Over the past few years, amidst the reshuffling of male creative directors at many of fashion’s most important houses, a question has emerged again and again—just where are all the female designers?
The answer is quite simple, actually: They’re making clothes that prioritize women’s multifaceted real lives rather than perceived fantasies about them—though that’s not to say their designs aren’t also sensual, or playful, or brutalist, or minimal, or twisted, or opulent, or made to desire and be desired in.
Givenchy’s Sarah Burton and Calvin Klein’s Veronica Leoni joined Chloé’s Chemena Kamali and Hermés’s Nadège Vanhée as heads of luxury heritage labels in the last season, and Louise Trotter will soon make her debut at Bottega Veneta. But more often than not, women are likely guiding empires of their own design. Miuccia Prada, Rei Kawakubo, Phoebe Philo, Stella McCartney, Tory Burch, Victoria Beckham, and Khaite’s Catherine Holstein preside over massive brands, and Simone Rocha, Martine Rose, Grace Wales Bonner, Diotima’s Rachel Scott, Chopova Lowena’s Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena-Irons lead smaller, independent ones.
This is certainly not a comprehensive list, but you get where we’re going with this—there are a lot of women designers out there when you start to look. So we’ll keep making these lists as long as we have to. We will shout out and exalt the ones we love, because we live in an attention economy wrapped inside the economy-economy. Because women are so often trained to put their head down and do the work; to have ambition, but not too much…
At the end of the day, it all comes down to one thing: They make the clothes we want to wear—that make us feel like the best version of ourselves; that show us alternate possibilities of who we are, who we can be, who we may want to be in the future.
Or, you know, they just design stuff that makes us go, “Damn, that’s cool! I’m gonna buy it.”