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The 2024 fashion year was bookended by Sarah Burton’s swan song at Alexander McQueen and Louise Trotter landing the creative director job at Bottega Veneta. In between, the state of women in the fashion industry—specifically, how few of them there are in top design roles—became the talk of the internet. Burton was replaced by Seán McGirr at McQueen and Trotter followed Matthieu Blazy at Bottega—men who, a popular meme pointed out, bear a striking resemblance to each other and to at least a handful of other on-the-rise white male designers. Another guy getting another great job: The throw-up-your-hands inevitability of it all could be one of the reasons, alongside price resistance, why women with money to spend are trading high-fashion purchases for wellness experiences and exotic travel. Personally, though, I find more satisfaction in seeking out and shopping smaller independent women-owned brands—and as a writer and editor, I find that these stories are the ones I take the most joy in telling.
There’s certainly no shortage of female talent in the industry, as young and not-so-young women designers have been establishing brands that are resonating far beyond their small footprints. Take, for example, Rachel Scott of Diotima, who made the giant leap from the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s Emerging Designer of the Year in 2023 to its Womenswear Designer of the Year a year later—and whose crochet tops, handmade by women artisans in her native Jamaica, have become synonymous with in-the-know chic. (It helps when Angel Reese, WNBA phenom and Vogue cover star, wears your dress on the red carpet.) Or take Scott’s Brooklyn neighbor Colleen Allen, who left The Row, where she helped get menswear off the ground, to create a collection of feminine suiting—much of it is made with colorful Polartec fleece—brimming with mystique. (Charli XCX has taken a particular liking to Allen’s work, wearing it onstage for her Sweat tour.) Or the Belgian Julie Kegels, who charmed Paris at her second-ever show last September with surf-inspired, city-ready pieces infused with a sly wit.
Not long after Trotter landed that coveted Bottega gig, we gathered these three women together—each of them independent designers who have launched brands since the pandemic—for an honest discussion about the challenges of operating in what can still feel like a man’s world. When, a decade ago, I wrote about the lack of female design stars in New York, the crux of the issue was that women founder-designers had it harder for all the reasons that women do in most fields: the pressures of balancing full-time work and full-time motherhood, along with the predisposition, on the part of the media and marketers, toward presumably less-encumbered men. It’s a phenomenon as old as the industry, as the Costume Institute’s recent exhibition “Women Dressing Women,” which surveyed the work of women designers from the turn of the 20th century to today, made efforts to redress. (At the very least, the show dispelled any lingering beliefs that women designers are strictly problem-solvers—and that only male designers can make creations worthy of the spotlight.) As it turns out, what comes around goes around (and around).
“There are so many incredible women designers that are just not considered or never get to that point,” says Scott of the competition for today’s top creative director gigs. That this is much to the industry’s detriment was reinforced by the collective thrill the long-awaited launch of Phoebe Philo’s eponymous brand produced—to say nothing of all the Bombé sunglasses, Gig bags, and expertly cut trousers from her collections that we’ve been seeing at the shows.
It took nearly six years for Philo to reemerge after exiting Celine. If going solo is risky, launching your own label as an unknown requires an even bigger leap of faith—along with either a willing suspension of disbelief or an amazing amount of true grit. Maybe both. Scott, who launched her label in 2021, is still the only full-time employee at her brand.
“I say this a lot,” she says, “but I started my career in Italy, and I don’t think I would have been able to open a brand as a Black woman immigrant if I had still lived in Milan.” (Scott studied at the Istituto Marangoni and worked at Costume National.) “That was only possible in New York—in America—where there’s more openness.” Allen, though her clothes have been picked up by Ssense and Moda Operandi, still consults as a designer for a New York men’s streetwear label in order to support her brand and herself. “It’s a great relief to be able to do that,” she says, “because it takes away a lot of the pressure, and I can work from a place of creativity rather than sort of a place of anxiety,” she says. Allen’s creativity is sparked by female Surrealist painters including Dorothea Tanning, Remedios Varo, and Leonora Carrington—in fact, her debut collection, for fall 2024, was inspired by a tarot deck Carrington created in the 1950s. (You can make connections between Allen’s ruby red Victorian polar fleece jacket with hook and eye closures and the artist’s high priestess card.)
Anxiety comes with the job of an emerging designer, of course. The three women all agree that the biggest hurdle they face is cash flow. “To be able to work with the levels of raw materials and fabrics and to work with factories that are at a level of quality—as a young brand—is a big investment,” says Allen. So much of being independent is working with limitations. “Any profits go back into building the business,” adds Scott, who is hoping that 2025 is the year her brand finally becomes profitable. Juggling creativity with commercial pressures, especially at a time in which traditional retail and e-tail models are faltering, makes for tough going—until that magic moment when you notice someone out and about in your clothes.
Kegels—whose work is sold at H. Lorenzo in LA and Modern Appealing Clothing in San Francisco, in addition to Nordstrom stores, lights up as she recalls the first time it happened: “It’s quite amazing to see how they communicate their world and their personality…. It’s like you created this piece, but it becomes something else.” Even better is communicating with these women one-on-one. “Who we dreamed our customer would be actually is who they are: incredible gallery owners, filmmakers, artists, businesswomen,” Scott says. “I met a plastic surgeon from Switzerland the other day who got my number and now she’s texting me, like, ‘I want that skirt.’ ”
What else keeps them forging ahead? Just how big their goals are. The Chanel-ish verve of Kegels’s spring 2025 skirt suit is entirely intentional—Coco Chanel has been an icon of hers since she was a young girl. “I still love her history, her authenticity; how she could empower women by making silhouettes,” she says. Allen learned on the job from Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen at The Row, who have always been resolute about doing things their own way. “Seeing them as women CEOs who started their own brand and worked almost outside of the traditional industry trajectory was such a big inspiration,” she says. “I hope there’s sort of a generational shift as the world evolves and that, if we just keep making the work, people will see it.”
Scott says she can imagine taking a corporate job one day. “I have dreams of brands—maybe ones that don’t exist [yet]—that I would love for a conglomerate to buy up and then call me to run.” Large design teams and big budgets of the kind Trotter is inheriting at Bottega, for example, are no doubt tempting. Scott also claims Miuccia Prada and the late Vivienne Westwood as role models: Prada because she was nearing 40, about the age Scott is now, when she designed her first womenswear collection, and because she has made such a globe-spanning success of the business since (“longevity is the dream,” she says); and Westwood for her radical politics and outspokenness. “People might not recognize that it’s there, but my whole project is to subvert the idea of value. I’m saying [that] craft is the true meaning of luxury—not place or, let’s say, pedigree.” Success, Scott adds, would be “adding something in a meaningful way that didn’t exist before to the industry.”
