Jordan’s fashion industry doesn’t have a funding problem.

Alexander McQueen shows in London today. So does Mulberry, with Christopher Kane’s first collection as creative director. McQueen and Kane entered the industry through the same door. Both were selected for NEWGEN, the British Fashion Council scheme designed to support emerging talent. At the time, neither name carried the weight it does today.

The scheme

NEWGEN was founded in 1993. Each year, it selects a small group of emerging designers, provides funding for them to show at London Fashion Week and presents their collections in a Paris showroom, where international buyers can discover their work and place orders.

This season, it is supporting sixteen designers, including three newcomers: Francesca Lake, Gui Rosa and Petra Fagerström, each showing in London for the first time. More than two hundred designers have passed through the programme since it began. Erdem. Simone Rocha. Mary Katrantzou. Matthew Williamson. Alexander McQueen. Christopher Kane.

It is usually described as a funding scheme. But the funding is only part of what it provides.

The recognition comes first

In January 2025, the British Fashion Council secured £1 million from the UK government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The funding would support show spaces, presentation costs and mentoring for early-stage designers. It arrived thirty-two years after NEWGEN began.

By then, the programme had already spent three decades doing something far cheaper and considerably more important: publishing a list. It still does. Every year, a small group of designers is named, announced and presented to the industry as a generation of talent worth paying attention to.

The list directs buyers towards emerging designers, introduces their work to editors and identifies where institutional support could have the greatest impact.

Visibility does not replace funding. It builds the foundation for it. Money can only be distributed once the sector has been clearly defined. That means knowing who belongs to it, what they are building and where support is needed. A sector cannot be properly funded if it has never been identified, documented or written down.

This matters in Jordan, where the lack of funding is often treated as the first problem. But before an industry can ask for investment, it has to become visible as an industry. Its designers must be named. Its work must be recorded. Its needs must be made specific. Otherwise, talent remains a collection of individuals, not a sector that institutions can recognise and fund.

The list does not simply record support. The act of naming designers is itself a form of support. And Jordan does not need millions in funding to begin doing the same.

How many are there?

Ask how many people design fashion in Jordan. Not who. How many.

There is no reliable answer. No publicly available figure. No regularly maintained record. We do not know because, as far as any public evidence shows, nobody has ever counted.

You have probably already answered the question in your head, and the answer was not many. It feels like the obvious answer, but there is no reliable evidence to support it. Public understanding of the industry is based almost entirely on the designers who have already gained visibility. As a result, Jordanian fashion appears only as large as its most visible names. That reflects how well the industry has been documented, not how many people are actually working within it.

This assumption has consequences. If Jordan’s fashion industry is believed to be too small, it becomes easier to dismiss the need for funding, international delegations or dedicated platforms. Yet that belief continues to shape decisions despite the absence of reliable evidence to support it.

There have been occasional attempts to document Jordanian creative talent, but none provides a clear picture of the country’s fashion industry. In October 2017, Dezeen published a feature on ten emerging Jordanian designers following Amman Design Week. The selection included graphic, product and architectural designers, but only one fashion designer. Emirates Woman later published a feature on five Jordanian fashion designers worth knowing. Both offered visibility at a particular moment, but neither was intended to function as a complete or regularly updated record of the industry. The lists that exist were created as editorial features, not as an ongoing record of Jordan’s fashion industry.

These are records of a single moment, produced from outside Jordan and never developed into ongoing documentation. They remain separate editorial features and have never become part of a continuously maintained industry record. The 2017 selection was not revisited the following year, and the designers it named were not tracked over time. It therefore tells us little about the size of the industry then, its size now or how it has evolved in between.

So the naming of Jordanian designers is currently being done occasionally, by foreign magazines, as a feature rather than as a record. Jordan does not yet author a consistent account of its own fashion industry.

This matters because almost everything we might want for Jordanian fashion depends on that knowledge. Buyers cannot approach designers they cannot find. A grant programme cannot build a meaningful shortlist without knowing who is eligible. A delegation cannot represent an industry whose participants remain unidentified. A journalist covering the region relies on whatever list is available, even when it is outdated and was never intended to serve as a record of Jordanian fashion. An opportunity may technically be open to Jordanian designers, but access begins with knowing who they are and how to reach them.

There is also a question of who gets counted. If recognition requires a runway show or magazine feature, the number will inevitably appear small. Include independent labels, ateliers, pattern cutters, embroiderers and design graduates whose careers are never tracked, and the picture changes. But without a proper record, nobody knows by how much.

We do not have a funding problem. We have a record problem. Until we know who is here, what they do and what they need, we cannot understand the scale of the industry we are asking others to support. A record does not solve the funding problem. It tells us what, exactly, needs to be funded and how large it really is.

What a register is

It is not a prize. It is not a ranking, and it does not decide who is good.

A register is a published, dated, and continuously maintained record of who is designing here. It documents their names, what they make, when they began, where to find them and what they have shown. It gets updated. It carries the date it was last checked. Anyone can read it and anyone can be added to it.

That is the entire idea. Information is recorded, checked and updated.

It would also produce something Jordan currently lacks, which is a reliable number. Not an impression or a guess shared in conversation, but a figure with a date and a clear method behind it. The number may be small. It may be considerably larger than assumed. Either result would tell us more than the uncertainty we currently rely on.

That number could then be questioned, revised and compared over time. For the first time, the conversation would begin with evidence.

A register does not grant anyone the title of designer. Nor does it decide whose work matters. It records the people who meet a clear, published set of criteria and gives others the opportunity to submit themselves for inclusion.

The difficult part is continuing

In September 2016, a workshop ran at the Jordan Museum’s MakerSpace as part of Amman Design Week, described as an attempt to establish the groundwork for an association of designers in Jordan. People sat in a room and did the work. Ten years later, it is difficult to find any public record of what followed.

That is not an accusation. Continuity is the hardest thing to sustain here, and Amman Design Week itself is returning this October after a six-year absence, which tells you something about how much effort it takes to simply keep going. But it does establish the shape of the problem. Jordan does not lack initiative. It lacks the boring, unglamorous repetition that turns an initiative into an institution.

A register that cannot be found or updated cannot function as a register.

When NEWGEN began in 1993, it did not have three decades of alumni or evidence of its future influence. Its credibility grew because the programme continued. New designers were selected, their names were published and the process was repeated the following year. Over time, that repetition became a record. Authority did not appear fully formed at the beginning. Trust accumulated through consistency.

The first step towards supporting an industry is knowing who it contains.

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