The power of patriarchy within luxury fashion means women and people of colour are vastly under-represented in the industry. When will change come?
When the French luxury conglomerate Kering announced last week that Sarah Burton, Alexander McQueen’s creative director of 13 years, would be succeeded by JW Anderson ready-to-wear head
“White men? For spring? Groundbreaking,” a male commenter wrote under the original post from @1Granary, the Instagram account of a student-run publication at the London art and design college Central Saint Martins. Kering declined to comment on its selection processes.
That luxury fashion is made primarily by and for women — and yet its most powerful and best-paying roles are held by men — is no secret within the industry. People of colour are also vastly under-represented in leadership positions.
Yet the appointment of a male designer to follow Burton at McQueen, and the apparent homogeneity of Kering’s creative directors, has again raised the question: why, in 2023, are there so few women designers leading these conglomerate-backed brands?
“Patriarchy is a powerful force in the world and in the fashion industry, and this is a very true manifestation of how we see it play out,” says Ben Barry, Dean of Fashion at Parsons School of Design in New York. “We see men rise to the top of these industries at a rate that is not reflective of their [make-up] in the industry.”
An FT analysis of creative directors and chief executives at 33 major luxury fashion brands showed that the proportion of female creative directors is now lower than it was 15 years ago.
Of the 14 brands that make up LVMH’s Fashion & Leather Goods division, only three — Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri, Pucci’s Camille Miceli and Fendi men’s Silvia Venturini Fendi — have women creative directors (three have no named creative director). OTB Group, owner of five labels including Diesel and Margiela, has only one female creative director — Jil Sander’s Lucie Meier, who splits the role with her husband Luke. Prada still has Miuccia Prada, but her heir apparent is Raf Simons. Burberry has never had a female designer.
That many of these companies position themselves as champions of diversity and inclusion makes the make-up of their creative directors all the more striking.
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Advertise with NZME.Some companies are bucking the trend. Chanel is led by creative director Virginie Viard and global chief executive Leena Nair, who last year became the first woman of colour to head up a major European luxury fashion brand. Richemont-owned Chloé has been led by a succession of women designers since the late Karl Lagerfeld stepped down in 1997, and both Hermès’s womenswear and menswear lines are designed by women.
But they are exceptions, and designers currently or formerly working within the big luxury groups describe a culture of bias and discrimination that prevents them from even being considered for creative director roles.
A Paris-based designer who has led ready-to-wear at two major European brands, and who would only speak on condition of anonymity, says she believes she “will never be” hired for a creative director role because of her sex. In recent conversations with headhunters, she’s been told she could be the “shadow head” of a brand, but if she wants the creative director title, her only option is to move out of luxury and into something more commercial and lifestyle-led, most likely in the US.
She says a former, similarly credentialed female colleague was told by a recruiter for a big luxury conglomerate that she would never be put forward for any creative director role “because they just hire men anyway”. She has since left the fashion industry.
“There are simply more men in chief creative officer roles than women, so when you put that important and very curated [candidate] list together, we’re always having to work a little harder to find the women that we know will be embraced by the client,” says Karen Harvey, founder of recruitment consultancy Karen Harvey Associates.
Experiences of gender discrimination are not exclusive to the top posts. In a 2018 survey of fashion industry professionals conducted by the Council of Fashion Designers of America and Glamour magazine, 100 per cent of women respondents said that their sex had hampered their career progression and that of their female peers. However only half of male participants recognised that gender inequality was holding back the careers of their female colleagues.
And though it is well-established that gender-diverse companies outperform their peers across industries, leadership imbalances continue to exist.
“I don’t think there’s ill intent [within these luxury companies],” says Gabriela Hearst, who designs a namesake label in New York and was until recently the creative director of Richemont-owned Chloé in Paris. “But it’s time [for HR] to question, is everything being done right?”
She believes companies are missing out by not hiring more women creative directors, who better understand how to design for women’s bodies and have a great record of selling product (she cites Dior’s Chiuri and Chanel’s Viard in particular).
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Advertise with NZME.Harvey believes luxury fashion’s shift from being product-led to being more marketing-led has put women candidates at a disadvantage. “We place chief creative officers on a regular basis. And I’m often told, ‘She’s a really good designer, but... ' ‘But does she have that much of a beacon for drawing people to the brand?’ ‘She tends to be more quiet.’ ‘She isn’t that well-known.’”
Parsons’s Barry points out that male designers have long been portrayed as creative geniuses while women designers are perceived as more practical, an entrenched stereotype that might be damaging women’s chances of securing creative director roles at brands where they are expected to be the face as well as the designer.
Most of the executives hiring for these roles are also white men; of the brands in the analysis, less than a third have a female chief executive. “Does a man feel more comfortable talking with another man about business face to face? If a man grew up where women were in the kitchen, [maybe they do],” says Hearst.
“It’s happening because the fashion industry is about networking,” says a London-based designer who asked that her name not be published. “And the inner circle is all men.”
Designers says discrimination begins at design school, where female students tend to significantly outnumber their male peers. (At Parsons, 82 per cent of students are women.) “But the boys get looked at more,” says the former ready-to-wear head. “And the moment you start working, boys get given room to develop these egos and personalities, whereas the women are taught that having no ego and being collaborative is a good thing.”
Fashion’s gender imbalance wasn’t always so pointed. Many of the great couture houses of the 20th century — Madame Grès, Lanvin, Chanel, Schiaparelli, Chloé — were founded and led by women. (Both Lanvin and Schiaparelli are now designed by men.) That began to change after the second world war.
Today the industry’s prominent women designers — Miuccia Prada, Comme des Garçons’ Rei Kawakubo, Stella McCartney, Sacai’s Chitose Abe — tend to also be the founders or owners of their businesses.
“To be a creative director and a woman, you have to do your own brand. It’s a fact,” says the London-based designer.
It’s not just women who are under-represented in creative director roles at luxury fashion conglomerates, Parsons’s Barry points out. Representation from other marginalised groups, including designers who are disabled and from ethnic minority backgrounds, is also lacking. Age is another factor. Rare is the creative director who lands his or her first appointment after the age of 50.
The racial diversity of head designers has improved in recent years, particularly in the wake of the Black Lives Matters protests of 2020. Pharrell Williams is now the men’s creative director of Louis Vuitton, the largest luxury fashion and leather goods brands by sales. LVMH-owned Kenzo and family-run Ferragamo have also appointed men of colour to lead their design ateliers in the last two years.
To bridge the gender gap, recruitment consultant Harvey says she would encourage LVMH and Kering’s owners to widen the consideration pool beyond male designers in “number two roles” who have lately been favoured for creative director jobs, a list that includes McGirr, Bottega Veneta’s Matthieu Blazy and former Valentino deputy Sabato de Sarno, now the creative director of Gucci.
“I would strongly encourage Mr Pinault and Mr Arnault to really create whatever is needed around [women designers] to make sure that [the companies] also get the marketing value and commercial value that they need. And it should not be assumed that women can’t bring the hype.”
June Ambrose, a former costume designer for Missy Elliott and Jay-Z who in 2020 became Puma’s first black female creative director, agrees that luxury fashion companies need to rethink their hiring criteria, and seek out creative directors with less conventional backgrounds. She points to Williams’s appointment at Louis Vuitton as a step in the right direction.
“What are they looking for? Do they just want to maintain the status quo? It’s a very old-school mentality of appointments,” says Ambrose. “I recognise my path wasn’t traditional. But we have to challenge the norms of the selection process.”
This article originally appeared in the Financial Times.
Written by: Lauren Indvik
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