At Louis Vuitton, Nicolas Ghesquière explored this shift through contrast, pairing fluid silks with sharply tailored jackets and shirts featuring isocoles pointed collars. The result was a reinterpretation of feminine tailoring that balanced strength with elegance, moving beyond overt masculine reference.
Where early tailoring for women relied on sharpness as a kind of armour, Louise Trotter’s debut at Bottega Veneta suggested something more assured. Her oversized silhouettes, exaggerated shoulders and baggy high-waisted trousers signalled personal style ownership: tailoring designed not to compete with men, but to exist independently of them.
As these runways signal a renewed appetite for women’s tailoring, a new generation of female-led businesses is rising. From Sylvia Lea’s chic, separate-ready designs to Liberty Joy Archive’s curated vintage tailoring, and the groundbreaking Gormley and Gamble on Savile Row, these 3 businesses reclaim the suit not as borrowed menswear, but as something crafted, led, and traded by women, for women.
Sylvia Lea
Trust a Taylor for your tailoring, Madison Taylor to be exact. She is the founder and designer behind Sylvia Lea, a women’s separates-led tailoring brand built around dressing that moves seamlessly from “meetings to martinis.” A London College of Fashion graduate of 2023, the concept for Sylvia Lea predated her degree, emerging during a brief flirtation with a very different career path.
“I shadowed barristers in court and applied to every university to study law,” she says. “But the biggest thing I took from it — and I can never say this to them because they’d be so offended — was how cool their suits were.” One woman in particular left a lasting impression: “She rocked up to court in a Dolce & Gabbana suit with Louboutin heels.”
Realising her attention was firmly on the clothes rather than the career itself, Taylor pivoted towards fashion, initially studying fashion journalism. Without a background in tailoring, she worked with a design team who steered her away from suits altogether. For a year, Sylvia Lea focused on knit dresses, but the pull of tailoring never left her.
That instinct materialised in Sylvia Lea’s debut Gentlewoman collection, a five-piece offering designed around modular tailoring. Each piece is intended to be mixed and matched within the collection and styled beyond office hours. A crisp white shirt with extended sleeve detailing anchors the range, alongside wide-leg tailored trousers, button-up corset tops and a demi-waistcoat designed for layering with shirting.
Tailoring also dictates the brand’s production model. “I’ve seen the mass amounts that you can end up stocking and stockpiling,” Taylor explains, which is why Sylvia Lea carries just ten units of each piece at a time. With family businesses rooted in waste management, she is acutely aware of fashion’s environmental impact. All fabrics are sourced and garments made in London, with plans to move to a pre-order model for future collections.
A permanent store isn’t entirely off the table, but for now, Taylor is focused on pop-ups, following the success of a recent one in Paris. Next up is a new collection, set to introduce a military-style jacket designed to complete the Sylvia Lea tailoring proposition.
Liberty Joy Archive Liberty Joy takes sustainability one step further with a shop and rental archive dedicated exclusively to the very best in vintage tailoring. Nestled in the heart of Cecil Court, Liberty Joy Archive’s bright orange exterior glows from the street. Inside, soft jazz plays and outward-facing pegs display a tightly edited collection of vintage suits, from Jean Paul Gaultier and Yves Saint Laurent to lesser-known or unbranded pieces chosen purely on quality. “I put the pegs up here specifically so that the clothes can be viewed as art,” Joy explains.
Another LCF graduate, Joy, began developing her archive while still at university. Long enamoured with Cecil Court, she opened the space shortly after graduating. “It wasn’t ever something I was going to immediately start,” she says. “I just ended up opening a few months after I graduated, purely because of the space.”
A collector since a young age and reseller for years, the archive felt like a natural evolution. Raised by antique-dealing parents, Joy developed an early eye for quality, with tailoring quickly becoming her focus. The idea stemmed from frustration with London’s increasingly commercial vintage scene. “You don’t really have that ultimate luxury of beautiful vintage, archive, collectable pieces,” she says, “or if you do, it’s completely closed off to the public.”
Tailoring and her shop are for everyone: “Anyone can come and look. Anyone can rent the pieces, anyone can enjoy them,” Joy says. And although Joy has suited the likes of Keira Knightley in her shop, accessibility sits at the heart of Liberty Joy Archive.
But more than anything, it is tailoring that lies at the epicentre of the archive and of Joy’s own fascination. Like the chicken and the egg, she can’t recall which came first: the tie or the suit. What she does know is that few garments rival a suit for versatility. “You can wear a suit consistently, and it always looks different every time,” she says, a quality she believes explains tailoring’s enduring appeal.
While the archive includes designer names, brand recognition is rarely the deciding factor. For Joy, it is “not even necessarily about the designer,” but about “the shape and the silhouette of the piece, the way it hangs on the body.” Not caring whether it is originally a male or female suit, it is the fabric and construction that play an equally vital role, she adds, noting that “beautiful fabrics and the way things are made” are qualities that are increasingly rare, yet central to what makes vintage tailoring worth preserving.
Gormley and Gamble ‘Behind every great man is a woman’, epitomises London’s Savile Row. While often synonymous with menswear, the history of London’s tailoring district was actually named after a woman: Lady Dorothy Savile. She is the one who brought the tailors, but Womenswear only tailors wasn’t established until Gormely and Gamble, the first female-only tailors in Savile Row’s over 200-year history.
Founded by Phoebe Gormley and now run by an all-female team, Gormley & Gamble occupies a singular position within one of fashion’s most traditionally male spaces. “Women have long been underserved by traditional tailoring systems, which adapt male patterns rather than designing from the female body outward,” says Rosie Holden, head of the atelier. Establishing the brand on Savile Row, she explains, sharpened that focus from the outset. Their work is grounded in the discipline and heritage of bespoke tailoring, but deliberately reframed. “Our approach is rooted in the rigour and craft of Savile Row,” Holden says, “but reimagined entirely through the lens of women’s bodies, lives and identities.”
The atelier remains committed to traditional bespoke methods: hand-cut patterns, multiple fittings, garments designed to last a lifetime, but modernised for the realities of a modern woman's lifestyle, offering Zoom fittings when not able to attend their design studio. Their clients aren’t seeking a costume of nostalgia but contemporary designs that focus on “quiet authority”: “Women are embracing tailoring as a form of self-expression rather than uniform.” Holden says.
They are finding women are commissioning suits for all aspects of their lives, not just work. This shift reflects the transitional period female tailoring is having. Once potentially acting as an armour for women in the workplace, the new age of female tailoring is in self-expression. A well-made suit can offer confidence, longevity, and comfort, qualities resonating with a modern female suit wearer.
Their all-female-led atelier functions upon listening to the client's needs, focusing on what she feels, not how she looks. As the future of women’s tailoring unfolds, the direction feels clear. “It’s less about rules,” Holden says, “and more about choice.”