The Truth about a Women’s industry run by Men

With women spending 226% more on clothing than men and fashion being a huge part of most women’s lives, it would make sense for the industry to be run by women too. Yet, this is where sense doesn’t really… well… make sense! The fashion industry is pretty much run by men with less than half of well-known womenswear brands actually designed by women.

At first look, this may not seem like such a terrible concept, and you may wonder why this matters to anyone except aspiring designers. However, the fashion industry is one of the most influential on our everyday lives, especially for us women as we have been trained from birth to be aware of our image and the way we look, for decades decisions made by the top dogs in fashion have influenced everyone one, perhaps more than we can know. This couldn’t have been shown better than by Miranda Priestly’s iconic speech in The Devil Wears Prada – If you haven’t watched this film, firstly what HAVE you been doing, secondly here’s what she says:

“You… go to your closet, and you select… I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back, but what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean.

You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that, in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns, and then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent, wasn’t it?… who showed cerulean military jackets. I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores, and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.

However, that blue represents millions of dollars of countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry, when in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of “stuff.””

Do you see how decisions by a few people high up in fashion can affect us? Now if we think about that in terms of gender inequality, mostly men are making these important calls from what colour we wear to what body type the model who wears it is (and effectively what body type we aspire to be), which eventually trickles down to us as consumers and becomes ensconced in our daily lives, influencing how we see ourselves, how we see others and what we buy.

So with only 14% of major womenswear brands having a female executive in charge, what can we do about endorsing women to the top spot? Firstly, we can be conscious to shop from more women-led brands, keep an eye on brands leading positions and their statements on how they tackle gender inequality in their business. Celebrate female designers this international women’s week and support them! Even if it’s just a follow on Instagram, every little helps to pave the way for more representation and a voice in an industry that has previously been governed by men.

Thank you for reading,

Poppy xo