s pr I ng c ou tur e
No longer the moribund dowager of the fashion world, couture is once more bursting with life, says Avril Mair
If magic ever exists on a catwalk, it’s at haute couture. The power! The glory! The exquisite sets and extravagant looks! This is the ultimate expression of fashion creativity, where money and imagination collide in a few moments of infinite possibility. But, as everyone knows, it doesn’t sell. The clientele is ageing, and those glorious creations return to the house archive, their beauty wasted and unworn. Or so the story used to go. But no longer. Couture is having a renaissance, and suddenly, those dresses—for they are nearly always dresses—are selling like never before.
It is partly down to the new designers: Raf Simons at Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli at Valentino, Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy, Giambattista Valli, the 32-year-old Ulyana Sergeenko. But, it’s also down to the enthusiasm of a younger generation of buyers— glamorous, rich, and absolutely thrilled to be seen in the front row. Couture is suddenly fashion’s hottest ticket: Miroslava Duma, daughter of a Russian senator and former editor of Russia, posted an Instagram picture of her glamorous friends—among them, model Elena Perminova, wife of Alexander Lebedev, owner of The Independent, and the
London Evening Standard— preparing to board their private plane to Paris. It is no coincidence that Karl Lagerfeld was quoted after the Chanel show saying that the new clients think nothing of buying 35 couture outfits at a time. The major houses are famously and fabulously discreet when it comes to this sort of thing, of course, but just one dress can easily cost upwards of € 70,000. You do the maths on that.
What these women are buying, however, is beyond price: Hundreds of hours of painstaking dressmaking, each stitch and bead, feather and crystal, and embroidered flower sown by an expert. So breathtaking and awe-inspiring is the detail, that Valentino spelled it out in the show notes, look by look...500 hours of hand-rolling to prepare the piping that decorated one dress; 850 hours to embroider an organza jacket and skirt. Meanwhile, in order to produce these extraordinary clothes at Chanel, the couture ateliers employ 200 petites mains, as they are known. At this rate, they will soon need many more.