At the Fashion awards – a lavish event at the Royal Albert Hall this month – Jonathan Anderson was named designer of the year for a third time for his work at his own namesake brand and Dior, Anok Yai was named model of the year and Delphine Arnault, the CEO of Dior and scion of fashion’s wealthiest family, gained a special recognition award for her work supporting new talent through the LVMH prize. Think of it as fashion paying tribute to its biggest stars.

Since the night, there has been praise for the British Fashion Council’s new CEO Laura Weir but also criticism. The anonymous Instagram account boringnotcom, which often shares strong opinions on the industry, wrote: “As predicted, the same names got rotated and won the fashion awards … how utterly boring.”

A week or so later, a new awards is being introduced – one where all the winners’ names might not be so well-known. Overseen by 1 Granary, a platform that focuses on helping emerging and existing fashion talent beyond those who are figureheads at brands, the Design awards aim to give credit to those behind the scenes. For every winner, 1 Granary will list the entire team involved – from junior designer to creative director.

“Instead of repeating the industry’s habit of celebrating one figure at the top, we wanted awards that reflect how fashion really operates: collectively, collaboratively, and through thousands of decisions made by teams who never get to walk a red carpet,” reads the press release. As Anderson said in his acceptance speech at the Fashion awards: “I am only the show girl up here. There’s an entire team … I can’t do it without them.”

Olya Kuryshchuk of 1 Granary

There are 20 categories in the 1 Granary Design awards and winners have been voted for by other designers, including heads of brands such as Veronica Leoni at Calvin Klein and Julian Klausner at Dries Van Noten, along with people who work in the brands’ studios, with about 1,000 voting overall. Big names such as Alaïa, Phoebe Philo and Chanel have still won big, with Miu Miu picking up four awards, including best womenswear collection. But the names of the team producing that influential collection will now be known to 1 Granary’s 19,000 Substack subscribers.

The format fits with 1 Granary’s ethos. It was set up as a student magazine by Ukrainian-born Olya Kuryshchuk with the help of other students, while studying fashion design at Central Saint Martins in 2012. Now, 13 years later, it is known for its advocacy for those in the fashion industry but out of the public eye; a mouthpiece to draw attention to problems in the work culture. Kuryshchuk and a team of six part-timers work across everything from recruitment for brands to student projects at 50 universities across the world.

These awards come from a desire to set a wrong right. “We just want to follow a very simple principle, to credit the people who create the work,” says Kuryshchuk. “Architecture does it, music does it. Fashion, weirdly, is an outlier and it should not be like this.”

Named after the address of the famous London fashion college, 1 Granary is now also a website, Substack and Instagram feed (with 314,000 followers). It’s read widely, well respected in the industry and, with those numbers, it’s increasingly influential. When Seán McGirr was named creative director at Alexander McQueen two years ago, meaning all of the top jobs at fashion conglomerate Kering were taken by white men, 1 Granary sparked a wider debate with an Instagram post pointing that out. More recently, they have tackled everything from the impact of AI on stylists, to the collapse of online store Ssense. In October, they published a list of all the brands owed money by the retailer for their paid Substack subscribers.

1 Granary was early on a wider shift in fashion towards speaking out about problems in the industry, ones that in the past might have been tolerated in order to not be seen as a troublemaker. There are now others that aren’t afraid to share opinions. The aforementioned boringnotcom Instagram account began in 2024 and is often outspoken and cutting, sometimes giving shows 0 out of 10 in their reviews. And Diet Prada, which began in 2014, still posts regularly on Instagram. The account has called out cultural appropriation and showcased allegedly racially offensive posts by Dolce & Gabbana (the brand went on to sue the account’s founders for defamation).

But Kuryshchuk is clear to make a distinction between 1 Granary and this wider landscape. “We never shame anyone,” she says. “We only talk about structural issues. We never highlight individuals or specific brands. We’re not about gossip, we’re not about stirring the pot to get likes. None of us hide our faces. We don’t publish anything we don’t stand for.” She says they have never received any legal pushback from a 1 Granary story partly because they are mindful of what they publish. “Our work is solution-oriented,” says Kuryshchuk. “If a story doesn’t help move the industry forward, we leave it.” Instead, she says, “we’re more of a community hub that advocates for [jobbing] designers.”

‘The names of the team producing influential collections will now be known’ … a model on the catwalk at the latest Chanel show. Photograph: Guerin Charles/ABACA/Shutterstock

Dal Chodha, the leader of Central Saint Martins’ fashion communication course, says the biggest contribution that 1 Granary has brought to the fashion landscape is exactly that: its “advocacy for those that are behind the scenes”. He describes it as “almost a union in lots of ways. Who do you go to if you work at a major design house?”

For him, Kuryshchuk’s presence at international fashion weeks and contacts with teams “in every house” is pivotal. “She’s not used that to grow her own profile,” he says. “She’s used that to try to re-establish what the hell fashion is and what it looked like when she started, what it looks like today, and more critically, how we could maintain it, or maintain something, for the future.”

Kuryshchuk says she is still motivated by her experience as a design student. “We all entered fashion education with a very romantic idea of the industry,” she says. “And we started discovering that the majority of graduates will never work in design, won’t get jobs.”

She believes 1 Granary’s influence is starting to show. When students graduate now, “and they see that the expectations don’t match what they believed, or what is right, they are actually pushing back.” Because of its work, some quarters of the industry are wary of 1 Granary. “I think [Kuryshchuk] makes people nervous in the way that union members make people nervous,” says Chodha, “because she upsets the apple cart. There aren’t many bold voices in our industry talking about the exhausted, exploited designers who are making these collections and are locked in studios overnight.”

Chodha hopes that 1 Granary can keep doing what they’re doing, supporting those within design teams, rather than “show girls” such as Anderson. Because it’s “so inside that it’s kind of an outsider, it gets to have that opportunity to be more fearless, perhaps, than a lot of others are.”