The Scoop With Martha Mosse: On the Paul Smith’s Foundation’s Next Moves

Welcome to the Scoop: a weekly email series in which I quiz fashion insiders on the stories of the week. This will be a way for the Vogue Business community to synthesize and reflect on the latest headlines and get a little inside scoop every Friday.

This week’s guest is Paul Smith’s Foundation director, Martha Mosse. The foundation was set up in 2020 to help build business resilience for emerging creatives, including but not limited to fashion designers. As part of that, in 2024, they launched a four-and-a-half-year initiative specifically for fashion designers called the Fashion Residency, which offers studio spaces and mentoring.

Martha joined the foundation in 2023 from Alexander McQueen’s Sarabande Foundation, where she had been since its early beginnings. I called her up for a chat.

Tell me, Martha, what’s the scoop?

Three of the designers supported by The Fashion Residency at Paul Smith’s Foundation — Paolo Carzana, Karoline Vitto, and Yaku — have designed an exclusive T-shirt to be launched in collaboration with Tate Galleries on April 23.

What led to this partnership, and what’s the goal behind it?

These three designers have been supported in developing their brands for over 18 months now. We’ve set up this partnership with Tate to give them the opportunity to respond creatively to art in a way that makes sense for them. But it is also a commercial project, in which they are being paid to participate. So it’s designed to guide them through the process of bringing a new product to market with a very important partner, from commissioning to it being reviewed by the Tate team, to going to the factory, and so on.

Can you shed some light on how the foundation works? How often do you plan to have a new cohort? How do you work with the old cohort?

These designers are supported by a program called The Fashion Residency, set up by Paul Smith’s Foundation in partnership with the Mayor of London and Projekt, and supported by British GQ and the City of London Corporation. In short, it’s a business development program in which six designers get a free studio space at Smithfield in London for 18 months, and enroll in a business skills course that includes 80 hours of lessons. The lessons cover common legal issues, e-commerce marketing, and brand graphics. It’s been created to touch upon all the different aspects of running a business that aren’t the creative side of things. And it’s been designed with Paul Smith in mind, who is a brilliant creative, but also a brilliant businessman.

The first cohort, who started in 2024, just moved out of Smithfield. We have found them another studio space to move into through a new partnership with the Paul Smith’s Foundation, Culture Mile BID, SET, and Travelodge. Travelodge has invested a significant amount of money to build studios in a disused building in Liverpool Street.

So you are still supporting your first cohort. When does the program end?

It ends when we run out of buildings, I suppose. If people keep giving me buildings, I will keep making studios out of them. Studio space is really hard to come by, and it’s really expensive when you do find it. But the second site comes with an expectation of rent. It is vastly reduced — nominal, really, especially for this standard of space. But we wanted to make sure that our support is responsible and helps people as they grow. Because, at some point, these designers will have to pay market rate in London, right? It needs to not be such a dramatic drop off for their business once they don’t have that rent relief.