PARIS, March 9, 2007 (AFP) - Female fashion designers should naturally have a headstart on their male counterparts, armed with the advantage of insider knowledge of feminine curves and a woman's sartorial demands. After all, they have to wear the clothes too.

However, when it comes to glamour, men often seem to be showing the women how it's done.

Fashion industry professionals say women approach designing clothes for their own sex differently to male designers, both in terms of the clothes' aesthetics and purpose.

"There's a fundamental difference in the way they make the structure of their clothes. They can understand what will work," said Godfrey Deeny, senior critic and European editor for Fashion Wire Daily.

He said that in general, women designers such as Jil Sander, Miuccia Prada and Donna Karan rarely imposed rigid structures that would make clothes feel uncomfortable, and also brought a more feminine touch.

"You really don't get many warrior women on the runway," he added.

Practical, even mundane demands on fashionable women's clothing such as everyday comfort and the need for to be functional as well as feminine, may be a factor in the different approaches of male and female designers.

"Men don't, or not many men, bend down to fill washing machines, vacuum, clamber on to the tube with a baby and a buggy," said Hilary Alexander, fashion director of The Daily Telegraph

"Men don't do those kind of things so they don't understand when clothes don't work."

At Guy Laroche, 39 year-old designer Damian Yee said the fact that male designers did not wear the clothes could create a certain detachment but that was "not so bad," he said

But what about glamour? On that score, the male designers have it, according to Alexander.

Deeny agreed. "I think curiously the men designers understand glamour better," he said, adding that they generally knew how to create styles for women that men found sexy.

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