Barjis Chohan

Barjis Chohan is an award-winning British fashion designer and entrepreneur who fuses Eastern modesty with Western design to create inclusive, sustainable luxury fashion. Trained at London College of Fashion and Central Saint Martins, she interned with Vivienne Westwood before launching her brand BARJIS in 1999, later founding The Barjis Initiative, a social enterprise empowering underrepresented creatives through mentorship and access to industry networks. Her sessions equip organisations to stay true to their core values whilst scaling, use creativity as a strategic growth tool, and build genuinely inclusive cultures that retain talent and drive results through understanding cultural nuances and authentic leadership.

At seventeen, Barjis Chohan handwrote poems to oil companies in the Middle East, seeking investment for a business she had yet to build. That bold, unconventional approach set the tone for a career that has challenged every expectation placed upon her. Trained at London College of Fashion and Central Saint Martins, where she interned with Vivienne Westwood, Barjis chose creativity over convention, launching her luxury brand BARJIS in 1999. What began with bespoke hand-crafted rugs evolved into a fashion label that fuses Eastern modesty with Western design, creating elegant, sustainable pieces for women seeking both style and cultural authenticity. Her decision to stop holding fashion shows at the height of her success, citing concerns about objectification, exemplifies the values-led approach that defines her work and her message to audiences worldwide.

Barjis has built her reputation not only as a designer but as a thought leader on sustainability, inclusivity, and authentic growth. Her luxury fashion collections have been celebrated at London Fashion Week and featured across international press, whilst her accolades include Mail on Sunday Designer in International Trade and Entrepreneur of the Year in London. The Guardian described her as a prodigy of Vivienne Westwood, and her story has been the centrepiece of documentaries by the London Film Academy and broadcasters with global reach. In 2018, she founded The Barjis Initiative, a social enterprise empowering underrepresented creatives through mentorship, skills development, and access to industry networks. Today, she runs a multidisciplinary design studio and is collaborating with Ukraine Arts Culture on a fashion project set to be exhibited at The Fine Art Museum in San Francisco, whilst also launching a new sunglasses range that reflects her longstanding commitment to thoughtful, purposeful design.

Barjis equips organisations to navigate growth without losing their core identity, using creativity as a strategic tool rather than an afterthought. Her keynotes address the practical challenges leaders face: how to remain commercially relevant whilst staying true to founding values, how to build genuinely inclusive cultures that retain talent, and how to implement sustainability in ways that deliver measurable results. She has spoken at Champion Headquarters, GoCompare, Cass Business School, the OIC Business Summit in Malaysia, and the Global Pioneers Conference, offering audiences actionable strategies drawn from over two decades of building a business that refuses to compromise on ethics or ambition. Her sessions inspire teams to bring their authentic selves to work, foster interdependence around shared purpose, and use cultural understanding as a competitive advantage that drives both retention and growth.