Are There Any Queer Women in Fashion Design?
It's a common stereotype that fashion design is the realm of queer people - specifically, gay men. And while of course, not all men in fashion design are gay, a number of them are, including high-profiles names such as Alexander McQueen, Marc Jacobs, and Tom Ford. Fashion design is perhaps one of the few industries where queer people have any sort of substantial power and prestige, and that’s something that should be celebrated .However, it hasn’t escaped notice that the most well-known queer people in fashion tend to be queer men, which begs the question: where, if they exist, are all of the queer women fashion designers?
There are, of course, a number of queer women in fashion design, although none who have quite reached the levels of recognition of their queer male counterparts. Jenna Lyons, former president and creative director of J.Crew, perhaps comes the closest: The New York Times once referred to her as “the woman who dresses America,” and Business of Fashion credited her with bringing J.Crew from “floundering catalogue chain to one of the most coveted fashion brands in America.” Lyons created a stir in the fashion world when she publicly came out in 2012 during a speech at Glamour’s “Women of the Year” awards. While she left J.Crew in 2017 after 26 years with the brand, she announced in a 2018 interview with Vogue that she has a new, innovative venture on the horizon: a “weekly unscripted television series that will bring together fashion, home, and lifestyle—and that will let the viewer buy into it (quite literally) with an accompanying e-commerce site.”
Patricia Field is another notable queer woman in the fashion business, having opened her New York City boutique in 1966. It remained a downtown NYC staple for 50 years before Field sold the property and opened a new concept store, ARTFASHION, where she now sells original hand-painted clothing. Field is best known, however, for her work in film and TV. She was the eye behind the famous TV series : Sex and the City and the film: "The Devil Wears Prada". She earned several Emmy nominations and wins as well as an Oscar nomination for her work.
Phoebe Dahl, granddaughter of British author Roald Dahl, is another queer woman who has made a name for herself in fashion design. After studying at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising and the London College of Fashion, she started her sustainable, unisex clothing brand Faircloth while working in partnership with the nonprofit General Welfare Pratisthan. She sold some of her pieces at Urban Outfitters and donated a scholarship to a schoolgirl in Nepal for every item sold. Efva Attling, a Swedish jewelry designer whose products have been sold at over 200 retailers worldwide, is also a notable queer woman in the business. She has formally worked as a model after being discovered by Eileen Ford and has designed for Levi's and H&M before starting her eponymous jewelry brand.
Additionally, in recent years a number of indie brands founded by queer women have been popping up. Often, these brands focus on designing for other queer people and tend to take traditional menswear and design to be worn by people of all genders. Two such brands are Wildfang, founded in 2013 by Emma Mcilroy, Taralyn Thuout, and Julia Parsley, and Kirren Finch, founded by the Brooklyn-based lesbian couple Laura Moffat and Kelly Sanders Moffat.
So, there are undoubtedly queer women out there working in fashion design. However, the fact remains that there is no queer female counterpart to the likes of Alexander McQueen, Tom Ford, and Marc Jacobs. With few exceptions, queer women remain extraordinarily rare in mainstream fashion design, and practically non-existent in haute couture.
This is perhaps unsurprising - after all, despite fashion being an industry with a primarily female consumer base, men still tend to make up a large percent of the higher-up positions in fashion, while women in general are mostly relegated to the lower-level position. A survey done by Business of Fashion in 2015 found that while women make up 70% of the total workforce in the fashion industry, they account for less than 25% of leadership positions. A similar survey conducted by Glamour in 2018 found that only 14% of major brands were run by a woman. No wonder, then, that queer women haven’t achieved the same levels of prestige in the industry as queer men.
Still, the fact remains that queer women fashion designers are out there, and many of them are doing wonderful things for the fashion world. Almost all of the queer-women owned brands listed above are sustainable. While it will take a whole lot of time and effort to increase the presence of women in general, let alone queer women in the upper echelons of fashion, a good place to start would be to be more aware of the queer women who are already out there making waves.
