Women make up 74% of fashion courses, but 12% of creative directors

“It’s a boys' club. It always has been. It’s so boring to me that nothing has changed. You wonder why fashion feels so irrelevant at the moment – you have all of these womenswear brands with so much potential, but no women are invited in to shape them.”

12%.

That’s how many women* we calculated are currently creative directors at leading luxury fashion houses.

There’s absolutely no shortage of female designers in the industry or education. In fact, we enquired about the gender split at a handful of design schools worldwide, such as Antwerp, FIT, and Ravensbourne, and found a rough average of 74% of fashion programme students identifying as female. So, what gives? The following article contains excerpts of conversations with a dozen industry figures – Lucien Pages, Lauren Sherman, Katie Grand and many more – who give their thoughts on the current state of the divide.

Gender divide in education

“This makes me think back to when I was a young girl, spending all my time at the stable tending to the ponies and taking riding lessons,” says Anja Cronberg, founder and editor-in-chief of Vestoj. “Back then, it was incredibly uncommon to see boys in the stable. But when I watched show jumping competitions with my friends, the stars were all men. Where had they come from? How did they get so good if we never saw them practising?”

This is what we commonly see: women are overrepresented in education, but they simply do not progress further in their careers compared to their male counterparts. “During my studies, I realised there would be fewer opportunities for my female classmates than for the few men that were in the class,” says French designer Jeanne Friot. “Growing up studying fashion, I started to count on how many women vs men were at the creative director roles, but even at lower positions in this industry I found it really unequal.”

Another designer based in London noted this, too. “From the offset, male students are generally encouraged and championed more, which in turn sets them up for success when they apply or are recommended for jobs,” she told us in 2023 . “I think it’s pretty evident when you look at the numbers of male students that end up in the [Central Saint Martins BA graduation] press show compared to female students, despite there often being more women on these courses.”

Critic Timothy Chernyaev, who runs the account @relaxitsonlyfashion, believes that when women do break into the industry, they normally discover that they’re up against ‘unexceptional men’. Quite consistently, you’ll see that when a brand-designer pairing isn’t working out, a male designer will likely still find success elsewhere. “For Clare Waight Keller, Frida Giannini, Virginie Viard,” Timothy says, “once their tenure at a design house is over, it’s a bit like: well, you had your chance, and it didn’t work out. The most qualified person should always be hired regardless of gender, but in the fashion industry, men are more likely to get a second, third, or even fourth chance while women need to be consistently excellent in order to succeed.”

This is something that continues to strike a chord for talented in-house female designers who are looking to climb the career ladder. “When it comes to recruitment for creative directors, 99% of the time, the final decision will be made on a personality basis,” recruitment consultant Alice Bouleau told us back in 2023. “Whoever is in charge of the decision will say something like, ‘I clicked better with the other person, I had a better fit.’ It’s always hard to hear for the candidate, and it’s hard to explain, but you want to partner with someone you feel a connection with, and unfortunately, men will click better with other men. They don’t necessarily realise they’re doing it.” When bias is unconscious, it’s harder to break the cycle.

The old boys' club, how bias keeps women out

This is a structural problem, not a smattering of isolated events. It’s therefore hard not to generalise when we talk of this issue, pervasive across all industries, in all countries. “Like begets like – people hire their friends, and their friends tend to look like them,” adds journalist Lauren Sherman, who leads Puck’s fashion industry analysis newsletter. This perpetuating culture starts at the top, a result of a relatively unchanged decades-old mentality. The decision-makers are still, by and large, cis white men (yes, there are progressives among those!) because that’s simply what the dominant leadership demographic has always been like. That doesn’t mean change isn’t happening – it is, but the change is of the slow and unradical kind.

If we zoom out, how much change has meaningfully been achieved at the top level in the past decade? It is undeniable that women's profiles are coming more to the fore, in part thanks to Phoebe Philo’s success (though many designers allege working for her is no walk in the park). But, as PR expert Lucien Pagès notes, the game of musical chairs in fashion is so tight that “some female designers win jobs, but they also lose them. There is a lot of rotation at big houses right now.” The problem is – when new female names aren’t added into the mix to replace outgoing names, it’s hard to see a measurable difference. It just means we see Maria Grazia Chiuri moving from house to house.

Yes, when there are 30 top houses, it’s hard to get a spot. But, over the past five years, new names have been introduced, but they have predominantly been in-house male right-hands. What about talents like Emilie Pirlot, Ilaria Icardi, Susanna Venegas, and Martina Tiefenthaler, and the many other exceptional women with in-house design roles?

The structural barriers

“The gender disparities in the top fashion roles persist, I believe, because of a deeply-steeped mentality that is hard to shake off,” says critic Angelo Flaccavento, who writes for Business of Fashion, Il Sole 24 Ore, and System. Another reason that women don’t graduate to the top job – in addition to unconscious bias – is that they also opt out of a system that does not support them. The industry’s punishing work culture discourages women, especially those who want families. The myth of the always-available designer works against them. If Jonathan Anderson can pull off running Loewe and his namesake brand, you should be capable too, basically. “The way these studios operate – extremely late, long hours – is not conducive to having a family, and so many women self-select out of the running,” Sherman says. “That’s why the appointment of someone like Chemena Kamali, a young mother, is so important.” This resonates with Claudia Donaldson, founder and editor-in-chief of Cloakroom: “In the 90s, we dressed up for work to stay in our jobs. A decade later, we drove businesses to success and were made redundant while on maternity leave.” It’s hard not to feel discouraged when the odds are stacked so neatly against you.

Phoebe Philo took maternity leave in 2005 as the creative director of Chloé, becoming the first high-profile designer to do so. First: it’s shocking it took that long. Second: we can likely count the number of creative directors who have done this since on one hand. Third: just because it’s a company policy doesn’t mean it’s normalised in-studio. A designer who spoke to us anonymously, described working for a female-led design house while pregnant. Despite experiencing early contractions and debilitating pain, she still felt she had to get on with the job because the show was only a few days away. “I realise I should have said something,” she says. “I should’ve asked for help. But it was presumed you would get on and do it.” In a society that implicitly expects women to put others’ needs ahead of their own – to assume an outwardly caretaking role – it’s hard for them to sidestep the way they’ve been culturally conditioned. Especially when there’s a lack of support from the powers that be.

The problem with unconscious bias is that women are also biased against women, because the bias supports the dominant, patriarchal position. When we wrote about discrimination in hiring in 2023, one designer shared: “I always get asked how I would manage my work-life balance. I tend to get asked about this by female head-hunters more than male. Women with families question me – “Would you be able to handle this?” This needs to change. If someone is good for the job, they should make the job suit them.”

It should not take extraordinary resilience for women to succeed.

One for the ages

It’s hard not to notice the age disparity, too. When is a designer deemed competent enough to be a creative director? For men, late 20s or early 30s has become a relatively acceptable age. For women, unless you’re the daughter of a celebrity, it appears you should be at least in your 40s. It seems, however, that the youth-hiring strategy of late that has been employed by the conglomerates isn’t entirely paying off either. Fashion is obsessed with youth and hiring them can be significantly cheaper than going for a well-established name like Nicolas Ghesquière or Hedi Slimane. But it also means less experience.

Lucien Pagès believes that “when women arrive at the job, they are super prepared. They are extra good. Take Louise Trotter, for example – I started working with her when she was at Joseph, then at Carven, and now she’s going to Bottega. She got it when she was older, but it was a good time – she’d likely do a better job than if they hired a young guy. When you arrive with more experience, you’re more prepared, more efficient. Sometimes I wish that people got these big jobs later on. I’m working with a lot of young designers and sometimes it’s a poison gift, because they’re not prepared.” He rounds it off by paraphrasing a more general saying: “We will know there is equality when there is an incompetent woman as creative director – just as there have been plenty of incompetent men.”

The women who forge their own path

Many women are choosing to build their own brands rather than wait for major houses to promote them. But this raises the question: should success for women always mean opting out of the system? “Women are addressing gender disparity by doing what they have always done: building community out of their customer base,” Chernyaev adds.

“There are also phenomenal women who started their own brands and have been essential creatives – arguably the most interesting designers of the last 30 years,” adds Katie Grand before rattling off a long list: “Miuccia Prada, Donatella Versace, Rei Kawakubo, Vivienne Westwood, Phoebe Philo, Luella Bartley, Stella McCartney, Isabel Marant, Sofia at Aries, Martine Rose, Simone Rocha, Bianca Saunders, Dilara, Miss Sohee, Karoline Vitto, Iris Van Herpen, Grace Wales Bonner, Mowalola – the list goes on. Yet, people tend to focus on the big brands rather than the industry as a whole.” And indeed, as Grand points out, women are being given important roles in management today: “Benedetta Petruzzo, who was previously CEO at Miu Miu, is now managing director of Dior. Leena Nair at Chanel. Francesca Bellettini previously at Saint Laurent. Pascale Lepoivre at Loewe. Séverine Merle at Celine. It’s a fact that the brands who have been very successful recently have very brilliant female CEOs.” Also, a lot of the very successful bag designers – the real money drivers in the industry – in fashion houses are women.

This is all true, and we must celebrate the success that these designers and CEOs have, without losing sight of the more structural issues at hand.

“There needs to be a foundational change, starting with who is recruited into internships and entry-level roles," Sherman says. "The culture of the workplaces needs to change, too, but that'll happen almost naturally as the makeup of the teams changes. Until then, it's going to keep looking like this."

At the end of the day, we can keep mulling over how we instigate change. But the solution is simple: hire women for these roles. Change is only made through real action, effecting real impact. So, why wait? Let’s give Maria Grazia Chiuri, Chemena Kamali and Sarah Burton some playmates.

*We’re addressing this issue from a more typical dichotomy of male-female for the sake of argumentative ease. Gender fluidity across a new generation of designers is more prevalent today, yet the majority of current creative directors identify as cisgender.