Those are very serious and almost depressing corporatist discussions at a time when people claims to hate that idea of corporatism…
For me the push for that conversation is a push to instrumentalize a sort of agenda that doesn’t make sense.
The fact that we need more women designers has nothing to do with men. Companies needs to provide environments that will allow women to thrive and to also believe in their ambition and go for those jobs.
My issue about this conversation is that it portrays women and men designers as a monolith. It implies that a woman will show women in a more dignified way than a man would ever….
That a woman will be more pragmatic when a man will only be about a dream.
Are Donatella Versace, Iris Van Harpen, Marine Serre, the girls from The Attico dressing that bourgeois idea of what a woman designing is? I don’t think so.
Is Rei Kawakubo that attached to the notion of practicality? No…
Where we definitely need more women is in photography and styling. I don't know about you guys, but that Robbie Spencer stylist guy seems to me like he hates women, nothing he styles appeals to me, I find it 99% of the time repelling and he's one of the leading stylists in the industry. Of course, we have photographers like Irving Penn and so many others who truly understood what is beautiful about a garment, but I still feel many women get ignored in this field. Women also know what women like, and they deserve more chances in showing it.
If there’s one side of fashion where women are heavily represented (besides design), it’s the styling.
There are more stylists that are women, who have a long standing career than men….
The job of styling is very much linked to magazines and in fashion, the magazine world was dominated by bourgeois women. There are very few men but because the turn over in that world is not that important, you may feel the opposite.
Carlyne Cerf and Joe McKenna changed a bit the status of a stylist. Then Carine and Emmanuelle elevated it even more but when it comes to stylists, it’s heavily dominated by women.
The same for celebrity styling. There, it’s a bit changing because it’s the side that is opening more to diversity and therefore some few black men or women are finding opportunities they would have never found without that circuit.
I like to see that there are more and more women photographers who are thriving and ready to elevate their work to Art.
There was always women photographers but their work wasn’t necessarily that much celebrated.
I think about a Bettina Rheims or a Dominique Issermann. They did fantastic work but they were never recognized as Artists so less exposure.
That is a discipline that needs more women indeed but a distinctive POV.
