Uk Fashion Industry Statistics

Britain's fashion scene has become an expensive, wasteful loop: shoppers spend over £500 a year and buy more clothes per person than anywhere in Europe yet return nearly a third of online orders and leave about £800 of unworn items in their wardrobes, as price-driven, sale-chasing and impulsive habits collide with rising resale, growing demand for size inclusivity and sustainability, a post-pandemic hunger for comfort, and collapsing brand loyalty that forces the industry to prove garments deserve more than their average 2.2-year lifespan.

The UK has turned into a digital runway: nearly a third of fashion sales are online with over 60% of that traffic on mobile, ASOS and Boohoo dominate the pure-play field while apps, marketplaces and BNPL proliferate; AI, virtual try-on and booming click-and-collect promise better conversion, yet 75% cart abandonment and returns twice the in-store rate mean brands must turn social discovery and influencer buzz into trustworthy, profitable experiences.

If the UK fashion industry were a country, it would be a heavyweight economy—contributing about £29 billion to GDP, driving roughly £60 billion in pre-inflation consumer spending and poised to top £50 billion in apparel revenue by 2025, with £9.1 billion of exports and around £9 billion in manufacturing turnover supporting a market led by womenswear while menswear has grown at roughly 3% a year over the last decade, childrenswear is worth about £5.5 billion and niche categories from intimate apparel forecast to exceed £3 billion to bridal at £300 million add depth, sportswear is valued at over £10 billion and footwear is projected to reach £10.9 billion in 2024, luxury fashion tops £5 billion and London Fashion Week alone brings in roughly £269 million, and despite Brexit red tape costing an estimated £850 million in exports and clothing prices rising by over 6% in 2023 the sector grew faster than the wider economy, bolstering British soft power and helping make the UK the third-largest apparel and footwear market in Europe while clothing still accounts for about 4.5% of household spending.

The UK fashion industry sews together 890,000 jobs across 34,000 mostly small businesses, with over 100,000 people manufacturing largely in the East Midlands, West Yorkshire and Leicester's 1,500 factories, while Savile Row's 1,000 artisans and Scottish cashmere's 4,000 rural jobs underscore niche skill; women make up about 70% of the workforce and 80% of garment workers are from minority ethnic backgrounds even though only 20% reach senior roles, over 60% of designers freelance, graduates and a 10% rise in apprenticeships feed the pipeline, and a 15% fall in EU workers plus a 5% shrink in stores reflect post‑Brexit and high street pressures, all while a steady £6 billion textile output and average designer pay of around £30,000 reveal both resilience and economic strain.

Good intentions are strutting down a runway of waste in the UK fashion industry, where booming resale and rental markets and strong Gen Z demand for sustainability collide with the fact that 300,000 tonnes of clothes still head to landfill each year, only 1% are recycled into new garments, the global supply chain drinks billions of cubic metres of water, washing emits thousands of tonnes of microfibres, and while extending garment life by nine months could cut impacts by up to 30 percent, overproduction, greenwashing and negligible organic cotton use mean policy wins like the carrier bag charge are still a long way from a full course correction.