Featured image: Evie Peattie

Over the past few months, Vogue Business has quietly phased out its institution-funded memberships. As of November 2025 the programme has come to a complete halt, in a decision which affects universities and fashion programs worldwide.

Vogue Business has been a crucial element of research, analysis, and critiquing of industry topics and issues. The platform offers on-trend, in-depth articles helping make sense of the fashion industry’s complexities. It has a youthful edge that resonates with audiences in their late teens and early-20s through its easy to follow journalism style, as opposed to more content heavy references like WGSN trend forecasting and Mintel’s consumer-insight reports. These are important too, however Vogue Business worked as an all-in-one platform offering a variety of viewpoints and is accessible to all needs.

“We’re all losers in that change,” says Manchester Metropolitan University’s fashion librarian Sarah Webb, who has been navigating the dissolution of Vogue Business first hand – a reality which begs the question: when will the strain on students finally reach breaking point?

Webb explains: “The reasoning behind the decision was that the website needed to be upgraded and the publishers had taken the opportunity to look at group or institutional access as a project after the migration and there would need to be a business case made internally within Condé Nast.” In other words, the website upgrade prompted Vogue’s publisher, Condé Nast, to reconsider how institutions access the site, and that any new system would require internal approval, a process that has effectively left universities facing higher costs or potential loss of access.

A 50% student discount is now offered to students as an alternative to incentivise continuing a membership. It might sound generous, but for most students, £92 a year is still completely out of reach. A student in this saturated fashion climate would realistically require the ‘advanced membership’, as a regular membership has just over half of the benefits. That means no access to fashion and beauty indexes, no invitations to panels and events, and just limited-depth studies of consumer trends. With the student discount considered, the advanced membership still costs an incomprehensible £594.50 annually.

Webb expresses her concern that “because some students will be able to afford personal subscriptions, people aren’t competing on a level playing field.” The shift from free institutional access to a paid model essentially puts industry knowledge behind a paywall, making an already competitive and financially inaccessible field even harder to enter.

The irony is that Vogue Business has spent years championing diversity, inclusion, and the empowerment of new voices in fashion – values that now seem at odds with a move that restricts access to the very people it claims to support. The publication has built much of its reputation on themes around the “future of fashion”, yet by cutting out students, it risks alienating that future entirely. The next generation of designers, marketers, and journalists can’t contribute to an industry conversation they’re priced out of.

This decision also highlights a long-standing problem within fashion’s ecosystem: the assumption that success begins with access. From unpaid internships to expensive subscriptions, financial barriers to entry unfortunately stay deeply embedded in the culture of fashion. Knowledge – just like opportunity – is becoming a privilege for students, not a right. For a field built on innovation, it’s a contradiction that weakens the industry’s progression.

Sharing her tips for navigating the loss of access, Webb encourages students to stay signed up for Vogue Business email updates so they can still catch headlines, free articles, and occasional webinars. She also recommends following the publication’s writers and editors on social media to stay aware of what they’re discussing. 

Beyond Vogue Business, Webb advises making full use of the University’s existing resources the likes of Business of Fashion, WGSN Fashion, WGSN Insight, and print copies including British and French Vogue, as well as electronic access to American Vogue and Vogue Italia. Most importantly, she urges students to seek out alternative industry voices and “raise them up too.”

Approached for comment, Vogue Business said to aAh!: “This is something that’s being worked on with our product teams and we will update your institution on when the portal will be back up and running as soon as we can.”

Ultimately, decisions like these suggest a shift in priorities. Where once publications saw universities as partners in welcoming new talent, they now view them as potential customers. “You walked away, but we’re still here for you – and it’s not too late to come back,” says Webb, a sentiment that captures both frustration and hope for the future. But, as education becomes another market, and students another demographic to monetise, it brings to question who the fashion industry really wants to include in its future.