This article is part of our new editorial package, where we seek to answer the question: what would fashion look like if more women were in charge? Click here to read more.
Virginie Viard’s departure from Chanel is complete, with the label showing an underwhelming couture collection last week that was said to have been designed without her. Viard’s work was rarely celebrated. Following three decades as Karl Lagerfeld’s second hand, she took creative direction five years ago to achieve 16 per cent revenue growth in 2023. Her kindest critics, though, argue that Viard’s work was uninspired. That may be true. But one can’t help wondering why her departure was accompanied by such vitriol: unfathomably cruel memes, snarky commentary and sneering celebration.
Maria Grazia Chiuri, whose collections for Dior are routinely divine, has often come in for mocking – more than her share, though her recent resort and couture collections received plaudits –with under-the-breath digs at her strident feminist statements, as though they are beneath a brand whose clients are overwhelmingly female.
Sarah Burton is out at Alexander McQueen, where she was beloved by clients and the talented Clare Waight Keller remains sidelined but for a line for Uniqlo. Phoebe Philo, happily, has at last launched her own independent label. The vast majority of esteemed womenswear brands are creatively led by white men, many of whom design for fantasies rather than fashion-loving females with busy lives.
Women can and should be criticised, even fired, if they’ve missed the mark. And no one has to like a collection just because it was designed by a female. But this is such a broad pattern that it warrants calling out and asking why it is. Why do we judge women more harshly, treat them more cruelly, and promote them far less often than men?
Heaps of studies show that women are undervalued and overlooked at work. Researchers at Yale, MIT and the University of Minnesota recently found at a large retail chain that women were 14 per cent less likely to be promoted. Women were consistently judged as having lower leadership potential than men, even though women’s job performance was consistently rated higher on performance reviews.
Of the 33,832 creative directors employed in the US, just 35.3 per cent are women, according to jobs platform Zippia. They earn 93 per cent of what male creative directors earn.
I wanted to know how this works in fashion, so I reached out to Mimma Viglezio, a veteran of Bulgari, LVMH and Kering in the early noughties when it was called Gucci Group. Gucci Group’s top executive ranks at the time seemed progressive, with three men and five women, including its chief financial officer and the CEOs of Balenciaga and Yves Saint Laurent. Viglezio was executive VP of global communications. “I don’t think we were hired because we were women. I think we were hired because we were good,” she says. Then-CEO “Robert Polet was so proud of that.”
Yet, she says, “Whenever we would decide on the CEO of a smaller brand, Robert would look at the two men (on the executive committee), and he wouldn’t ask us women if we wanted the job.” She confronted him, and says Polet responded with genuine surprise that she might be interested. “Robert wasn’t evil,” Viglezio says. “I think that the image of a CEO was very much the image of a man. It wasn’t in the culture of those middle-aged white men.”
Polet says he doesn’t recall the moment Viglezio confronted him, though he agrees it may have happened. “Different genders, different cultures, different age groups — they all help in making teams better and being more in touch with reality and society at large,” he texted me. “So logical as a point of view, but not always to be taken for granted. There are still a few male dinosaurs around with rather old-fashioned points of view. Time will take care of those.”
Industry observers have called out the sameness of luxury’s creative directors in light of recent appointments that place white men in top positions. Is fashion backsliding?
Today at Kering’s top five brands — Gucci, Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen and Bottega Veneta — of their 10 CEOs and creative directors, one is held by a woman: Francesca Bellettini at Saint Laurent.
LVMH’s top six womenswear brands are male-designed, with the exception of Grazia Chiuri at Dior — a label whose CEO is female, Delphine Arnault, the daughter of LVMH founder and chairman Bernard Arnault.
Tory Burch, the billionaire fashion entrepreneur who launched a non-profit foundation to mentor and promote women entrepreneurs, made the struggles she has faced — and how she overcame them — as a woman both designing and running a fashion enterprise, the centrepoint of her commencement speech this spring at the Parsons School of Design.
“At a business summit, I was introduced not as a CEO but as a ‘female CEO’,” she told the crowd. “At times, it’s tempting to give in to other people’s doubts, but when we do that, our dreams quickly evaporate. You need to thicken your skin. And you need to know yourself and have conviction.”
Some with conviction — Philo, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen at The Row, Jil Sander (now retired), Gabriela Hearst, and Maria Cornejo among them — launched their own successful labels, developing cult-like followings for the way they have woven fashion, power and wearability specifically for women. That’s good for their clients, who want real, elegant, well-made clothing that fits them, but fashion investors should be gnashing their teeth.
Cornejo and her CEO Marysia Woroniecka told me they eschewed jobs at big brands in order to make chic clothes for real women. “I’m a woman designer designing for women’s bodies,” Cornejo says, “because I understand their bodies.”
Woroniecka says top roles at big luxury brands have become focused on creating noise and grabbing attention in order to sell cosmetics and accessories with profit margins far exceeding those of clothing.
“It does feel like very male energy, that hype machine,” Woroniecka says. “The big shows are meant to sell the sunglasses, the bags.” It’s uplifting to see Veronica Leoni bringing the collections business back to Calvin Klein. She’s a veteran of The Row and Philo’s Celine. At Chloé, Chemena Kamali, who worked for both Philo and Waight Keller, earned raves for the savvy, flowy collection she showed in Paris for autumn 2024.
Is it possible that men are better at selling cosmetics and accessories than women? Luxury companies that are majority led by men are certainly voting that way. Yet the numbers argue against them. “Women leaders are crucial to organisations’ success — a better gender mix among board directors and senior executives is linked to higher return on equity, higher valuations, better stock performance, and higher dividend payouts,” said mega-recruiting company Russell Reynolds Associates in January as it announced a new executive development programme for women, RRA Artemis.
We must ask: how many talented female design directors and second or third-in-commands will never affect our lives, our closets or our profit margins because no one envisioned a woman in the role, or because they were driven out of a well-done job by naysayers?
As for Viard, I’ll wager she wasn’t earning a fraction as creative director of what Lagerfeld was. She supported, then followed fashion’s most popular designer, and capably produced collections with an intact team. Her shows weren’t as extravagant as Lagerfeld’s, whose sets and model castings — the supermarket, the iceberg, his adoration of Cara Delevingne — were more memorable than the perfectly capable clothes that he and Viard made together.
Give the woman a hand as she goes on her way.
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
More from this series:
Just how hard is the fashion industry on women?
What fashion misunderstands about menopause
Here’s what our clothes would look like if more women designed them
