Why Couture Matters: Everything You Need to Know About Fashion’s Finest Season
A medley of haute couture looks from the Paris collections. Photos: Getty Images
Dedicated followers of fashion await the last week of January and early July with bated breath. That’s when a small handful of designers unveil their most intricate, most fantastic, and most elaborate works at the haute couture shows in Paris.
In order to participate, you have to be invited to join the governing body, the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture. It sets up different levels of membership, and the roster is not always set in stone. On the top level are the permanent members, including Chanel, Christian Dior, Stéphane Rolland, Givenchy, Bouchra Jarrar, and a handful of others. To earn this designation, the brands have to operate a Paris workshop with at least 15 full-time employees dedicated only to handmade, made-to-measure clothes and present twice-yearly collections of at least 50 designs. There are also associate members from overseas, such as Atelier Versace, Valentino and Armani Privé. Finally, there are those invited to show season by season, that have to follow the base rules — design entirely handmade custom clothes for private clients with at least one fitting (although three is usually the minimum) — but who do not get to officially label their wares “haute couture.” Alongside all of the big designers’ own dedicated workshops, there is a string of independent ones in and around Paris that produce the lion’s share of haute couture beading, embroidering and ruching. Many of these shops are over 100 years old; they include Maison Lemarié for featherwork, Lesage for embroidery, and Massaro for shoes. This specialized labor is the reason a typical haute couture piece can cost $20,000 and why some cost 10 times that. In this era of factory-made everything, haute couture is special.
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Such stringent requirements and a longstanding tradition and work-of-art-level prices seem to fly in the face of modern fashion, which is fast, cheap, and industrially produced. (Even high-ticket ready-to-wear fashions are mostly machine-made.) And for a time, starting with the rise of fast fashion in the 1990s, many wondered if Haute Couture would die out entirely. The number of designers showing dwindled from over 100 in the 1940s to just the teens in the ’90s. And modern lifestyles have changed. “I hate to say this,” says Becca Cason Thrash, the Houston-based philanthropist and socialite, “but unless you’re a celebrity walking the red carpet, there is rarely an opportunity to wear haute couture.” (Unlike ready-to-wear, haute couture collections are largely driven by eveningwear; only 20 percent of Cason Thrash’s own archives of Jean-Paul Gaultier, Chanel and Giambattista Valli were designed to be worn during the day.) “Ready-to-wear has gotten so well-made and expensive,” she continues, “one would need to be a difficult size to justify” getting made-to-measure clothes. But despite a globally shaky economy, this tiny slice of the industry is thriving. As WWD reported, last year Chanel had a record-setting year of haute couture sales. Armani and Valentino reported strong numbers too.
From left to right: Couture looks from Giambattista Valli, Dior, and Maison Margiela. Photos: Getty Images
Why is couture thriving?
1) Couture cuts out the BS.
The rich are getting richer. It’s not a political slogan, it’s the economic truth, and it means the one percent has ever more cheddar to play with. Haute couture, for all its complicated workmanship, is an incredibly simple business, directed squarely at this elite group. Designers sell directly to the client, and production is finished just in time. There is no massive up-front investment in materials and work hours to produce millions of pieces. And most of the shows have a much smaller audience. “When I’ve covered couture,” said Robin Givhan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion critic of the Washington Post, who, like many journalists, is always at the main shows, but rarely at couture, “what’s fascinated me is how much smaller they are. So much of the audience are clients,” not press or bloggers or shop owners looking to fill large orders for multiple outlets. “It’s not about creating a frenzied marketing desire, it’s about selling single pieces to people who have the means to buy them.” Period.
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2) Couture is no longer just for old European ladies.
Two new things are fueling haute couture’s skyrocketing sales in the past few years: The client base is now totally global, and it’s a lot younger than it used to be. New customers from Asia, particularly China, have made for double-digit growth in recent years. This means a new source of hopefully lifelong clients. (Provided the Chinese government’s new crackdown on excessive spending among the power elite doesn’t go too far.) The workforce in the couture ateliers is also getting younger. You don’t need to be a vampire to know that new blood equals life.
From left to right: Rosamund Pike, Dakota Johnson, Julianna Margulies, Julianne Moore, and Emma Stone all wearing couture on the red carpet. Photos: Getty Images
3) It’s still important to designers.
When John Galliano made his debut as creative director at Maison Martin Margiela earlier this month, what was his first show? Couture. (Galliano’s decision to show in London was a nod to the city that gave him his start in fashion, but if he does it next season, he’ll endanger Maison Martin Margiela’s status as permanent member of the Chambre Syndicale.) When Raf Simons took over design duties at Christian Dior in 2012, his debut show was also couture. Giambattista Valli, a designer with a high-spending, high-society clientele, added couture to his business in 2011. On Wednesday, the French designer Alexandre Vauthier, known for sleek and sexy tailoring for stars such as Kate Bosworth and Vanessa Paradis, presents his first Haute Couture collection as an invited member. (We wish him the best of luck.) Jean-Paul Gaultier closed his ready-to-wear business last year, but he just can’t quit couture. And the same was true of Yves Saint Laurent in his final years of designing. He handed over the reigns to every other aspect of the business but kept doing one-of-a-kind pieces until he retired in 2002.
Why do designers love couture? See item 1. They only have to please themselves and a handful of willing buyers, not the international press and retailers the world over, with their conflicting agendas and spending habits and independent trend forecasts. As Delphine Manivet, who designs bridal and eveningwear for ladies like Lily Allen and Kristen Wiig and was invited to stage a couture show last season, puts it: “It’s wonderful to do exactly what you want and not make any compromises.”
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4) The red carpet is taking over the world
Ever since Giorgio Armani revolutionized Hollywood style in the ’80s by dressing Hollywood stars in actually tasteful and current fashion for the red carpet — it used to be a circus of exhibitionist eccentricity and home tailoring — designers have used the red carpet as a prime marketing event. And the success of that, combined with the rise of the Internet, has spawned more interest in fashion, which has spawned ever more red-carpet events, creating a kind of celebrity-fashion-industrial complex that threatens to occupy all of the world’s spare gawking time.
Not all the one-of-a-kind red-carpet looks commissioned directly for celebrities are haute couture — which, again, must be entirely hand-made. But more and more of them are. A recent, incredibly non-exhaustive count: At the Golden Globes, there was Dakota Johnson in Chanel Haute Couture, Julianne Moore in Givenchy Haute Couture (she chose a different gown, but the same arrangement, for the SAG Awards on Sunday), Rosamund Pike and Emma Stone in Dior Haute Couture, and Julianna Margulies in Giambattista Valli Haute Couture at the SAG Awards. As long as there are inventive designers, well-trained craftspeople, pretty ladies, and free-floating cash, there will be haute couture. On with the show.
