BoF. ‘The question is whether I can produce, market, and distribute even one of them at the scale that retailers expect.’ His experience reflects a broader reality: the infrastructure of fashion has not kept pace with the abundance of talent that social media and digital platforms have surfaced.
