The Present Is Female

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.

- Sarah Mower

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 generations of established entrepreneurs: a multifaceted critical mass of women steadily working to change an industry 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 institutional 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 achievement of women designers today would amount to a reshaping of the industry—not by fitting in with male-led corporate rules but by steadily ignoring 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 visibility 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 succeeded by doing things in their own ways: Miuccia Prada, Rei Kawakubo, Vivienne Westwood, Donatella Versace, Vera Wang, Alberta Ferretti, and many more.