From ‘Women’s Work’ to Award Category

The complicated stratosphere of gendered labor in the fashion and film industry in 2025

Photo by Charlota Blunarova on Unsplash

Luca Guadagnino’s remarks are not merely a provocation about creative preference; they expose a deeper, long-standing hierarchy that devalues costume design as both labor and art. At a moment when the industry is ostensibly celebrating costume excellence—amid awards season fanfare and recent hard-won pay equity gains—his comments echo a persistent belief that costume design is secondary, technical, or interchangeable with fashion branding.

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With the nominees for the 2026 Costume Designers Guild Awards (CDGA) being revealed this month in anticipation of the 28^th edition of the ceremony, which will take place in February, the rather controversial comments by the immensely zeitgeist-y Italian film director, Luca Guadagnino, remain pressing. Last month, at Business of Fashion’s “annual gathering for big thinkers…movers, shakers and trailblazers”, BoFVoices, Guadagnino joined legendary fashion journalist and broadcaster, Tim Blanks, to speak about process and inspiration. An important aspect of the discussion centred on the power of character design, to which Guadagnino commented on his preference for collaborating with fashion designers like Jonathan Anderson and Raf Simons rather than career costume designers. It was announced back in July that the former would be collaborating with the director once again on Artificial, an upcoming film based on the dramatic firing and rehiring of OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman. The pair famously joined creative forces for Challengers (2024). 

On the BoF live stage, Guadagnino, when explaining the reasoning behind his collaborator of choice he said: “costume designers, and I'm going to create enemies here, tend to think in terms of the garment, designers of fashion think in terms of the body who wears them, and that is a huge difference for me”.  This sparked some well-justified outrage by industry insiders, including, most importantly, legendary costume designers. Such as the likes of Jenny Beaven, who wrote, “I can only add and I am thankful he will never want to work with me!” under BoF’s Instagram post. Mitchell Travers added, “It’s so disappointing to see one artist put down an entire art form, for no real reason. Truly amazing to see him be so confidently wrong in public”. Other veterans in the business who commented include Arianne Phillips and Kate Hawley.  

There’s much to unpack about Guadagnino’s stance, but what screams out the most is how this is just another perpetual denigration of costume design as a respected art form and skill. This is made an even more pertinent issue when you consider that costume design is a largely women-dominated field. 83% female according to the Costume Designers Guild (CDG). Contrastingly, in fashion design, a majority of Creative Directors are notably white men. Former ex-CDG President, Salvador Perez, in an interview with refinery29 shared a largely held stereotype plaguing the costume design profession, “[The industry] thinking is, ‘Well, it’s just shopping, my wife can do that’”. Guadagnino has worked with traditional costume designers in the past, like Antonella Cannarozzi, who was Oscar-nominated for her work in his film I AM LOVE (2009). Yet the most puzzling fact of it all is that he actually worked with a costume designer for Challengers. Margaret Robbs who has been credited sparingly by sources as a primary assistant costume designer. Robbs herself commented on the BoF post, writing: “There was a costume designer raised hand emoji and a pretty great costume team on Challengers that did a large portion of the work… [we] have been left off of the press and conversation…we worked in tandem with JW”. Robbs even personally picked the iconic Tashi Donaldson (played by Zendaya), Chanel espadrilles. In her comment, she also mentioned how the team had to ‘fight’ to be included on the Challengers’ award nomination at this year’s CDG. 

Markets like the US and the UK introduced awards for Costume Designers at their respective highly-renowned film awards decades ago, but arguably still a little too late. The Oscars first in 1949, and the BAFTAs in 1964. The Dutch film and TV industry serves as an interesting case study for just how slow progress and recognition have been overall. Dutch Visual Culture lecturer and author Josette Wolthuis has commented on how her region has been much further behind than its US and UK counterparts. The first Gouden Kalf (Golden Calf) prize for Best Costume Design was awarded in 2020, at the 40th edition of the Netherlands Film Festival, the major film festival in the Netherlands. Before this, costume design was categorized under production design. The award went to seasoned costume designer Alette Kraan for her costume design in Mi Vida (2019). In Wolthuis’s in-depth interviews with local costume designers incorporated into her research article published last year on this issue, she noted how all interviewees referred to their profession as ‘ondergeschoven kindje’, meaning neglected child. A Dutch expression for something which should be deemed important and yet is uncared-for. 

Costume designer, writer and consultant for pay equity in the arts and theatrical industries, Elsa Hiltner pertinently stated: “costume design as a whole is the area of design most impacted by institutionalized sexism”. This inequity is largely a result of a century of gendered considerations around who has historically made clothing. We see this in the global textile industry, where in the pre-industrial household economy, the tradition of textile production, especially spinning, was seen as ‘women’s work’ as during this time women made garments in the home whilst men were the paid garment workers (holding esteemed positions such as patternmakers and tailors). Then, a little later, before advanced mechanization and the increase of synthetic textile production, the textile industry was seen as light and suitable for the ‘nimble hands’ of women workers. However, during the creation of modern garment factories in the nineteenth century, it was no longer necessarily about nimble hands but about corporations wanting to survive in the sea of competition that mass globalization brought on. Women workers were considered across time by textile producers as a cheaper and amenable option, which, as Hunter and McNaughton examined, were “more readily available as an expendable and/or untapped labour pool”. 

Even now, within the fast fashion supply chain (which has increasingly become more flexible and demand-driven), author Barrientos contends women are still seen as the “worker of choice” as they are deemed to be “more accepting than men with regard to the poorer employment conditions linked to flexible employment”. With this history in mind, Hiltner, in an influential blogpost on Howlround in 2016, calling for equal support in theatrical design, wrote, “more than a hundred years later, the labor of garment work is still effectively women’s work and is incorrectly considered, much like modern agricultural labor, to be unskilled, disposable, and worth minimal compensation”. 

Equal Rights Advocates (ERA), when analyzing pay scale rates for costume designers, found that they were 30-65% lower than other creative department heads, a majority being men. In July, ERA in support of the CDG’s Pay Equity Campaign, Pay Equity Now/#NakedWithoutUs, announced winning a wage increase of over 40% for Hollywood costume designers. Raising their pay rate to match that of their colleagues. An enormous win after CDG’s decades-long fight for pay equity, yet Guadagino’s words indicated how much work is left to be done in unravelling long-held perceptions of costume design, both the business and the art of it all.