Amanda Parkes never thought she'd wind up in fashion. Then again, 2-year-old Pangaia, where she serves as chief innovation officer, isn't your typical fashion company.  "We are a materials science company," Parkes said on the latest Glossy Podcast. "We're all about the future of materials, and we really think that's an approach that can change the fashion industry from the inside out." However, many fashion fans best know Pangaia as the brand behind the rainbow-bright sweatsuits with lines of text that have been worn by Harry Styles and Kourtney Kardashian. Parkes started her career as a mechanical engineer and product designer, before eventually going back to school, at the M.I.T. Media Lab. There, she earned a hybrid computer science-materials science Ph.D. and the rare job title of fashion scientist. "I came into fashion through the back door," she said. "When I was in college, 20 years ago, there was no such thing as a fashion scientist." But, she said -- despite the lack of interplay between the two worlds -- fashion and science go hand-in-hand. "Fashion is an amazing platform to be able to show off science," she said, adding, "I was really shocked when I got more into the fashion industry to realize that big fashion companies don't have internal research. I was coming from tech, working with companies like Intel and Google. They are doing their internal R&D 5-10 years out to change and transform and make their industries what they want them to be. Fashion didn't have that as much inside of the big companies or at all. So I saw that as first of all massive opportunity for [Pangaia] to fill in the space." Parkes also discussed the power of the Gen-Z shopper, the state of greenwashing and the future of sustainability in fashion. 

Over the last two years, the fashion industry has experienced plenty of ups and downs – but 19-year-old contemporary brand Ba&sh has managed to remain on the upswing for the last 10 months. “[2021] was a record year,” Desiree Thomas, CEO of Ba&sh North America, said on the latest Glossy Podcast. “Since the middle of March last year, we’ve seen this excitement around getting dressed again; a lot of women are just wanting to take a moment for themselves and celebrate the joys of life.” As a result, Ba&sh has seen “explosive growth” in each of its sales channels. “We saw retail explode in all of our freestanding stores in North America,” she said. “And digital was also on fire.” Thomas joined Ba&sh in May 2021, after serving as brand president for 3.1 Phillip Lim and holding top sales roles at BCBGMaxAzria and Nicole Miller. She said she was lured by the brand’s focus on “joy, female femininity and empowerment.” Ba&sh was founded in France in 2003 by entrepreneurs and best friends Barbara Boccara and Sharon Krief, whose first names were combined to create the brand name.  Moving forward, Thomas plans to maintain the brand’s trajectory by opening more stores, including in first-time markets like Greenwich and Aventura, hosting pop-ups and collaborating with influencers, among other strategies,  “We have a very ambitious growth strategy in place,” she said. “We are going to see double-digit growth this year, for sure.”