The Vogue Business Funding Tracker
Bringing you the latest fashion and beauty financing news, including investments and acquisitions.
Reported by Vogue.
Billions are flooding into beauty and fashion right now, and the thesis behind each deal tells you everything about where the industry thinks it's headed. According to Vogue, the latest funding tracker reveals an ecosystem in flux: legacy conglomerates are hunting for authenticity and innovation, celebrity founders are scaling aggressively, and sustainability is no longer a nice-to-have—it's a competitive advantage.
Priyanka Chopra Jonas's haircare brand Anomaly just landed an acquisition from Reliance Retail, the Indian retail giant, in a bid to dominate South Asia while consolidating its North American and UK footprint. Meanwhile, luxury skincare brand 111Skin—already backed by Kim Kardashian and Jay Sammons's Skky Partners—just snagged a minority investment from Estée Lauder Companies. The logic here is clear: ELC sees the future of prestige skincare as clinical and procedure-adjacent, built on efficacy rather than mystique. Dr. Yannis Alexandridis's three decades of surgical expertise make 111Skin the poster child for that shift.
When Giants Go Shopping for Cool
The bigger story is how legacy players are acquiring their way toward relevance. Kering just bought a minority stake in Icicle Carven China France (ICCF), the premium fashion group that owns Chinese brand Icicle and French label Carven, as part of its "House of Wonders" initiative—essentially a partnership playbook for building cultural cachet across geographies. Unilever, meanwhile, snapped up greens supplement brand Grüns, signaling an aggressive push into premium wellness. These aren't random moves; they're admissions that incumbent beauty and fashion houses need to absorb scrappier, digitally native competitors to stay culturally relevant.
On the sustainability front, Stockholm-based circular materials startup Enkei just raised €3 million pre-seed funding to scale ReCeramix™, a material made from 90% construction waste that replaces concrete and marble. It's a niche play now, but it signals that architecture and design investors are betting serious money on waste-to-value solutions.
The wearable-tech-meets-luxury trend is also accelerating: Whoop, the fitness tracker that obsessives swear by, just raised $575 million at a $10.1 billion valuation—with backing from everyone from Qatar's sovereign wealth fund to LeBron James. Even celebrity investors now see health tracking as the next status symbol.
The takeaway: beauty and fashion money is consolidating around brands that feel authentic, data-driven, and built for a world where sustainability and science aren't marketing angles—they're baseline expectations.
Read the original at Vogue.
