Fashion CEOs operate under a pressure most executives never face: the people buying from their brand are also reading about how it treats the people building it. Any culture gaps that might take years to surface in other industries become exposed in a single news (and fashion) cycle. The leaders who last from season to season and from era to a new era are the ones who understand that internal standards and public identity have to be written in the same han. And who build that way from the start. Leadership experts who work with elite organisations see the same pattern again and again: culture isn’t what’s written on the wall. It’s what leaders do when something goes wrong and no senior leaders are watching. In fashion, that test plays out publicly.

Hali Borenstein built Reformation's culture the same way she built the brand: sustainability-first. When she took over as Reformation CEO in 2020, she walked into a company dealing with a pandemic and a leadership crisis simultaneously. Her stated priority wasn't product or growth; it was trust. "It is all about walking the walk," she said. "Not every decision is easy, but I will share with you why I made a decision and why the leadership team is thinking about something in a certain way.”

She’s open about how her identity shapes her leadership presence. As one of the few women in investor rooms, she chose to wear a dress deliberately: "a dress is feminine and empowering," and she saw no reason to dress around that fact. Borenstein has spoken about how she approaches work-life balance inside a company where 70 percent of the workforce is female: not as a perk, but as part of the same operating discipline that governs sustainability commitments. It is the same instinct that drives Reformation's broader approach to sustainable luxury fashion, where the internal standard and the external promise are written in the same hand.

Under her leadership, Reformation grew to approximately $350 million in revenue, expanded into four international markets, and opened a Paris flagship designed with locally sourced furniture. TIME named Borenstein to its TIME100 Next list in recognition of her role in pioneering sustainability across the industry. Teams that believe in what they’re building tend to produce work at that level; at Reformation, where the sustainability promise is the commercial identity, the cost of a culture gap would have shown up in the product before it showed up in the numbers.

The case of Burberry when Joshua Schulman arrived as CEO in mid-2024 is a good example of what happens to a brand when it loses its internal north star. With so many years of rotating leadership and strartegic shifts, the company had to suffer sales going down 15 percent every year until March 2025.

Schulman's response was re-establishing what Burberry is actually for. What he did was pull focus back to scarves and outwer and he reset a pricing architecture that once confused core customers. Because of this, Burberry's global reputation surged in 2025 according to RepTrak's annual ranking, and the brand returned to the FTSE 100 in September of that year. Organizational leadership experts recognize this pattern across high-performing cultures. While the terminology varies—psychological safety, values alignment, clarity of mission—the rules are the same: internal coherence trumps external credibility. Burberry's recent history makes that sequence visible in real time.

Fashion operates under a pressure most industries don't face: the people buying from a brand are also reading about how it treats the people working for it. A brand whose internal culture contradicts its public identity gets found out faster now than at any point in the industry's history, and as the definition of luxury continues to shift toward transparency and personal values, the margin for that contradiction is narrowing further.

Borenstein's style was putting sustainability standards through her supply chain and her leadership in the same breath. Schulman was able to rebuild Burberry's internal clarity before the market believed the turnaround was real. In fashion, this kind of sequence where internal comes first before external is what determines whether a brand is still standing in ten years. Leadership experts who work with elite organisations across industries will tell you the same thing Borenstein and Schulman learned in fashion: brands and institutions built to last are those whose internal standards and external promises are indistinguishable.