Opinion: Can the Female Gaze Save Fashion?

With sales stagnant, a simple but urgent question has echoed through the fashion conversation: Is fashion still for women?

In recent seasons, several collections have been dismissed as unwearable, while others have been criticised as too pedestrian. Reaction to the latest round of haute couture shows followed this pattern, with commentary oscillating from “it’s too wearable” to “it’s not wearable enough.”

High fashion has always lived somewhere between a dream and the constraints of the everyday. Even couture has forever been suspended between the top-most expression of fashion authorship and imagination, and real-life dressing, albeit for the world’s wealthiest women.

A fashion collection only truly succeeds when it has vision and that vision can be translated in such a way that finds its way into women’s lives via pieces they can wear, feel powerful in and live beautifully with. That space between imagination and reality is where a lasting fashion legacy is forged — or falters.

Wearable collections that move naturally from runway to wardrobe — less about pure fantasy than refinement, intelligent fabrication, precise tailoring and silhouettes that honour the female form — can be powerful. They rely on exceptional materials, perfect fit and exquisite accessories, which can provide a look with emotional punctuation. And when they’re put together with sharp merchandising and considered styling, elevated yet real, they can certainly deliver what women want.

So, too, can collections that start with emotional theatre, where form, texture and movement awaken something visceral but the poetry of the catwalk is steered through thoughtful merchandising into pieces women can actually live in, clothes that carry the feeling of the show without losing functionality. When a creative director has a 360-degree vision across design, merchandising and marketing the results can be truly extraordinary: clothes with both imagination and pragmatism.

Problems arise when a designer becomes so consumed by fantasy that the woman effectively disappears. When fantasy runs wild, proportions are distorted, fabrics only work in a small size and fit goes missing. The result is reliant on “a look”: how it works on a very young model or photographs for images, speaking more to the industry than to women themselves. These collections can generate hype and critical praise for a few seasons, but they rarely translate into lasting desire and consistent sales.

For collections to work, designers need to centre women and their needs for both fantasy and function. At its heart, fashion is still a dialogue between creator and client, and that conversation mustn’t become one-sided. When women design for women, they tend to see their task differently and the language changes: fashion becomes less about being looked at and more about creating a feeling.

The female gaze isn’t a buzzword, it’s a way of seeing that women designers may understand instinctively but male designers can and must adopt more consistently if they are to succeed.

When creative directors centre women, the results speak for themselves: garments women reach for again and again because they reflect both their fantasies and their realities, and they feel as good as they look.

Sarah Richardson is a stylist and co-founder and editor in chief of Beyond Noise.