There is a particular story the independent fashion world likes to tell about itself. It goes something like this: free from the old hierarchies of corporations and unshackled from the boardroom politics of conglomerates, the independent designer operates on instinct, vision, and sheer creative will. Here, talent is currency and the playing field is level. It is a seductive narrative – and, for women building their own labels, it remains largely fiction.

Though women occupy a rough average of 74% of fashion programmes at design schools such as Antwerp, FIT, and Ravensbourne, according to 1 Granary only 12% currently hold the position of creative director at a leading luxury fashion house. Indeed, when one surveys the emerging designers receiving grants, the founders attracting wholesale investment, the names landing on the radar of the international press, a familiar imbalance reasserts itself. Male designers dominate the conversation. The world of independent brands is, in this respect, a mirror to the mainstream it often claims to have escaped.

" Which brands does a buyer champion on a tradeshow floor? Whose lookbook does an editor pin to their moodboard? These choices, though individually defensible, collectively constitute a pattern. "

What makes the issue particularly acute is the absence of accountability structures. At a major fashion group, the infrastructure of scrutiny, however imperfect, exists. In theory, one can demand a diversity audit, a pay gap report, or a public statement committing to change. In the independent ecosystem, decisions are made in DMs, over coffee, on instinct – a thousand small decisions in which bias is able to operate with particular insidiousness precisely due to the invisibility of its structures.

Which brands does a buyer champion on a tradeshow floor? Whose lookbook does an editor pin to their moodboard? These choices, though individually defensible, collectively constitute a pattern. Mckinsey and Leanin’s 2024 Women in the Workplace report found that progress on gender equity is, in many respects, “the same or worse than ten years ago.” Women hold just 29% of C-suite roles across industries, a figure that was maintained in the 2025 report, and are underrepresented at every level of the corporate pipeline. The independent fashion world, with its absence of formal pipelines, offers no structural reason to expect better.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the funding landscape. In 2024, all-female founding teams attracted just 2.3% of the $289 billion of global venture capital invested globally, while all-male teams captured 83.6%. Early-stage financing, the lifeblood of any independent brand, shows an even sharper point of inequality – only 20.5% of first financings in 2024 went to women-led startups, down from 26.5% in 2020. For women building independent labels today, the starting conditions are simply less favourable: less capital, less runway, and less margin for error.

In 2025, prompted largely by Donatella Versace stepping down at Versace, Sarah Burton’s exit from Alexander Mcqueen, and Maria Grazia Chiuri’s departure from Dior, the conversation on the number of women holding top design roles hit the mainstream internet. Many women creative directors were replaced by rising male designers, such as Seán McGirr and Jonathan Anderson - “another guy getting another job,” in the words of Nicole Phelps. Phelps’ previous writing on the topic highlighted that women founders face similar challenges to women in most fields: the competing demands of full-time work and full-time motherhood, compounded by an industry and media that defaults its attention toward men: “It’s a phenomenon as old as the industry.” 

Launching your own label as a relatively unknown designer implies even greater pressures. Speaking to founders Colleen Allen, Julie Kegels, and Rachel Scott of Diotima, Phelps confirms that the biggest limitation founders face is cash flow. Allen and Scott put it plainly: “To be able to work with the levels of raw materials and fabrics and to work with factories that are at a level of quality—as a young brand—is a big investment [...] Any profits go back into building the business.”  Balancing creative ambitions with commercial reality is demanding at the best of times – and particularly so as both traditional retail and e-commerce face growing challenges.

Yet the evidence that supporting female-founded brands is a worthy investment has never been stronger. PitchBook's 2024 All In report confirms that in 2024, female-led companies maintained historically lower VC burn rates and delivered twice the revenue per dollar invested compared to their male-led counterparts. Moreover, the brands that have most compellingly disrupted the fashion and retail landscape in recent years – labels such as Rent the Runway, Reformation, and TheRealReal, rooted in consumer empathy, authentic storytelling, and responsiveness to the real lives of the women they dress – have disproportionately been founded by women. 

Taking the cue from such data, we must stop treating the gender gap as structural inevitability and recognise it as a series of choices – choices that buyers, editors, investors, and consumers make every single day. McKinsey's 2025 findings are instructive: when women and men receive equal career support, the ambition gap between them disappears. The same logic applies to independent fashion. The gap is not one of talent or drive – it is one of access, advocacy, and belief, all of which are addressable. 

" Wolf & Badger has been more than just a stockist — it has been a partner in growth, creativity, and confidence. The visibility and press exposure have helped my brand grow significantly. "

Platforms such as Wolf & Badger, for example, offer a materially different proposition for female founders, one that does not require the founder to surrender equity, creative control, or independence in exchange for reach. For many female-founded labels stocked on the platform, it has provided a viable route to global customers without the pressure of traditional investment models that have historically made the journey inaccessible. Today, over 80% of the 2000+ brands stocked on the Wolf & Badger platform are female-founded, with many seeing significant growth thanks to the visibility and opportunities provided. Miss Cicconi, a woman-led brand featured on Wolf & Badger, notes, “Wolf & Badger has been more than just a stockist — it has been a partner in growth, creativity, and confidence. The visibility and press exposure have helped my brand grow significantly.”

The data shows there is no shortage of qualified, capable women ready to lead. There never was. The shortage has always been on the other side of the table, and it is high time we rectified it.