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The
PR E SE N T
is
FEM A L E
There’s a paradigm shift in the fashion industry—a cadre of women
designers of all generations rethinking standard practices,
designing with intuition and feeling, and putting human values
first. By Sarah Mower. Photographed by Zoë Ghertner.
A
female culture runs far and
wide across the landscape
of 21st-century fashion.
It’s there at the top of the
canopy, in major Parisian houses;
it pervades the uprising of young,
self-made independents and genera-
tions of established entrepreneurs: a
multifaceted critical mass of women
steadily working to change an indus-
try for the better. What’s remarkable
is the way they talk about feeling,
their agile ability to intuit the time
we live in, and their quiet but steady
turning of the fashion world toward
the overthrow of bad and old institu-
tional behaviors.
I was working at my first job in New
York when Donna Karan launched
Seven Easy Pieces, her inspirationally
efficient wardrobe that heralded the
rise of the ’80s power woman and
the first wave of consciously feminist
fashion. Nothing was more thrilling
than her have-it-all idea that executive
women could smash the glass ceilings
of corporate America, and seeing her
advertising campaign with Rosemary
McGrotha being sworn in as president
showed us—nearly 30 years ago—that
everything should be imaginable for us.
Still, what we never reckoned with
then was the notion that the achieve-
ment of women designers today would
amount to a reshaping of the indus-
try—not by fitting in with male-led
corporate rules but by steadily ignor-
ing them, trusting their own instincts,
living how they wish, and opening
wide the creative space for a whole
generation to thrive.
This new normalization of visi-
bility includes women leading major
houses, from Maria Grazia Chiuri
at Christian Dior and Clare Waight
Keller at Givenchy to Sarah Burton
at Alexander McQueen and Virginie
Viard at Chanel. Innumerable major
women leaders, meanwhile, have suc-
ceeded by doing things in their own
ways: Miuccia Prada, Rei Kawaku-
bo, Vivienne Westwood, Donatella
Versace, Vera Wang, Alberta Ferretti,
and many more.
Yet progress today can hardly be
quantified as linear, up-the-ladder
stuff. It’s gyrating around whole new
axes of celebrity and social media.
Doors to the luxury-fashion fortress
that didn’t even exist a decade ago are
now being stepped through by female
upstarts from everywhere in the digital
age—including those who’ve credibly
switched to fashion from acting and
music careers: first the Olsen twins,
then Victoria Beckham, and now Ri-
hanna, the first black woman to have
a label backed by LVMH.
Women are taking the freedom to
toot their horns on media platforms—
or to stay private and silent—as they
wish. You won’t find holiday selfies
