LONDON — Jamie Gill, executive director at Roksanda and chair of the British Fashion Council’s Diversity Committee, is launching an incubation project, called The Outsiders Perspective, to tackle fashion’s diversity issue behind the scenes.

“It’s an incubator nurturing people of color to make sure they’re equipped to affix the operational side of the style brand, driving changes in equity, diversity, inclusion in fashion,” Gill said.

While racial diversity has increased on the runway and on social media in recent times, Gill argued that those working behind the scenes have barely modified.

Only 5 percent of the workforce in the style industry comes from a people of color background, a study from the MBS Group and the British Fashion Council showed.

“There may be a severe lack of ethnic representation working on the less creative but no less essential roles — finance directors, sales directors and operations managers.

“Apart from the macro fashion brands, which most of us know, the fact is the style industry is made up of small to medium-sized brands where there isn’t any clear skilled training ground for sourcing talent. I would like to assist change this,” Gill said.

Along with Burberry, the British Fashion Council, Mayor of London’s Office, Deloitte, Karla Otto and Zalando, the project goals to offer a platform for people of color — like Gill himself, who was born to working-class British Indian parents within the Midlands — to affix and perhaps someday lead the British fashion industry.

“I would like to talk to skilled talents, like bankers, lawyers, accountants, people who find themselves of color, and who’ve been sat in a profession that they felt they sort of needed to do and all the time checked out fashion as a glamorous and exciting creative industry,” he said.

“The partitions all the time have been up, because even in the event that they need to be a lawyer at Burberry, you don’t have the five-year luxury and fashion experience working in law, let alone anything. And it is a talent who’ve got an lively passion and interest within the space and so they don’t know who everybody is,” Gill added.

Those that are serious about the incubation project can get in contact via its website Theoutsidersperspective.org from Thursday.

“I’ve already got some ring-fence talents that I feel may very well be really good. They undergo a recruiter with the entire partners together, after which we take them through a series of workshops and so they have to really even do a case study at the top of the workshop.”

The platform may even provide a much-needed talent pool for fashion businesses which can be facing diverse talent shortages.

“It’s addressing two things. It’s a diversity project, nevertheless it’s also a talent project. You may have brands like Roksanda, Erdem and Victoria Beckham searching for diverse talents, but don’t know where to go,” Gill identified.

The truth the industry is facing today is that “as soon as a business starts turning over 1,000,000 kilos, they might be employing 11 people and scaling. But where are you getting that salesperson from? They’ve just probably trained at one other smaller brand, after which gone to a different brand onto one other brand, but probably not been built up,” he said.

As compared, the skills coming out of The Outsiders Perspective might need a couple of extra months to get up to the mark with industry knowledge, but “we’re gonna provide you with someone who’s smart,” Gill said.

Having worked in architecture, accountancy and enterprise capital prior to joining Roksanda, Gill believes that the British fashion industry can profit greatly from welcoming people from more diverse backgrounds joining the decision-making process, as their multicultural upbringings may help brands access challenges and opportunities from a more nuanced perspective.

“On top of that, they understand how one can budget. They’ve got accounting and legal awareness and an innate understanding of this. After which on the soft skills, they know how one can communicate and be analytical. They might be thorough, and so they might be diligent. All those skills that we could really do with but they simply don’t know specifically about fashion,” he added.

At the top of the mentorship, Gill will match the skills with brands, and all of the bodies in The Outsiders Perspective will monitor them through that.

“If I can transition 25 talented people of color on the primary incubation within the six subsequent months, getting them jobs and onboarding 20 leading British luxury and fashion brands, it’ll really create a solid foundation to really scale, after which we might be like ‘let’s go larger now, because we’ve got something that works,’” Gill said.