Blue Stocking

Prada’s iconic Cadillac-inspired heels

After a fashion century which began dominated by male designers such as Paul Poiret and Charles Frederick Worth, and ended with prodigiously talented Maria Grazia Chiuri at the head of the legendary house of Christian Dior, female couturiers seem to have come triumphantly into their own in 2022.

Over their shared century, the film industry saw the same shift: while in the 1930s costume designers were brilliant men such as Orry Kelly and Adrian, by the 1950s Edith Head was in the ascendant and Hollywood goddesses turned to female designers off-screen – Helen Rose dressed Elizabeth Taylor, Ceil Chapman swathed Marilyn Monroe’s curves and Ava Gardner favoured the starched bibs and embroidered satin of the Roman sisters, the Sorelle Fontana.

Women designers understand women’s bodies better and can therefore make them comfortable: this has been the dictum since Mademoiselle Chanel liberated her customers from Edwardian corsets in favour of separates in silk and jersey that permitted both freedom of movement and minimal underpinnings. Chanel’s baton was taken up by Diane von Furstenberg 50 years later with her wrap dresses that made life easier for the modern woman, while flattering every figure.

The bargain female designers make with their customers, however, is more complicated than mere comfort: Armani and Halston, after all, brought just as much ease in their soft-shouldered, draped silhouettes. The great female rival to Coco Chanel in the ’30s, Elsa Schiaparelli (whom Chanel despised as “that Italian artist” and loathed so much she once “accidentally” set her on fire at a ball), offered something very different, a combination of avant-garde, artistry and fantasy: dresses appliquéd with lobsters and quilted with skeleton motifs.  And while Vivienne Westwood – grande dame of British fashion and heir to Schiaparelli’s wayward brilliance – is in favour of letting it all hang out, no-one could accuse her of making life easy for the wearer of her fabulous and fantastical clothes. There are straps and flaps that must be puzzled over, there are bustles and asymmetry, there are corsets inside corsets: this is reworking the body through the power of the imagination.

Wand-like, ex-supermodel, rock-star wife Susie Cave – whose exquisitely gothic brand The Vampire’s Wife has been on every red carpet since it was launched, may not understand the average woman’s body any better than Christian Dior did, but she certainly knows our dreams.

The female designer, then, is playful, she understands the fantasy of seduction – and she takes risks, pushing at the limits of what is wearable and acceptable. This is how she offers women another version of the freedom Chanel brought to their everyday lives in the ’20s, allowing them to escape an idealised image of femininity and instead explore a hundred different ways of being a woman.

Maria Grazia Chiuri might declare her feminism proudly on T-shirts, but where it really shows is the way she sets the wearer free with Dior clothes. There are big buckled flat sandals or biker boots with tulle skirts; a T-shirt under the classic Bar jacket; soft wide trousers and reefer coats and beaded gowns and striped matelot sweaters that all constitute an exquisite dressing-up box.

But it is Miuccia Prada, the most influential figure of late twentieth-century fashion, who perhaps best represents the freedoms a woman designer can offer. Intellectual, politically committed, fearlessly imaginative, extravagantly talented and in love with fashion. Like Westwood and Maria Grazia Chiuri, she knows that clothes are significantly about our fantasy lives. Prada has re-imagined women as 1930s cabaret dancers and schoolmistresses, as surrealist icons and bank robbers – even styled them as 1950s Cadillacs, flame decals at their ankles.

Schiaparelli, Chanel and Prada, Chiuri, Cave and Westwood all play with who and what we are and that in the end is how we fall in love. It’s not so much that female designers know women’s bodies better than men, it’s that they know our minds.

Christobel Kent is a Gold Dagger-nominated author. She has lived in Essex, Modena, Florence and Cambridge and has written seventeen novels, ten of which are set in Italy. Her latest novel “The Widower” came out in May 2021