Why the hell are all the great fashion designers men?

There has been a flurry of activity in the fashion sector lately, with a real thunder game between its creative directors. It all started with the departure of Hedi Slimane from the house of Celine, which started a cascading effect of the most important firms replacing their creatives, as is the case of Gucci, Chanel, Valentino, Chloé, Alexander McQueen or Bottega Veneta. A game that is not yet over, since it remains to be seen where John Galliano will go to talk, after leaving Maison Margiela and being replaced by Glenn Martens, and the uncertain future of houses such as Christian Dior or Loewe is also yet to be defined. But these operations, which oscillate between the coldness of a chessboard and the passion of a Turkish novel, cannot make us overlook one fact: how is it that, after these moves, more than 90% of the current creatives of the main fashion houses are men? These movements would see two of the very few women in the front line replaced by designers: Maria Grazia Chiuri at Christian Dior and Virginie Viard at Chanel.

This situation, which is worrying in itself, is even more difficult to understand if we take into account that the proportion of male university students in fashion design does not exceed ten percent of the total. Furthermore, it is worth remembering that historically women, apart from darning socks, hemming and mending dresses for free (according to Silvia Federici, "What they call love is unpaid work"), were the anonymous and essential workforce of the boom in the textile sector during the 19th and 20th centuries. The chef Maria Nicolau denounced a similar situation in haute cuisine in the programme Cultures 2 from TVE.

Nicolau was paying attention to the international congress Madrid Fusión, a reference in the sector, with a main auditorium with 47 participants, of whom 44 were men and only 3 women. Is this proportion logical when women have historically assumed the burden of feeding others throughout their lives? In the past, university studies in art history, as well as humanities in general, were reserved for women because they did not have a direct correspondence with the world of work and, consequently, to ensure that they would not abandon the domestic sphere. Today, despite still having an overwhelmingly female university student body, it is men who, in general, run museum institutions.

Certainly, it is good that the labour segregation of the 19th century has been broken, which considered that sectors such as textiles and fashion, education or nursing were women's own, because they were extensions of the domestic and care tasks that were inevitably attributed to them. But what is not so good is that the bases of these sectors continue to be made up of women, but that the places of power and visibility are enjoyed by men. And I ask myself: at what point have we allowed ourselves to be taken over by the control of key sectors for the beginning of the economic emancipation of women? While they are accessing without restrictions the areas considered feminine, are we enjoying the same facilities when it comes to entering their spaces of power? And, ultimately, are we advancing in equality or are we simply entangled in a patriarchy that, like a hydra, when you manage to cut off its head, it grows four heads?

In 1971, the American historian Linda Nochlin wrote a fundamental text for feminist theory in art entitled Why have there been no great female artists? In it, she unravelled the fact that, far from being less talented, these women had suffered from social, cultural and institutional impediments that were completely adverse, which in no way favoured their brilliance in this field. Along the same lines, the feminist collective Guerrilla Girls asked in 1989 whether women should be naked to be able to enter the Metropolitan Museum. In the 21st century, I wonder whether, despite our talent and excellent training, we should be content with being models with normative beauty in order to have representation in the (considered feminine) world of fashion.