Oscar nominations by gender - Costume

There have long been quiet but persistent complaints of discrimination against women fashion designers in the NY-Paris-Milan world of haute couture. This 2005 NYT article lays out the evidence than an Old Boys Club of male designers discriminates against women. 

We can test whether women are as discriminated against in the parallel but separate world of designing clothes for movies by looking at Wikipedia's lists of Oscar nominees. Best Costume Design nominations generally go for work on period films or fantasy films aimed at girls. For example, the current nominees are three 19th Century period films -- Lincoln, Anna Karenina, and Les Miserables versus two versions of Snow White: Mirror, Mirror (a film with a wild Eurasian aesthetic, centered on the Punjab) and Snow White and the Huntsman.

So, Costume Design Nominations aren't an apples-to-apples direct test of the sense of where fashion is headed next fall, like haute couture designers attempt to do. Instead, Hollywood honorees are designed for accurate and exquisite reproductions of past fashions, usually with some attempt to make them accessible to current tastes. Either that or some kind of timeless fairy tale fantasy.

Thus, Hollywood's top costume designers are conservative restorationists or fantasists, rather than on the fashion forward cutting edge like the Old Boys Club of New York design. And, to be a name in high fashion requires relentless self-promotion.

Still, these Oscar nominations allow a sort of oranges and tangerines comparison.

The Best Costume Design award was invented in 1948, and Edith Head quickly emerged as the most honored designer, garnering 35 nominations and 8 Oscars. (The character Edna Mode in Pixar's The Incredibles reminds many of Edith Head.) Before Head's rise to dominance in the later 1940s, the most famous Hollywood designers tended to be male, such as Adrian, who designed Dorothy's ruby red slippers. "Gowns by Adrian" was a prominent credit in many 1930s movies. Wikipedia explains that Head revolutionized movie dress design by actually listening to the leading ladies.

Head was known for her low-key working style and, unlike many of her male contemporaries, usually consulted extensively with the female stars with whom she worked. As a result she was a favorite among many of the leading female stars of the 1940s and '50s such as Ginger Rogers, Bette Davis, Sophia Loren, Barbara Stanwyck, Shirley MacLaine, Anne Baxter, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and Natalie Wood. In fact, Head was frequently "loaned out" by Paramount to other studios at the request of their female stars.

Over the last ten years, women have earned 80% of nominations.

So, designing clothes for Hollywood is much less male-dominated than designing clothes for the runway.