It’s how we end up with years of superhero movies (until superhero movies stop performing), with unending book series about vampires and faeries and their love affairs with mortal women, with a whole swath of designers hired out of streetwear lines — until the market gets saturated or the copy of the copy of the original becomes so removed from the source that it is no longer convincing.
If there’s one lesson fashion should learn it is that some of the many game-changing designers of recent history came from nontraditional backgrounds: Miuccia Prada, who studied political science and cannot sketch a dress; Demna Gvasalia, a child of war who wanted to change the definition of luxury and went from Vetements to Balenciaga (making him one of the Kering six); Telfar Clemens, who bucked the system entirely.
Yet currently, the industry model seems to be Up with No. 2! Or find the next big creative director in the shadows of an already successful creative director. That is exactly what is engendering the current spate of sameness, said Alice Bouleau, the head of the creative sector at Sterling International, a global search firm that works with many of the large fashion brands.
By the time anyone gets to that point in the system, she said, the barriers to entry — be it access to education or being able to take on months of unpaid internships — have largely weeded out more diverse candidates. Indeed, she said, she believed that about 70 percent, or at least two-thirds, of the designer directors or heads of design in major fashion houses are white men.
Then, the choice of who to name as creative director is largely up to the chief executive, most of whom are (yup) white men. And no matter how varied the candidates for a job, the chief executives are “choosing someone based on their own culture through their own bias,” Ms. Bouleau continued. Someone they “click” with.
She was shocked, she said, at “the number of conversations I had with C.E.O.s when we talked about a woman candidate and they asked me, ‘Do you think they are ready for this next move?’ It’s a question very rarely heard about a male candidate and sometimes male candidates were 15 years younger than the woman in question.”
