Altering an Industry
Can the Women in Fashion Find Equality?
by S. KING
Young women, draped in black, file into their classroom at Parsons School of Design at 9 a.m. Their arms wilt under the weight of garment bags and their shoulders hang heavily, loaded with fabric and supplies. They weave through a sea of industrial tables and dress forms, and scraps of drafting paper crunch beneath their feet.
With their garments now hung on a rack, each student selects a dress form and takes a seat on a metal stool beside it. The walls are lined with industrial sewing machines, sergers and irons, and the air is tense. In a class of 17 students, the tired eyes of 16 young women dart around the room as they wait for their professor to arrive. Among them is Kekoa Iskandar, the only male student in the class.
Iskandar, in his second year of fashion studies, is used to being one of few men in his classes. Parsons School of Design, the top school for fashion design education in the United States (ranked second worldwide only to London’s Central Saint Martins) has a student body that is 79% female students. Within the School of Fashion alone, this ratio climbs even higher. While Donna Karan is one of Parsons’ most cherished alumni, the list of designers Parsons likes to claim among its most celebrated is overwhelmingly male: Alexander Wang, Marc Jacobs, Tom Ford, Jason Wu, to name but a few.
Historically, many of the most renowned fashion designers have been men. Think Louis Vuitton, Cristobal Balenciaga, and Christian Dior. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that so many of today’s creative directors remain men. But with so many young women pursuing fashion, shouldn’t there be more women at the top?
In the Classroom
Iskandar, whose dreams of being a designer began as a child in Jakarta, Indonesia, is weary of the stigmas often attached to men interested in fashion. Peering from beneath the brim of his black bowler hat, Iskandar says that fears of effeminate stereotypes keep some men from pursuing careers in fashion.
“Boys aren’t allowed to be interested in clothes growing up, and girls are taught to wear pretty pink dresses,” said Rebecca Lanman, a production assistant for Wes Gordon, a high-end womenswear label, and Parsons graduate.
Like Parsons, the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), also draws significantly more young women than men with a student body that is 84% female students. In fact, nearly all art and design schools around the world with top fashion design programs have significantly more female students than male.
“We’ve seen the same things over and over,” said Yvonne Watson, Associate Dean of Fashion at Parsons. “The greater interest in fashion comes from young women.”
Fashion is a global industry and even at Parsons over 40% of students come from outside the United States to study design. While New York, Paris, Milan and London remain the fashion capitals of the world, Paris has historically been the focal point of fashion and the goal for many New York-based designers is still to present at Paris Fashion Week. New York-based designer Phillip Lim, for example, presents his label, 3.1 Phillip Lim, in Paris, as do many elite Japanese labels, such as Yohji Yamamoto, Junya Watanabe and Comme des Garçons.
University of the Arts London, which is home to the prestigious Central Saint Martins, is 74% female students. Central Saint Martins has produced many of today’s biggest names in fashion, including Alexander McQueen, John Galliano and Phoebe Philo of Céline. Other esteemed fashion schools include London College of Fashion and La Cambre in Brussels, both of which are nearly two-thirds female students.
Competition in fashion is notoriously cutthroat and design schools like Parsons and FIT foster a competitive spirit in their students from early on. Both Lanman and Iskandar competed as sophomores in an annual competition, known as the Fusion Fashion Show, in which freshman and sophomores from Parsons and the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) compete for the titles of Best Overall School and Best Designer.
Alexander Wang and Prabal Gurung are among a handful of acclaimed New York designers who competed in the Fusion Fashion Show in their early days at Parsons. Simon Lee, a 2014 Parsons graduate since deemed fashion’s rising it-boy, also participated in Fusion during his sophomore year.
James Ramey, who founded the competition 11 years ago as Prabal Gurung’s college roommate, is amazed by how many young Fusion competitors have gone on to reach “enterprising levels success” in the industry. “The best I can come up with,” said Ramey, “is that they got a taste of something that they wanted, and that it really ignited something in them to keep going.”
Both Lanman and Iskandar have competed in the Fusion Fashion Show– Lanman in 2012, and Iskandar in 2014 and 2015. The competition was their first experience bringing a collection to life from sketches to finished garments that graced the runway.
Tickets for the Fusion Fashion Show, hosted by Parsons, quickly sold out, leaving eager students from FIT and Parsons on a wait list to witness the competition. The Fusion Fashion Show brims with a different energy than the more reserved industry runway shows or even the Parsons’ Fashion Benefit show, which showcases seniors’ work each spring.
At this year’s Fusion Fashion Show, The New School’s auditorium was filled to capacity with students, families and professors. Parsons and FIT students cheered loudly for their friends’ collections and gasped collectively when a model shed his coat halfway down the catwalk, right on cue with the pulsing electronic music. At the end of the competition, which consisted of four runway shows over two days, the judges named Best Designer and Best Overall School.
In 2015, 32 students competed in Fusion (16 students from each school), of which nine were male. This year, FIT junior Haley Byfield was named Best Designer for Best Overall School. The Best Designer awards for both Parsons and FIT went to female students this year, with Annie Meng taking home the win for Parsons and Byfield for FIT, but more male-identified students have taken home the award since the first Fusion competition 11 years ago. Even the Fusion Fashion Show’s website couldn’t help but point out how unusual it was to have a woman win, writing “Haley Byfield is only the third female that has won Best Designer from FIT and the first in seven years!”
On the Fusion website, this detail is listed under the title, ‘Fun Facts’.
“You definitely stand out,” said Iskandar, referring to his status as a male student at Parsons. He admits that being the outlier can have its benefits: it’s easier to recall the name and work of one male student than that of sixteen female peers. Perhaps, Lanman echoed, more men go on to become head designers because so few young men pursue fashion, rather than in spite of it.
Designers of the Year
In the fashion industry, international competitions and awards have played key roles in launching the careers of many of today’s most successful brands. Competitions like LVMH Prize and the International Talent Support (ITS) contest, as well as awards like those given by the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) and the British Fashion Awards (BFA) provide international recognition, mentorship and cold, hard cash. The LVMH Prize, for example, awards a grant of 300 thousand euros to an emerging designer, as well as 12 months of personalized technical support. LVMH (Moët Hennessy • Louis Vuitton S.E.) is a multinational conglomerate based in Paris that owns 70 luxury brands and fashion houses including Dior, Givenchy, Céline and Louis Vuitton.
Awards given by the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) are the most prestigious awards in American fashion. At the most recent CFDA awards in June of 2014, Joseph Altuzarra won Womenswear Designer of the Year while Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell Osborne of the label Public School won Menswear Designer of the Year. Public School’s Maxwell Osborne is only the second black designer to win Designer of the Year after Sean Combs won for his label Sean John in 2004 and is one of the dozen African-American members among the CFDA’s 470 members.
Since 1995, male designers have won Womenswear Designer of the Year 14 times, while just four labels led by women have received the same award.
80% of the labels named Womenswear Designer of the Year by the CFDA since the award was first given have had male creative directors. Donna Karan, who was named Menswear Designer of the Year by the CFDA in 1992, is the only female-headed fashion house to be recognized for menswear since the award was first given in 1987.
Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen received the CFDA award for Womenswear Designer of the Year in 2012 for their label The Row, and only three other labels headed by women received the award before them: Donna Karan in 1996, Carolina Herrera in 2004 and Rodarte, a Los Angeles-based label led by sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy, in 2009.
The fashion industry tends to promote “the star,” said Watson, noting that many of the CFDA Designer of the Year recipients are repeat winners. Marc Jacobs, Proenza Schouler, Oscar de la Renta, Donna Karan and Francisco Costa for Calvin Klein, have all received repeated recognition from the CFDA, often within the same category.
“I don’t know what it is that has the industry favor an individual or promote male designers,” said Watson. She studied fashion design in her native country of England and has since been both an associate professor and administrator at Parsons School of Fashion, where she has worked since 2010.
Watson acknowledged that outside of fashion schools, “the industry really is about a kind of male dominance.”
The British Fashion Awards have been similarly male-dominated. No British female designers have been recognized for menswear design, but four female designers– Luella Bartley, Phoebe Philo, Sarah Burton and Stella McCartney– have received the British Fashion Award (BFA) for Womenswear Designer of the Year. Phoebe Philo, who heads the French fashion house Céline, and Stella McCartney have each been recognized twice.
Still, only 8 women in over two decades have received either CFDA or BFA Womenswear Designer of the Year recognition.
The 2014 LVMH Prize winners, which consisted of one winner of the Emerging Designer Award, and three winners of the Graduate Award, were all men. Most recently on March 18, the finalists for the 2015 LVMH Emerging Designer Award were announced. After months of weeding through over 1200 submissions, the competition was narrowed down to eight brands consisting of eight men and two women.
On May 22nd, a jury of nine creative directors from LVMH-owned fashion houses will announce the winning label at the Louis Vuitton Foundation.
Behind the Scenes
“We’re like the little worker ants,” said Sheycha Dem, a menswear designer and Parsons graduate. She paused, looking the window at the bustling streets of SoHo from a studio in downtown Manhattan. Dem is dressed in all black and her hair is pinned back neatly in a bun at the nape of her neck. “We’re in the background in this cramped office and the creative director sits in the showroom,” she said.
Dem, originally from Thimphu, Bhutan, is one of around twenty women working on the design team at R13, a denim-driven contemporary label. At R13, all of the designers for both menswear and womenswear are women, though the creative director is a man.
Dem’s experience is not unique in fashion. A 2008 documentary, Valentino: The Last Emperor, followed Italian couturier Valentino Garavani into his Milan studio as he prepared for his final runway show as head of the fashion house he founded in 1959. In one scene, a team of three women in white lab coats are seen huddled around a model during a fitting frantically pinning strips of white silk to a floor-length, pleated gown under the direction of Garavani. He steps back to analyze the gown, standing in a suit with his hands in his pockets, and praises the women for their “miracle” work to accommodate his last minute design changes.
The seamstresses get to work on the corrections and finishing details. It’s after dark and three women, each in a white coat with a tape measure around their necks, sit in a row, hand sewing crystals to the edges of the gown’s white silk ruffles. Two women work together to pull a gown down on to a dress form and another stands over a table, threading a needle. A grey-haired woman leans back in her chair, resting her head against the wall and closes her eyes for a moment of reprieve.
These women– the designers, the patternmakers, the seamstresses, the production managers– play essential roles within fashion houses, but receive little recognition outside the walls of their studio.
Even in the classroom, fashion history is largely claimed by men, said Isabella Bravo, a Parsons student who premiered her designs at the Fusion Fashion Show this winter. Fashion students at Parsons are required to take courses on the history of fashion, among other art history subjects, which cover key designers, garments and techniques. “Men created these crinoline skirts and these gowns and these corsets, but I’m like, where are the women?” said Bravo, recalling her fashion history class.
French designer Paul Poiret, considered the grand master of early 20th century fashion, developed iconic garments like the hobble skirt, harem pant and lampshade tunic and is often credited with freeing women of the corset– though this was not done single-handedly. Madeleine Vionnet, head of her namesake fashion house in the early 20th century, also played a part in getting rid of corsets with her development of the bias cut. Bias cutting is a technique in which the fabric is cut 45 degrees to the direction of the thread, or ‘on bias’, rather than parallel. Bias cutting continues to be used regularly in patternmaking to create garments that drape and hang softly on the body.
Bravo, a native New Yorker, struggled to name five labels with female creative directors. She listed Carolina Herrera, Diane von Furstenberg and Coco Chanel before falling silent to her own dismay. Still, Bravo recognizes that women have contributed to fashion in many other often-overlooked ways. “Why not talk about the women who developed the sewing patterns for women to sew their own clothes during World War II?” Bravo asked. “Why aren’t their innovations acknowledged?”
For Dem, the lack of women in positions of power can be disheartening for young women, she says. “You see that all the creative directors are men, all these famous fashion designers are men,” she said. “What are we going to think?”
Before joining R13, Dem worked for Ovadia & Sons, a SoHo based menswear label founded by twin brothers Ariel and Shimon Ovadia in 2010, and interned for Richard Chai while a student at Parsons.
Having been taught by all male professors while studying menswear at Parsons, Dem was prepared for the industry’s dynamic. It was confusing, she said, but not shocking.“It has always been all these men,” Dem said. She rattled off names like Christian Dior, Cristobal Balenciaga, and Yves Saint Laurent, trying to pinpoint “the start of fashion” as we know it. “It has always been this way,” she said. “So for women, maybe we subconsciously think that we can’t do it.”
Rebecca Wright, program director of graphic communication design at Central Saint Martins in London, feels the lack of visibility of women in top design positions relates to young women’s confidence in stepping into the spotlight. “After 15+ years in design education,” she wrote in October of 2014. “My experience is that female students are still less likely to want to grab the limelight, less inclined to push themselves forward and to self promote.” According to Wright, these students are more inclined to exhibit their confidence in other ways, choosing instead to take more leadership behind the scenes.
“I don’t actually know many women who have the career path I want to have,” said Phoebe Lovatt, a 27 year-old Londoner who founded the Working Women’s Club in Los Angeles, a platform that connects women in creative industries. “I totally get that feeling of, how do I do this? If I can’t see how to do it, is it even possible?”
Watson, the Assoc. Dean at Parsons, feels this lack of confidence can be attributed to the differences in the way men and women are socialised. Women are not often encouraged to be as hard-nosed as their male counterparts towards reaching levels of enterprising success, Watson said. “If you’re a woman, there are certain ways that it’s okay for you to be,” she said in her 5th Avenue office at Parsons. “If we are not within the norm of what’s acceptable, clearly we get certain reputations, and there’s a very deep schism.”
Still, the dream for many young designers is to have their own label. “We are the generation of Alexander Wang,” said Madison Li, a junior a Parsons who won Best Designer at the Fusion competition in 2014. “We look up to him.”
Alexander Wang, often called a fashion darling and wunderkind, has become the poster child of success for young designers. Like many of New York’s emerging designers, Wang attended Parsons and even competed in the Fusion Fashion Show before he left school at age 19 to launch his namesake label in 2007. In 2008, Wang won the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, which annually awards $20,000 to an emerging designer to grow their business, and soon after, received Designer of the Year recognition from the CFDA and Swarovski. In 2012, Wang was appointed creative director of the Paris-based fashion house, Balenciaga, at just age 26.
Back in the classroom at Parsons, Iskandar has his own dreams of running a major fashion house. “I always wanted to take over Dior,” he said. “Now, I don’t think I want Dior. Now I think I’m going to take over Comme des Garçons.”
Young men in fashion often feel driven to make a name for themselves, said Lanman. “Otherwise, it’s just a man making dresses.”
Dressing and Addressing
“When men design for women, the woman becomes more of a canvas,” said Li in a studio at Parsons. As a man designing womenswear, he said, “You’re allowed to treat it more like an art project.”
One of the loudest arguments within the fashion conversation lies in the belief that men are simply better womenswear designers because they have more distance from their subject– making clothes they’ll never wear– and that this separation cultivates more creativity.
“It is as though what they have to say about feminine style and female allure is more legitimate, more believable, more acceptable or simply more exciting because it is coming from a man,” style and culture critic Robin Givham wrote in 2011.
Every designer has their own process, but some, like Iskandar, feel that men and women take a different approach to design. “I’ve noticed a lot of women in this industry, or girls in my class, they just design things for themselves,” he said. “They can really only imagine like, what would I like to wear?”
If this detachment is to explain the disproportionate levels of success of the men behind womenswear, then women should be excelling in menswear at parallel rates, but menswear remains the area of fashion in which women are overlooked the most.
As a menswear designer, Dem feels that women have no problem removing themselves from their work. “Being a boy or a girl doesn’t make your level of talent or comprehension of art different,” she said.
“Companies are always saying, ‘we’re a meritocracy, we’re a meritocracy, we just didn’t find any women,’” said Elizabeth Ames of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. When the industry promises individual talent will prevail, the underlying assumption is that women just don’t cut it.
“Sometimes when I’ve thought about male designers, I think they’re dressing some kind of idealized body,” Watson said. Fashion has a long fascination with ideals of beauty and femininity that have often objectified women’s bodies. Paul Poiret, the grand couturier praised for releasing women from their corsets, is the same man who designed the hobble skirt– a garment so restricting that it forced women to literally hobble around instead of walk.
Lanman, a six-foot tall blonde raised in St. Louis, Missouri by a business-minded family, has plans to start her own company in partnership with her sister, an analyst at J.P. Morgan. Lanman takes a very practical approach to fashion in both her design aesthetic and her business plans. “I am not an avant-garde designer,” she said without hesitation. “I want every woman to want to wear every piece of my collection.”
Lanman, who also works as a model with Wilhelmina Curve, often chooses to imagine herself as her customer, which she feels gives her and other female designers an advantage. At Wes Gordon, where Lanman works, the company’s only two men are the creative director, Wes Gordon, and his assistant designer. In a recent fitting at their lower Manhattan studio, the two designers struggled to understand the problem with a dress that was not “bra-friendly.” Several women from the sales and production departments spoke up, reminding Gordon that many women would not feel confident wearing a thin silk top without a bra.
For Lanman, empowering women is the driving force behind design. “You want to feel like a super cool, badass-looking woman in your clothes, she said. “That’s the whole point of fashion.”
Phoebe Philo and Donna Karan are among the top tier of high-power female designers whose success has come from creating garments that are both functional and highly stylish. “It’s accessible,” said Watson. “And it’s about real women.”
Like the Boys
Expressions of femininity are often looked down on. “Girly” clothing is readily dismissed by the fashion industry– viewed as too traditional, too juvenile or too frivolous. “They don’t take it as seriously,” said Li. Essentially, he said, girly isn’t cool.
“When you look at the iconic womenswear that’s made by women, it is somehow very gender neutral, or masculine even,” Dem said. Even the great Coco Chanel made her name in womenswear by borrowing elements of menswear and at last giving women clothing that was both stylish and comfortable. “Her whole approach to fashion was women wearing men’s clothes.”
Céline, a Paris-based womenswear label headed by designer Phoebe Philo, has followed in the footsteps of Chanel, though their designs appear quite different: Chanel was known for her tweed suits and little black dresses and Céline for its minimalist and unisex silhouettes. Like Céline, the highly exclusive Tokyo-based fashion house, Comme des Garçons, produces gender ambiguous womenswear in the form of deconstructed and expertly tailored avant-garde garments.
“Comme des Garçons is one of the only truly great and iconic brands run by a woman,” Dem said. Yet even the name, Comme des Garçons, translates to “Like Boys,” Dem pointed out.
Designers spend much of their energy focused women’s bodies and female designers themselves often feel pressure to dress like the boys. At Parsons, students are discouraged from wearing their own work when they present their senior thesis collections each spring to panel of industry experts.
Fashion designers and fashion students are notorious for dressing themselves in all black, only occasionally switching out their black t-shirts for white ones. Many designers choose this uniform to prevent the colors or prints of their own outfit from impeding on their work. But it’s also a look that has become synonymous with the moment at the end of each runway show when the creative director, so often a man in a sleek t-shirt and trousers, steps out on the catwalk to graciously wave to the editors and buyers who came. This is the image of the newest generation of fashion designers, and young female designers are choosing to dress the part.
Fashion’s Glass Ceiling
While designers blur the lines of gender both on and off on the runway, the industry is expanding to new cities across the globe. The majority of designers listed on style.com, the encyclopedia of fashion shows, still come from the traditional fashion capitals, but designers based in other cities like Sydney and Moscow are now being noticed.
In Moscow, a city that only recently stepped on to fashion’s world stage, the majority of today’s top designers are women. Perhaps opening the door to new fashion hubs will also extend the hand to more female designers seeking recognition, Watson suggested.
Of course, gender bias is present in all global industries. “It’s everywhere,” said Lanman. “It’s [in] every industry that exists.” But when a 20 year-old Parsons student looks around her classroom at the world’s top fashion school and sees only female faces staring back at her, it can be easy to forget.
Fashion is art, many designers say, but fashion is also a business. Fashion comes with its own kind of boys’ club and the factors that perpetuate the gap in gender in fashion are many of the same factors that affect all industries– socialization, maternity and visibility can all influence a woman’s career trajectory, said Watson.
For Lanman, the age-old challenges of motherhood affect the number of women making it to the top. Some women, she said, choose to start a family during peak career-growing years, believing that they will seamlessly return to their careers after bearing children. But over time, Lanman said, other things become important.
Watson recently attended an industry talk given by representatives of Swarovski and was shocked when the speaker began speaking about women’s empowerment as a tenant of fashion. “I had literally never heard somebody, talking from a fashion perspective, start to talk about women’s empowerment,” she said. “They don’t even occur to me sometimes as a part of the same conversation, which is really, really ridiculous.”
Understandably, addressing a classroom full entirely of young women about a lack of female representation can feel confusing, if not absurd. But having a lot of women doesn’t always prevent unconscious bias. “It’s important to acknowledge that we all have biases in order to get past the defensiveness,” said Ames of the Anita Borg Institute at the SXSW Interactive conference in March, who explained that female leaders often exhibit the same gender bias as male leaders when hiring.
“It’s time for a paradigm shift in the industry,” Watson said. “It’s time to break that glass ceiling.”
‘Breaking the glass ceiling’ is a phrase frequently heard in conversations about gender equality in the workplace. While there is still a gap, this paradigm shift is beginning to happen in science, technology, engineering and math, also known as STEM fields. Even the White House has partnered with the Office of Science and Technology Policy to engage and support women in STEM fields, but few such initiatives exist to elevate women in the creative industries.
Kering, the holding group of nearly 20 luxury labels including Alexander McQueen and Balenciaga, was the first in France to join the Women’s Empowerment Charter and adopt the UN’s Women’s Empowerment Principles. Kering has since launched an internal Leadership and Diversity Programme, which aims to foster young female talent through mentorship.
This month, Kering partnered with Parsons for the fourth year of the Empowering Imagination contest, which awards 12 students with a feature on Style.com and the winner with a trip to Kering facilities in Italy. Despite a corporate commitment to elevating female talent, eight of this year’s 12 finalists are male students, though male students made up less than 20% of the applicant pool.
For Phoebe Lovatt, who founded the Working Women’s Club in Los Angeles, corporate programs aren’t always the best solution. The Working Women’s Club, she said, was born out of need. “I was yet to find a platform that spoke to me, and the kind of ambitions I have,” which she said, “are not about adopting a kind of Sheryl Sandberg, climbing corporate America, way of working.”
For Lovatt, collaboration among women is one solution to elevating creative women. “I think women are naturally very supportive of each other,” she said. Lovatt rejects the cultural myth that women are inherently competitive and envious, but, she said, “I think that’s a divide and conquer mentality and I don’t subscribe to it.”
Still, Lovatt admits there is still a big gap to be closed. The majority of head designers behind the runway shows on style.com remain men. “But what’s exciting to me is that it’s changing,” she said.
In a conference room at Parsons, Lanman contemplates the future of women in fashion. Is is changing? She doesn’t have an answer. Lanman says she can’t predict whether or not more women will rise to the top as the head of their own companies. But for now, she said, “I’m doing it.”
