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Tag: Inspiring Women

  • What Do Women Really Want to Wear? These Two Female Designers Have the Answer

    What Do Women Really Want to Wear? These Two Female Designers Have the Answer

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    Here’s a paradox to digest over your morning coffee. Fashion has a female problem. 

    While the industry is still coming to terms with the fact that it hasn’t done nearly enough to promote young Black and Brown designers, there’s yet another important seat left empty in conglomerate boardrooms and high-end ateliers: women. Despite being some of the largest consumers and creators of fashion as garment workers, buyers, editors, and models, women are still overwhelmingly underrepresented when it comes to making the decisions with the most reverberating impact. In a world where women are expected to foot the fashion bill and have nearly $32 trillion dollars in spending power, it’s disheartening, to say the least. 

    As of publication, only five out of 37 creative directors of major luxury brands and leather-goods houses under LVMH, Kering, OTB Group, Richemont, and Puig are women—Miuccia Prada, Maria Grazia Chiuri, Stella McCartney, Gabriela Hearst, and Sarah Burton. Out of the select few, none are Black women or women of color.

    There are only a handful of female directors who have rightfully received their flowers for revolutionizing the way women approach clothing, turning to dresses, suits, and footwear as a means of being both comfortable and stylish. Think of the likes of Coco Chanel, Phoebe Philo, and Diane von Furstenberg, who all triple-earned their seat at the table among male executives and designers, making decisions on what goes on a woman’s body. 

    Clothing designed by women for women outside of the male gaze isn’t nearly as rare as it was 100 years ago, but today, it still remains in a state of suspension. Most celebrated female-led brands don’t operate under the watchful eye of a luxury conglomerate, relying on legacy status or a strong sense of community to peddle profits—a community that, by and large, is looking for clothing that actually excites them when they open their closets in the morning. Think big dresses, loose pants, frilly baby-doll dresses, and frivolous lace tops. No longer are tight corsets, stumble-prone platforms, and skimpy dresses the only options for women to wear. In 2023, we’re dressing for our 8-year-old selves.

    Ahead of the end of Women’s History Month, Who What Wear wanted to investigate the “why” behind one of the industry’s current dilemmas. If women were at the head of all means of production within the fashion ecosystem, what would we be wearing? What would we be talking about? What would matter to us in the long-term? We sat down with two independent designers and the women driving their sales to discuss what makes female-led design such a rare, but necessary, battle to keep on fighting.

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    Ana Escalante

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  • The Female Content Creators Ushering In a New Era of Formula One

    The Female Content Creators Ushering In a New Era of Formula One

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    These women set the stage for a new era in F1, one that—despite an abundance of pushback from change-fearing fans and a significant lack of representation—is, in many ways, dominated by women. But rather than a racing car, the women currently making their mark on the sport work from behind screens, on platforms like Instagram, Twitch, and, most significantly, TikTok. Even without a seat or, in many cases, any official credentials, it hasn’t taken long for their impacts to be felt across the internet and inside the moving walls of the F1 paddock. 

    “Female F1 content creators have ushered in new terminologies, new ways of approaching and consuming the sport, new ways of talking about the sport, and new content styles, all of which were mocked at first by fans, teams, and the sport itself and then replicated and finally celebrated,” Toni Cowan-Brown, 37, says. Cowan-Brown is a longtime fan of F1, but it wasn’t until 2020 that she made the transition from fan to content creator after publishing her first F1 video on TikTok. Since then, Cowan-Brown has amassed more than 84,000 followers on her F1 TikTok page, @F1Toni, where she shares both educational and entertaining content surrounding the media and culture of F1. One of the major methods she’s used to shift the way audiences think about and consume the sport is through her simple and easy-to-grasp Guide to F1, which she first developed for her friends who weren’t ready to watch hundreds of races in order to learn about F1. Realizing that her original guide was too long for even her friends to read through, Cowan-Brown decided to divide it into bite-size pieces for content, putting them on the taking-off TikTok platform. “I realized that people enjoyed going on this research and discovery journey with me and that the gap I was filling was this desire for knowledge and learning,” she says.

    Those who weren’t raised on the sport but who grew into fandom thanks to its increased representation in popular culture (a result of Netflix’s wildly successful docuseries Drive to Survive, Lewis Hamilton’s presence in music and fashion, and the rise of F1 content creators) could be easily turned off from the sport due to information overload, especially given its existing fan base’s reputation of being harsh on newcomers—particularly female newcomers. Cowan-Brown’s Guide to F1 and the videos associated with it make it easy for new fans to get acquainted with F1 in a judgment-free zone. “I’m hoping to break down some of the stereotypes in this space and the toxic traits we are seeing with certain fans who think the sport belongs to them because they can name every race Michael Schumacher won,” she says. “There is no one way to be a fan—that’s the beauty of fandoms.”

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    Eliza Huber

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