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Women's fashion is always a statement about women's roles and how they are or should be performed. Therefore it is appropriate to ask whether, in their capacities as fashion designers, men and women interpret women's roles differently. To what extent does fashion express the experiences of most women? In the nineteenth century, fashionable clothes were intended to be worn for the social activities of upperand upper-middle-class women but were generally unsuitable for the everyday lives of other women. Gradually, in the twentieth century, simpler types of clothing, appropriate for women at all social class levels, appeared, but they often began outside the "fashion worlds" in which fashionable clothes were created. While women have always been dressmakers, only in the late nineteenth century did a few women become fashion designers and, in that capacity, begin to have the possibility of translating their experiences as women into clothing for women.
While one might suppose that women would dominate the field of fashion design for women, in fact, women designers have been in the past and continue today to be outnumbered by male designers in the field of fashion design for women.1 In the area of fashion design for men, they are definitely a minority.
Fashion design, as a type of cultural hegemony in which certain aspects of gender roles are favored rather than others, can be understood in part as the outcome of organizational structures and the constraints on behavior they necessitate. Social change which disrupts these relationships sometimes provides female designers with opportunities to challenge existing interpretations of female roles as they are embodied in fashionable clothing. In this essay, I will explore the differences between men and women fashion designers in the contexts of the fashion industries in three countries, England, France, and the United States.2 Using a typology of roles that fashion designers perform, I will compare the activities of men and women designers in those roles.
Based on Howard Becker's analysis in Art Worlds of the relationship between crafts and arts, the roles performed by fashion designers can be characterized as craftsman, artist-craftsman, and artist. Craftsmen and artist-craftsmen produce their work to order-for clients or employers. For craftsmen, utility is the major factor in evaluating their creations while artist-- craftsmen stress beauty and...