Hi, this is Imran Ahmed founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion. Welcome to the BOF podcast. It's Friday, March 11th.

As usual, at the end of Fashion Month, I sat down with our editor-at-large Tim Blanks to reflect on the Fashion Month gone by.

But of course, this was not your typical fashion month.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which began the day Prada showed in Milan,

raised questions about whether it was even appropriate for Fashion Week to go on amid the horror

and how the industry should respond to the unfolding tragedy and loss of human life.

By the end of Milan, when Georgia Armani held his show in silence,

there were signs that the industry was beginning to pay attention.

And this week, Tim and I reflect on the shows and how they were interpreted

through the lens of the crisis unfolding in Ukraine.

Here's Tim Blanks and I reflecting on Fashion Week

in the shadow of war. Hello, Tim. Welcome back to London. It has been an extremely stressful

and unusual fashion month, but as always, I wanted to catch up with you to get your reflections,

and we can't really talk about this fashion month without talking about the war in Ukraine,

which broke out the day of the Prada show in Milan.

I guess I wanted to start just by asking if you think it's appropriate for fashion week to go on as a war is breaking out.

I know it's a question that, you know, others posed to you during the last couple of weeks.

But now that you've had some time to reflect on it, you know, where did you end up?

It's not the first time that fashion weeks have happened during wars.

I was talking to a retailer in Paris the other day who reminded me

that the first time I ever interviewed him was during the Gulf War in 1990 and people were

asking the same questions then and wondering of fashion would ever be the same. I think the thing

...