It was several years into her career that Siobhán O’Donnell first realised why she felt othered. “It took me a while to register it, but the minute I spoke, there was automatically a sense of, ‘OK, you’re from the north, so you’re almost definitely lacking something,’” O’Donnell says. “It seemed that I must have a lack of knowledge because I’m northern, and it was always as soon as I opened my mouth that eyebrows would be raised.”

The belief, O’Donnell observed, was that people suspected she could never hold a position as high as she does because of her thick Mancunian accent, and she herself felt that she had to be “better than average” in order to prove her worth. She adds: “I believe that when you start in the north, you have a lot of things you have to push through, and that is a life-long problem.”

Last week, O’Donnell, who’s spent her career working in fashion consultancy, launched the first-ever Northern Fashion Week in Manchester, which aimed to provide a platform for northern voices and figures in the industry. It was born out of the feeling that she had little to no opportunities and wanted to showcase the talent born from the north. The appetite for it has been clear among northern figures in the fashion industry.

“My accent makes it difficult to be taken seriously”: the truth about fashion’s north-south divide