Lisa Nandy is doing a quiz. It’s not just any quiz, it’s part of designer Yaku Stapleton’s AW25 presentation at London Fashion Week, during which he invited guests, including the secretary of state, to explore an imagined island and determine which ‘biome’ they belonged to. Nandy is speeding through the soul-searching questions; she is quick to answer and even quicker to giggle at herself. We get to the third question:
WHAT ROLE DO YOU TAKE IN A GROUP?
A: the quiet observer / B: the mediator / C: the leader / D: the strategist.
‘So I think it’s C, but I feel like a bit of a dick saying it – “I’m a leader”. It just feels ridiculous. But I don’t genuinely think I can claim to be any of the other three,’ she says frankly in her Mancunian accent, which after nearly 15 years as a Labour MP darting between her constituency in Wigan and office in Westminster hasn’t dulled.
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By the end of the quiz, we determine that the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport belongs in Stapleton’s Combat biome: she’s courageous and adaptable but can also be impulsive and restless. And if there’s one thing missing in her life, it’s the time to slow down.
Unfortunately for Nandy, 45, it doesn’t look like that will happen any time soon. She was appointed culture secretary hastily after the shadow minister Thangam Debbonaire lost her seat in the general election, and in just under a year in the job, Nandy has announced a £270m Arts Everywhere Fund, pledged an extra £1m to the British Fashion Council’s NewGen programme (which Stapleton is part of), and declared an end to the culture wars.
When she arrives for the ELLE photoshoot at Somerset House, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, she’s straight off the train from Wigan, where she lives with her husband and son. One of her aides says wearily that she doesn’t know how the secretary of state does the weekly commute and constant travel, but Nandy is fresh-faced with a buoyant energy.
‘Make me look like I belong in the pages of ELLE,’ she jokes, admitting she’s totally out of her comfort zone, and laughing when her special adviser, coincidentally one of the most fashionable-looking on set, who is doubling up as her unofficial stylist, says she resembles Hillary Clinton in her blazer: ‘She’s an 80-year-old woman!’ cries Nandy. You get the impression that her curiosity and excitement for the job, unique in government for its vast remit across sport, the arts and media, is the same as it was on her very first day.
She was ‘mind blown’ by Stapleton’s presentation, in which actors based on real-life characters walked around the video-game inspired space in the designer’s signature ‘dinocore’ puffer jackets and animal-print hoodies. ‘It was really immersive, really creative and just blew me away… every piece of it made by hand, and every bit of it a vision straight out of his head… you could feel the buzz and the creativity,’ says Nandy when we sit down later that day in Portcullis House, linked to the Houses of Parliament across the road by an underground tunnel that takes exactly nine minutes to cross.
But the buzz wasn’t just for Stapleton. There was also a palpable excitement around Nandy’s presence at the NewGen space on 180 The Strand, which showcases emerging designers: she is the first culture secretary to have been there and so, you could say, it is a statement of the government’s intent when it comes to fashion.
For Sarah Mower MBE, the chair of NewGen, Nandy is a breath of fresh air for British fashion: ‘I can’t remember any culture secretary taking such a keen and genuine interest in understanding and meeting with designers in such a grassroots way. Lisa Nandy is the first to put in the work through actual conversations and spending time to listen to what people say.’
The creative sphere is one of eight industries that Labour has identified as showing the most potential for growth, and it has committed, according to Nandy, to ‘back them to the hilt’. Years of spending cuts to the arts have left the fashion industry, among others, on its knees: this year’s London Fashion Week schedule was more lean than ever, its programme shortened by a day and the impact of its influencer coverage estimated to be $20.9m compared with Paris’s $437m – showing that people are missing the city’s shows altogether.
But as Nandy points out, the wider fashion industry is worth £28bn a year to the British economy and employs nearly a million people. She is keen to understand why it has been labelled ‘fluff’ in this country, most recently by the BBC, compared with how it’s viewed on the continent and in the United States, where political figures, such as France’s first lady Brigitte Macron and former president Joe Biden have appeared on the front row: ‘This is one of the things we’re trying to get to the bottom of,’ says Nandy.
Indeed, after Sir Keir Starmer became Prime Minister in July 2024, there was a Downing Street reception for the fashion industry and its creatives: ‘I felt, in that room that day, there was almost a collective sigh of relief,’ recalls Nandy who wore Canadian-British designer Edeline Lee, a firm favourite amongst politicians and royals and who was ‘absolutely made up that we were showcasing [her] work’.
‘First of all, you have a new government that sees the centrality of fashion to the whole country, not just the economy, as properly at the heart of our industrial strategy, which is where it belongs, but also to the soul of the nation.’ And while Nandy might be new to Fashion Week, she’s clearly open to learning and collaboration. ‘So many of the designers and some of the fashion journalists really wanted to talk about how we work together to leave a much more lasting legacy. That’s really exciting to me.’
Since then, Nandy has visited The Paul Smith Foundation in Smithfield and been inspired by the young designers based there, including Stapleton, Laura Pitharas, whose clothes she borrowed for this story, and Paolo Carzana, a 2024 LVMH Prize nominee with whom she got on so well, she took his number. ‘One of the things I’ve learned about fashion since I got appointed to this job, that I hadn’t really understood before, is just how good it is at interpreting and shaping the country and the world we live in,’ says Nandy.
Beyond that, ‘it defines what comes next… I find it really curious how good fashion is at that and how bad politics is.’ When Paolo Carzana showed her footage of his first show, which was held in his back garden and made a statement on the inflated ego of the industry, Nandy was gripped. ‘It’s literally holding a mirror up to society and to fashion, to show what fashion has become, and to say we’ve got to do better than this. It’s really thought- provoking in a way that no political speech could ever be.’
While Nandy might be captivated by parts of the industry, what does her commitment to fashion actually look like? One of the challenges she wants to tackle is encouraging more diversity. When she met Sir Paul Smith she asked him: ‘“How would a Paul Smith starting out in Beeston in Nottinghamshire, working-class lad, state school, make it today?” And he said they wouldn’t. That is what we’ve got to change.’ How to scale up businesses sustainably and to keep talent in the UK are also challenges Nandy wants to address.
She is planning to take the Paul Smith Foundation model – which provides not only studio space for designers but also business support including accountancy and legal advice – to different parts of the UK. ‘We’re looking to see if we can make it work in other parts of the country, which then helps with the diversity of people entering the fashion industry,’ says Nandy, who went to Parrs Wood High School, the largest state school in Greater Manchester. ‘I moved down to London from the north of England, God, it was 25 years ago now, and it was difficult enough then. But with rent sky-high, with costs of everything in London so much more expensive, it makes it virtually impossible for a lot of young people to do it [now].’
In her speech at the Creative Industries Growth Summit earlier this year, which was attended by the BFC’s Caroline Rush and The Arts Council, Nandy pledged her government would be ‘willing to take a bulldozer to every barrier to growth’. I ask what her plans are around some of the fashion industry’s biggest barriers right now, including Brexit and the end to tax-free shopping that was introduced under the Conservative’s in 2021 and was considered a big blow to the luxury market as it took high spenders away from the UK.
Regarding Brexit, Nandy is hopeful that negotiations can still work in Britain’s favour: ‘[Along with] my colleague Nick Thomas-Symonds who is leading on the negotiations, we think it will be not just in the UK’s interests, but in Europe’s interests to have a much closer relationship. Whether it’s fashion or music… we do think there’s a deal to be done there, that helps to break down those barriers and makes the ability to work and trade much more frictionless,’ she says. ‘We want to see that free flow of artistic expression. There’s no option on the table from either side to bring back freedom of movement. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t encourage more artistic collaborations…to make it easier for young, up-and-coming British artists like Yaku, Laura and Paolo to be able to flourish all over the world.’
Regarding the scrapping of tax-free shopping, which Gerry Murphy, the Chair of Burberry, Britain’s only major luxury-fashion house, called a ‘spectacular own goal’, Nandy is woollier, signalling it’s not a priority for the government: ‘I’ve heard very loud and clear the calls from the fashion industry to [reintroduce it]. My understanding is it was scrapped by the previous government because it had limited economic value. But we’re always happy to look at the evidence around these things… If it is a benefit, it’s something that we’ll explore, but at the moment, that’s not something we’re proposing to do.’
As well as concrete roadblocks, Nandy feels there’s a more abstract obstacle at play when it comes to the UK’s creative industries: ‘When I reflect on the last decade, I feel the country has lost its self-confidence,’ she says. ‘But we are so good at the things that sit within my remit, whether it’s film, fashion, music, arts, museums, galleries... And they could all do so much more if they had a government that could match that level of ambition. And that’s what we’re determined to be.’
Nandy is also determined not to be perturbed by the commentary on her own fashion choices, which is often directed at female MPs far more than at their male counterparts. She alludes to the controversy around Keir Starmer’s wife Victoria’s clothing allowance last year, even though the Prime Minister’s wife was clearly supporting British brands, such as Me+Em.
‘There’s not much you can say about what I wear nowadays that isn’t water off a duck’s back,’ says Nandy, who has held various roles in the shadow cabinet including Shadow Foreign Secretary and Shadow Secretary of State for Levelling Up. ‘I think the great thing for me is that when I wear something like this,’ pointing to her Laura Pitharas silk shirt and black blazer, ‘it’s not just that these are incredibly beautiful clothes, it’s that I’m helping to showcase something that Britain is really good at.’
Nandy grew up in a single-parent household in Manchester, her mother a producer at Granada TV and her father a Marxist academic from Kolkata, and she admits her early fashion choices were questionable. ‘I thought I looked great, but I grew up in the era of Aaliyah, of new jack swing, Mary J Blige, and I basically thought I was Aaliyah. I used to go clubbing in Manchester in my dungarees with my Calvin Kleins poking out and I thought I looked tremendous,’ she smiles. ‘I look back now and think, thank God we didn’t have cameras on phones, because there’s very little photographic evidence.’
It’s clear Nandy isn’t a culture snob, and aims to give as much time to fashion as she does to football – ‘you can combine the two’ – and to divide resources, such as the £270m funding, between national enterprises and grassroots organisations. She remembers that the first time she was moved by culture was as a child in Manchester: ‘We used to go and watch Matthew Corbett doing The Sooty Show live every year – it was an annual tradition in our house,’ recalls Nandy.
‘That very early experience of being at a live show and being surrounded by every generation… It was bonding; you never forget it. They used to call kids up on stage every year, and I always wanted to be that kid.’ For Nandy, it doesn’t matter where people interact with culture, whether it’s ‘high-end fashion or high-street fashion, Royal Ballet or The Sooty Show. These things have an impact of people’s lives and how they feel about their lives – they all matter.’
And despite operating in a cost-of-living crisis, Nandy is determined that arts funding won’t be the first to be axed in a potential round of spending cuts: ‘There’s a really difficult economic situation, none of us are pretending otherwise. It’s our collective job in government to make sure that we can wring every bit of waste out of the system, so that every penny we spend, we spend wisely, because it’s people’s money and they haven’t got a lot of it.’ She hopes that her government will be ‘judged by our actions, not our words… it can’t just be all bread and no roses. People have to have hope and belief in the future, and the arts are so central to that.’
When the Prime Minister appointed Nandy to the DCMS, he told her if there’s one word to have plastered on the walls of her office, it’s ‘Deliver’. So, what does success in the fashion industry look like to her? ‘I want to encourage the best talent to start up, scale up and stay here in the UK. And most of all, I’ve got that young Paul Smith in mind. I want to know how that working-class lad growing up in Beeston can become the Paul Smith of the future. And if we can crack all those things, I’ll be happy. If not, I’ll probably go back to your quiz: I’ll be overthinking, and worrying about the problem.’
When we leave Stapleton’s presentation, Nandy joins the crowds taking up a pen attached to a giant wall covered in velvet and starts scrawling enthusiastically. It looks as if she could be writing some political slogan or manifesto, but when she turns round, she drops the pen and beams, ‘It’s a sheep!’ Nandy will be back at Fashion Week, and she’s determined to see her commitment to the industry through over the coming three years.
Once she has left for her next appointment of the day, someone from Stapleton’s team explains how the drawings on the velvet wall might be used in the designer’s next collection. It’s a fitting symbol of how this secretary of state’s fashion legacy could be far more material and lasting than that of any of her predecessors.
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