VICTORIA BECKHAM
Victoria Beckham—above, taking a quick runway turn in 2018, and above left at her London home—is the rare celebrity designer whose second act has utterly eclipsed her first. Launched in 2008, Beckham’s eponymous ready-to-wear collection has evolved alongside her, from the body-con “results” dresses of its early days to a spring 2024 show with everything from knit leotards and jersey dresses inspired by her youthful dance training to the kind of outdoor jackets and brogues she wears with her family at their English countryside retreat. (If you saw the wildly popular Netflix documentary about her husband’s storied life and football career, you likely caught glimpses of it.) “This is a very personal collection,” she said backstage at that show, but her philosophy hasn’t changed since her Spice Girls days. As she once told Vogue: “What we did was celebrate being different. We showed it was okay to be who you are. And that’s what this is about—empowering women through fashion.”—Nicole Phelps
REI KAWAKUBO, COMME DES GARÇONS
When Comme des Garçons’ Rei Kawakubo burst upon the scene in 1981, the fashion world had never witnessed anything like it. Her clothes didn’t depend on darts and seams, and employed fabrics—rumpled and frayed, some glowing with the sheen of cheap polyester—entirely new to the Paris runway. And they were almost always black. Perhaps more than any other woman designer, she has radically rethought assumptions about femininity and upended conventional ideas of ‘sexiness’. If we now accept
