With Virginie Viard and Sarah Burton’s exit, does fashion hate women in power?
“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.
This story first appeared on voguebusiness
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