The most recent Fashion Weeks highlight an age-old trend off the runway: the status of men as the gatekeepers of women’s fashion. That’s according to an AFP wire published in Fashion Network.
In Paris and Milan, as Europe’s premier luxury fashion brands show off their Spring-Summer 2026 womenswear, around 10 debuted collections from new artistic directors. Louise Trotter at Bottega Veneta was the only woman among them, with the new faces at Chanel and Dior notably replacing high-profile female predecessors.
Karen Van Godtsenhoven, a fashion academic at the University of Ghent in Belgium and guest curator for the 2023 exhibition Women Dressing Women at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, sees the trend as a reaction to the post-Covid landscape.
Luxury fashion brands had a brief boom after the initial hit from the pandemic, but artificially high prices and economic uncertainty have seen customers leaving in droves. European luxury brands, Van Godtsenhoven mused, are “going back to the old certainties of the male solo designer.”
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This turn is especially galling for fashion houses like Chanel, founded by “the most famous woman and influential person in fashion,” Dana Thomas told AFP, referring to the iconic Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel. Other celebrated brands created by 20th-century female designers – Lanvin, Nina Ricci, Schiaparelli and Celine – “all have men as creative directors now.”
The recent appointments of Sarah Burton at LVMH-owned Givenchy and Maria Grazia Chiuri at Fendi, do little to dent the trend back toward male-dominated leadership in the industry. Frederic Godart, a professor at French business school INSEAD and author of Unveiling Fashion, deemed the absence of women among new lead creative voices “quite glaring” given that the industry “has collectively and in many instances claimed it cares about diversity.”
Both Godart and Van Godtsenhoven point to longstanding perceptions of men as geniuses and visionaries as influencing the trend. Women, Van Godtsenhoven told the AFP, are overwhelmingly present at every stage of the production process yet it is men who are seen as the visionaries of fashion. This cliché is “very damaging, both to men and women in the industry,” she added.
Ignored by established fashion houses, women designers like Iris van Herpen, Molly Goddard and Simone Rocha are launching their own labels instead. “There’s a whole generation of women who are really, really good, and they’re just not getting the breaks,” Thomas told AFP.
