July 7, 2012 |
Haute couture. What’s that all about then? A fancy French term for faffing about with acres of tulle, a man in Von Stroheim jodhpurs and a monocle shouting out almost-nonsensical words like “astrakhan” and “martingale” and “travette” whilst thrashing a seamstress with a length of duchesse satin? Well, sometimes, yes.
But it’s about much more than that. Couture is another world, one with a different language of clothes – with a different currency, too (roughly one couture pound equals 100 pounds sterling. Tough exchange rate). It isn’t about expense, though, it’s about expertise. Haute couture is fashion’s Formula One – clothing made by some of the most skilled hands in the world for individual clients, the crystallisation of the finest of fashion designers’ fantasies.
If there’s anyone qualified to talk about haute couture, it’s Lady Amanda Harlech. She’s an insider, in every sense of the word. She works inside the house of Chanel (the essential, aristocratic right-hand woman to Karl Lagerfeld and all that) and also gets inside haute couture quite a lot herself – she gets at least one piece of Chanel couture a season, custom made to her measurements. “Couture has a power that ready-to-wear can never have, because the intention of les petites mains as they sew – all that love and belief – goes into the cloth. That’s what you feel when you wear it,” states Harlech, grandly. Then she goes and ruins all that arch hauteur by crying out, “Ain’t no joke!” “This is not about rich people putting on something so that they can look better than everybody else,” says Daphne Guinness, a staunch champion of haute couture, who puts her money where her mouth is, buying pieces since her wedding in 1987 (her civil and religious wedding outfits came from the ateliers of Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel and Marc Bohan for Dior, respectively). “It’s the living soul of dressmaking, of clothes.”
Let’s get down to basics and see what the fuss is about: haute couture translates as high sewing or needlework. It is entirely made by hand, made to order and made in Paris. And it’s the way things always used to be done. It was the Englishman Charles Frederick Worth who elevated mere dressmaking to haute couture, establishing his house in 1858 and immediately issuing decrees of what fashionable women must wear. He’s where the image of couturier as aesthetic dictator comes from, affecting a beret and artist’s smock and making sweeping statements along the lines of, “I have Delacroix’s sense of colour and I compose. A toilette is as good as a painting.” Modest.
He may have alluded to art, but Worth’s real achievement was in transforming his name into a status symbol – almost all the stereotypes of couture that persist today originate from Worth, from the designer label, to the fashion show, to the snobbery of a designer who would turn away unsuitable customers at the door (granted, not so much of that around any more, post credit crunch). More tangible a legacy is the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, the regulating body of French fashion – although founded by another Worth, Charles’ son Gaston.
But what does the Chambre Syndicale actually do? In layman’s terms, they say who is in the couture club and who is out. Originally founded by Monsieur Gaston back in 1868, the Chambre’s power was hiked up in the 1940s by the likes of Dior and Balenciaga (the originals, Christian and Cristobal, I mean) to protect couture from the endemic copying. Back then, couture was<itals> fashion. High-fashion ready-to-wear – or, as the couturière Elsa Schiaparelli clumsily dubbed it, “ready to be taken away immediately” – only existed as sweaters and scarves, hawked in a boutique adjacent to the hallowed salons to the plebs who couldn’t afford true haute couture. Couture was a multimillion-pound, -dollar and -franc business, and hence was worth protecting. It’s difficult to imagine, in an age of rampant, straight-to-Primarni rip-offery, that the Chambre Syndicale could – and would – send dressmakers to prison for copying a couture frock. No one was allowed a pencil, much less a camera, during a couture show (of which, incidentally, there were at least 22 per season, per house). Contrast that with today’s digital couture, where a thousand flashbulbs pop with white-hot intensity, beaming each look around the globe in a matter of seconds to be raped and pillaged by mass manufacture.
“You can’t just suddenly start up a couture house in Paris, you’ve got to pass the Syndicale,” says Guinness. “There are no slouchers – the French aren’t easy!” She’s right: the name haute couturier isn’t a right, it’s a privilege handed out by the Chambre Syndicale. However, if haute couture’s rules used to be draconian and absolute, today they are more pliant. A few remain set in stone: haute couture must be entirely made by hand, and be presented twice a year to clients and press during January and July. That’s about it. The rules used to govern how many outfits houses needed to show per season to meet the grade, alongside specifying numbers of ateliers and full-time employees, even down to the division of labour between tailleur (tailoring) and flou (translating as “soft” and defined as anything from blouses to floaty frock-ettes and massive ball gowns). In theory, those rules still stand – 20 technical employees and 25 outfits, at last count, although the subject is clouded by les membres correspondants<itals>, the term for couturiers not based in Paris: the Rome- and Milan-based houses of Valentino and Armani, for example. And, for the past two years, Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy has shown a dozen or so intricately worked outfits via static presentation. Beautiful, yes, but do they a collection make? Not by “official” couture standards.
So, couture used to be high fashion incarnate. It used to ring in the changes – Dior’s scandalously fluctuating skirt lengths, Chanel’s rebellious little black dress, Yves Saint Laurent’s revolutionary leather jackets. Couture also used to cater to about 20,000 wealthy women worldwide, the true leaders of international style. Today the number is in the mere hundreds. “There are between 60 and 80, but the number has actually been growing,” says Jean-Paul Gaultier of his clients, a rare matter-of-fact declaration in a world shrouded in secrecy. Most couture houses avoid the question of client numbers just as any enquiries about price are met with either rolled eyes or a sharp rapprochement and swift boittine-ing out on to the Rue de la Hoity-toit.
Ah, les prix. Seldom fixed in the world of haute couture, often rocketing sky high – and even higher when you reason that couture requires not just cash-flashing, but that most precious of modern commodities: time. The time for fittings, lots of fittings, three or four as standard, all in Paris, of course. “You have to engage and you have to make a commitment,” says Guinness. “You’ve got to put in some work.” So the price climbs. And, to borrow again from Schiap, these garments aren’t “ready to be taken away immediately”. They require hundreds or even thousands of hours of highly concentrated labour – “It takes two people two weeks to make one suit by hand,” confirmed Harlech of the couture workload at Chanel. It’s the antithesis of the fast fashion of today. To those addicted to the instant gratification of contemporary fashion, that sounds like torture. Why buy into that?
“It’s the impossibility!” declares Harlech, sounding, for a moment, like a contemporary Worth, expounding the superiority of haute couture. “What looks like shining cloth is just minute, tiny<itals>, black beads, sewn like grosgrain, in little ridges. Unimaginable!” That is the pull for the couturiers, too. “Couture provides an opportunity to create something that is a one of a kind,” say Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli of Valentino. “Hours of expert craftsmanship… The difference between ready-to-wear and the dream of a couture piece.” “Couture is my laboratory for ideas,” states Gaultier. “I have more freedom, as I can experiment with cuts, with draping, with embroideries… ” “It is not ‘more’ but a ‘different sort of’ freedom,” reasons Bill Gaytten, the current creative director at the house of Christian Dior. “Couture works in a more artisanal way, the collection evolves through the fittings and the different skills of the ateliers. There is more time and work put into each piece as there is a greater focus on attention to detail and craftsmanship with haute couture.”
Detail, craftsmanship and dreams. It’s what fashion sells itself as, constantly. But only in haute couture can fashion really achieve a dream-like quality, the clothes tradition-steeped textile talismans of a brighter, better past, the presentations walking dreams. Example: for spring, both Riccardo Tisci’s Givenchy and Gaytten and the Dior ateliers “re-appliquéd crocodile scales” – slicing out the hide and painstakingly re-assembling it onto chiffon or tulle. Because plain old crocodile just isn’t luxurious enough.
No expense is ever spared: for January’s couture shows, Chanel recreated a jet plane and showed haute air hostess outfits in every shade of blue; Valentino offered a 21st-century take on Marie Antoinette’s idyllic, Rousseau-ean rustic hideaway, complete with panniers and hand-painted toile de jouy taffeta; Gaultier frocked up his models as Amy Winehouse clones (that was more of a nightmare than a dream to some eyes). It’s a grown-up game of dress-up, with six-figure price tags. Chanel is one of the few houses with an haute couture division that actually makes a profit, an unheard word in this loss-leading legacy. But when it boils down to it, the £50,000 one-off is intended not to sell, but to shift its many £5,000 prêt-a-porter shadows. Or, even greater, its £50 essence, evaporating rapidly in a cloud of eau de toilette. And that’s the reality of the couture dream factory: despite all those hours and all that effort, it’s not really about the clothes.
Photographer: Jason Lloyd-Evans- www.lloyd-evans.com
by Alexander Fury
