Let me describe an industry to you. Its customers are mostly women. Its workforce, from the shop floor to the sewing machines to the design studios, is mostly women. Its students are mostly women. Its imagery is almost entirely women. And at the very top, where one person decides what all those women will be offered next season, it’s usually a man.
That’s fashion. And I think we’ve become so used to it that we’ve stopped finding it strange.
First, the disclaimer I shouldn’t need
I don’t hate men. I don’t hate white men, who hold most of these jobs. Some of my favourite designers of all time are men, and several of them have made women feel more powerful and more beautiful than anyone else could. Good design isn’t decided by gender, and I’m not here to say a man can’t understand a woman’s body or that a woman automatically does it better.
My problem is with the system. With the pattern. When the same kind of person keeps getting the job, decade after decade, in a field full of qualified women, that isn’t about individual talent anymore. That’s structure.
The numbers are not subtle
The last couple of years gave us the biggest reshuffle of creative directors anyone can remember. More than a dozen major houses changed hands. It was a once-in-a-generation chance to change who’s in charge.
And mostly, the jobs went to men. Dior, which had its first ever female creative director in Maria Grazia Chiuri, replaced her with Jonathan Anderson. Chanel, a house founded by a woman on the idea of freeing women’s bodies, went from Virginie Viard to Matthieu Blazy. Both are very talented designers. I’m excited by their work. But look at the direction of travel.
When Marie Claire did the count in late 2025, women held ten of the thirty-three creative director roles at houses designing for women. Two of those ten were women of colour. That’s under a third, in womenswear.
What really gets me is the list of houses that were started by women. Chanel. Lanvin. Schiaparelli. Nina Ricci. Celine. As that same reshuffle settled, every one of them had a man designing it. Women built these names, and somewhere along the way the keys were handed over.
Why it matters who’s holding the pencil
You could say, so what? If the clothes are good, who cares who drew them?
I care because of what this industry actually sells. Fashion doesn’t just sell fabric. It sells women a picture of who they could be. It makes its money from our wants and desires, and also, let’s be straight about it, from our fears and insecurities. The feeling that you’re not quite thin enough, young enough, polished enough, and that the right purchase might fix it.
When that picture is drawn, again and again, from the outside looking in, something gets lost. A woman imagined by someone who has never lived in a woman’s body tends to be a woman who is looked at. She’s a vision. She’s a muse. She is often stunning. But she doesn’t always get to sit down, or eat lunch, or put her phone anywhere.
That’s what people mean by the male gaze, and it shows up in very practical ways. Dresses you need help getting into. Shoes built for a photograph. Sizing that treats a normal body as a special request. Decades of women’s clothes with no pockets.
What changes when a woman designs
Again, not always, and not automatically. But there’s a pattern in the work of the great female designers, and I don’t think it’s an accident.
Coco Chanel took women out of corsets and put them in jersey, because she wanted to move. Miuccia Prada has spent her career designing for the woman’s mind, making clothes that are clever and slightly awkward and not especially interested in being sexy for anyone. Phoebe Philo’s Celine became a kind of religion because women felt, maybe for the first time, that someone was designing for their actual day. Rei Kawakubo ignored the idea of flattering the body altogether. Donna Karan built a whole wardrobe around a working woman getting dressed in the morning.
What links them is that the woman in their clothes is the subject, not the object. She’s the one doing the looking. The question shifts from “how will she appear?” to “how will she feel?” And I think you can sense that difference the moment you put something on.
So why does it keep happening?
It’s not a shortage of women. Fashion schools are full of them. Design studios are full of them. A lot of the men who get the top job are supported by teams of women who do much of the actual designing.
I think it comes down to who makes the decision and what they picture when they hear the word “genius”. The executives and owners doing the hiring are overwhelmingly men, and the industry’s favourite story is still the lone male visionary, the tortured star. Women who are just as gifted get described as “practical”, “commercial” or “a safe pair of hands”, which sounds like praise and works like a ceiling.
Then add the things nobody says out loud. The job is brutal, with endless collections and constant travel, and it’s built on the assumption that someone else is handling the rest of your life. Women are still judged more harshly when they fail and given fewer second chances. A man who leaves one house under a cloud gets another. Women tend to get one shot.
The good news, and I mean it
It hasn’t all gone one way, and the women who did get through deserve their flowers.
Sarah Burton, after years of carrying McQueen, is now at Givenchy. Louise Trotter took over Bottega Veneta, which made her the only woman leading a house at Kering when she was appointed. Maria Grazia Chiuri went to Fendi after Dior. Meryll Rogge got Marni. Rachel Scott got Proenza Schouler. Veronica Leoni is at Calvin Klein. Grace Wales Bonner was named to lead menswear at Hermès, which matters in a different way, because a woman designing for men is still treated as unusual when the reverse is treated as normal. And Chemena Kamali has made Chloé feel like it belongs to women again.
These are big appointments at serious houses, and I think they’re a real step in the right direction. I just don’t want us to celebrate so hard that we stop counting. A handful of women in a field of dozens is a start, not a result.
What I’d actually like to see
I’m not asking for men to be pushed out. I’m asking for the shortlist to look like the industry. For women to be hired for vision, not only for stability. For them to get the same time, budget and patience their male peers get, including the freedom to have a bad season and keep the job. And for more women on the boards and in the owner’s chair, because that’s where these decisions are really made.
We’re the ones buying it. We’re the ones making it. We’re the ones wearing it. It doesn’t seem like too much to ask that more of us get to decide what it is.
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