© David Burton Last year, by some freak mishap of scheduling, International Women’s Day coincided with the publication of our spring menswear special. Readers, you were not impressed. This year we’ve decided to make a virtue of the refreshed calendar alignment to celebrate women’s work. Women have been emancipated in most countries for many decades, but misogyny and abuses still prevail. Gisèle Pelicot has become a feminist icon for her long fight to bring her rapists to justice, now described in unflinching detail in her memoir A Hymn to Life. Her strength and dignity are an inspiration. But if the continued exhumation of the Epstein files has taught us anything, it is that women are too often still regarded as sex objects to be toyed with by the elite. HTSI is not a campaigning publication but in this issue we wanted to champion the female voice. If a thread of continuity runs through this week’s features it is a woman’s point of view. 
© David Burton The fashion industry is one of many in which female creative executives are few: it is estimated that female designers occupy a mere 14 per cent of senior roles. Sarah Burton is one of only four female creative directors at fashion houses in the luxury conglomerate LVMH (although, in fairness, its numbers are better than Kering’s, at which there is only one). Burton has earned a stellar reputation for clothes that are kind and generous without compromising on innovation or sensuality. I interviewed her at her home in St John’s Wood, London, in the run-up to her AW26 show. I’ve followed Burton’s career for decades, first at Alexander McQueen, which hired her after she graduated from Central Saint Martins, and now at Givenchy, where she has been working since 2024. And, loath though I am to say the standard thing, I found her charming, funny, a champion of other women and refreshingly unspoilt. Her work at Givenchy is an opportunity to carve her signature anew. Moreover, at 51, she is proof positive in an ageist world that opportunities and alternative career paths can arise at any time. I’m a huge fan of what she’s doing and I hope that you are too. 
© Olimpia Taliani de Marchio Among the most striking garments I saw on the SS26 runways were a series of aprons at Miu Miu. The looks in question were either highly decorative or functional – Mrs Prada described them as a celebration of female labour, whether in the industrial or domestic space. 
I love an apron: some of my earliest memories are of my mother in a range of different versions doing jobs around the house. She wore them as I do, as part of an unofficial uniform that formalises work we do in the domestic sphere. I cannot contemplate a kitchen chore without tying up my brown cotton duck fabric bib apron from Labour and Wait. It’s empowering: it says, this job may be mucky, but I’m all in to get it done. Plus it protects my cashmere from getting ruined. Nevertheless, Miu Miu’s apron provoked an interesting conversation about whether this vaunted stage was the right setting in which to show clothes associated with menial work. Ellie Pithers has explored the subject further in a fascinating feature about feminism and its ties to the apron’s strings. Sylvia Plath’s ‘daffodil days’ in Devon | | | | 
© Siv Arb/Writer Pictures Sylvia Plath is condemned to be remembered for her tragic suicide. Scholarly debate rages about the circumstances that reduced her to such a desperate mental state, but there is inevitably a habit to couch all of her achievements in a miasma of misery. Our HTSI colleague Helen Bain has been studying Plath’s work, life and relationships for four years as the subject of her PhD. Now she has brought that knowledge to light in a fictionalised account of Plath’s time in Devon in the months before her death. Her novel, The Daffodil Days, is an attempt to redress the assumption that the writer and poet’s fate was forever writ so large. We join Helen on a pilgrimage to North Tawton to follow in Plath’s footsteps and discover “the vast joy she took in the world”. |
