Circle: Inside The Private Women’s Network

Founded by Alise Trautmane-Uzuner and Kathrin Lausch, Circle brings together women across culture, business, investment and philanthropy. During Haute Couture Fashion Week in Paris, I discovered why the room matters as much as the guest list.

During Haute Couture Fashion Week in Paris, Circle invited me to one of its intimate gatherings. The name sounds slightly secret society, and I admit I half expected passwords, ceremonial robes and perhaps a beautifully dressed woman guarding a hidden door. The reality is far less sinister, although it is definitely exclusive.

Circle brings together established women from across finance, entrepreneurship, the arts, luxury and social impact. Yet both founders are quick to point out that this is not another networking club filled with women exchanging business cards and calculating who might be useful later.

“What CIRCLE is not: it is not a networking room or a business-card exchange,” Kathrin tells me. “Our women are already established and, on paper, already ‘there’.” What connects them instead, she says, is “curiosity and generosity.”

That distinction became obvious almost immediately.

The End Of Awkward Networking

There were a little more than a dozen women at our Paris gathering, eating ice cream, drinking cocktails and talking about their work, interests and ambitions. Normally, a room full of strangers and the instruction to mingle can produce the social equivalent of airport turbulence. Everyone knows the scene: you arrive alone, established groups have already formed, and suddenly your cocktail glass becomes your closest friend.

Circle felt completely different because the founders carefully designed the introductions before we even began talking. They introduced each woman to the room not simply by name or profession, but by highlighting her interests, accomplishments and the details that might spark another woman’s curiosity.

Kathrin says this is entirely intentional. “We personally introduce every woman before the conversation opens, because nothing kills intimacy faster than the anxiety of not knowing who everyone is,” she explains. “Openness at that level is designed, not left to chance.”

Alise describes those introductions even more precisely: “Introductions are not an icebreaker. They are the architecture of the evening.” Once women understand the experience and intelligence sitting around the table, she says, “the conversation immediately becomes more meaningful.”

Experiencing Circle

As Editor-in-Chief of IRK Magazine, I met women who had dreamed of working in publishing and wanted to contribute to the magazine. Then I met a woman working with private jets. I have wanted to photograph an IRK fashion story aboard a private jet for years. We might never have approached each other at an ordinary cocktail party, yet suddenly we had something very specific to discuss.

That is not accidental. Circle actively curates for those unexpected intersections. “The connections you can predict, you can arrange yourself,” Kathrin says. What interests her is “the woman from an entirely different world who changes your thinking, your business, or your life.” As she puts it, “CIRCLE exists to manufacture serendipity.”

When Success Becomes Isolating

The idea for Circle emerged from something Kathrin found surprising: many of the most connected women she knew were also strangely isolated.

“The women I most admired, running companies, principals of family offices, cultural figures, were extraordinarily connected on paper and quietly alone in practice,” she says. “Thousands of contacts, and almost no rooms where they could simply be themselves, without being pitched, managed, or performed for.”

Her conclusion is simple: “Access is not the same as belonging.” In fact, she argues that success can make the problem worse. “The higher you go, the fewer true peers you have left.”

That is why Circle focuses not only on bringing powerful women together, but also on creating the right chemistry between them.Its members might be building companies, investing capital, exploring philanthropy, raising families or deciding what their next chapter should look like. That difference is essential.

“If everyone is at the same stage, you get a mirror, not a conversation,” Kathrin says. “The founder in build mode, the investor deploying capital, the woman reconsidering her next chapter — each sees something the others cannot.”

Alise agrees. “We don’t curate around demographics; we curate around curiosity.” Different women may arrive at the same conversation as investors, collectors, entrepreneurs or simply people who want to understand something new. “Some women leave with new knowledge. Others leave having opened a door for someone else. Ideally, both happen at the same table.”

Support That Goes Beyond Applause

Women are frequently encouraged to support other women, but the phrase can become so vague that it loses meaning. Circle is interested in what happens when support becomes practical.

“It becomes introductions, investment, board seats, collaborations,” Kathrin says. Yet she also believes the less visible gestures matter: “A woman being taken seriously, told the truth, championed when she is not in the room.”

Then comes one of the strongest lines from our conversation: “Support that stays vague is just applause.”

For Kathrin, meaningful support should eventually show up somewhere tangible. “We try to build the kind that shows up in a calendar invitation and a wire transfer, not only in a compliment.”

The results can be surprisingly concrete. Without revealing members’ identities, she tells me Circle has seen a film receive the final funding it needed, art collections purchased, an emerging female artist introduced to a wider international audience and women who first met over dinner go on to host gatherings of their own. She also points to connections around fem-tech, women’s health and new investment projects.

Money Is Part Of The Conversation

What I also found refreshing is that Circle does not pretend money and power are somehow vulgar subjects that sophisticated women should politely avoid.

“Women are subtly taught to be modest about money, to downplay ownership, to talk around power,” Kathrin says. Inside Circle, capital is simply treated as another legitimate subject. “When a woman hears her peers speak plainly about a raise, a cap table, or a family office allocation, it gives her permission to do the same.”

Her rule is excellent: “Discretion, always; euphemism, never.”

Alise sees that conversation as having consequences far beyond individual wealth. “Capital shapes the future,” she says. As more women become investors, they bring their own experiences and priorities to decisions about where money flows. “Every investment is, in some sense, a vote for the future we choose to build.”

Circle also deliberately blurs the old boundary between philanthropy and investment. Kathrin describes them as “one continuum of influence, capital deployed toward impact in different forms.” A woman might support a philanthropic cause and invest in a commercial founder within the same year without seeing any contradiction between the two.

Pomellato, Paris And The Power Of Place

Our gathering eventually moved to the Palais de Tokyo, where Pomellato hosted us for a private viewing of Pomellato: The Revolutionary Jeweler. It was a fitting collaboration for a group centred on female independence, culture and changing definitions of power.

“Pomellato tells the same story we do,” Kathrin says. She points to the Italian house’s history of jewellery designed around female independence and self-expression rather than waiting for a man to provide the diamonds. “Gathering our women around a maison that celebrates self-possession rather than status felt less like a sponsorship and more like a shared language.”

For Alise, the exhibition also gave the group something richer than a commercial brand experience. “Circle has always believed that culture creates better conversations than commerce alone,” she explains. The exhibition opened discussions around “creativity, collecting, entrepreneurship, legacy, and how women increasingly define luxury on their own terms.”

Place is central to the Circle’s philosophy. Its gatherings take place in galleries, museums, private homes and other spaces that already give guests something to respond to.

“Because the room writes the first line of the conversation,” Kathrin explains. “Beauty and culture disarm people. When women are surrounded by something worth talking about, the posturing falls away and real curiosity takes its place.”

Alise is perhaps even more practical. “Experiences compete with our living rooms,” she says. “If someone is going to leave her family, her work, and a perfectly comfortable evening at home, the experience has to justify the journey.”

She has little patience for “corporate conferences, fluorescent lighting, generic hotel ballrooms, and forgettable catering.” Neither, frankly, do I.

Women Building Their Own Rooms

Behind the cocktails, exhibitions and remarkable locations, Circle makes a larger argument about how women create and exercise influence.

For generations, men have understood that relationships built outside the boardroom can determine what eventually happens inside it. The golf club, the private dinner, the members’ club or the sporting weekend have all functioned as informal infrastructures of power.

Kathrin believes women have spent too long trying to earn invitations into structures created by somebody else. “Women were expected to earn their way into rooms someone else owned,” she says. “What is changing is that women are done waiting to be invited. We are building our own rooms, setting our own terms, and deciding who belongs.”

Alise reached a similar conclusion through her work with independent designers at DOORS NYC. “Talent is rarely the scarce resource. Access is,” she says. She repeatedly saw brilliant founders struggle not because their ideas were weak, but because they lacked the right buyer, investor, collector, media contact or strategic partner.

“Circle is, in many ways, an answer to that observation,” she explains. “We cannot manufacture talent, but we can shorten the distance between exceptional people who ought to know one another.”

And then the line that perhaps sums up the entire project: “Most breakthroughs happen through trusted introductions, not cold outreach.”

A New Definition Of Luxury

Circle also challenges traditional ideas of luxury. For decades, people defined luxury through possession and access: owning the rare object, entering the private room and getting behind the velvet rope.

Kathrin believes that definition is changing, especially for women who can already buy almost anything they want. “The old codes were access, status, possession,” she says. “The new luxury is access to trusted people, to conversations you cannot buy your way into, to time and attention that are genuinely scarce.”

“For women who can purchase anything, the rarest thing left is a real room full of real peers.”

Perhaps that is why Circle worked so well in Paris. It was exclusive, certainly, but it did not feel like a room constructed simply to remind everyone else that they were outside it. Instead, the exclusivity protected something: privacy, openness and enough intimacy for women to actually talk to one another.

Circle Expands

As Circle expands internationally, the founders want to preserve precisely that scale. New York, Paris and other cities are part of the plan, alongside future gatherings in Venice, Istanbul, Milan, Abu Dhabi and Marrakech. But Kathrin has no ambition to turn these salons into enormous conferences.

“By scaling the number of rooms, never the size of the room,” she explains. “Growth means more tables, not bigger ones.”

That may ultimately be what makes Circle interesting. It is not trying to put thousands of women into one network and call that connection. It is trying to create carefully chosen rooms where women arrive already knowing enough about one another to be curious, then giving them the time and privacy to see what happens.

Kathrin jokingly describes it as “Freemasons for women,” where intelligence, education, influence and affluence can come together to create change.

Having experienced it, I understand what she means. Thankfully, I saw no secret handshakes, just cocktails, ice cream, Pomellato and a room full of women who had something to say to one another.

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