Crazy Couture
Is haute couture dead?
That was the question widely asked when the contemporary world's greatest fashion designer, Yves Saint Laurent, announced his retirement in January.
They asked the same question in 1957 when his mentor, Christian Dior, died. Whether prompted by a slump in oil prices, the rise of grunge or a highprofile, zone-out such as Saint Laurent's, they've been asking it ever since.
The fact is that the most elite arm of the fashion industry has survived all the social changes of the past century, although on a much smaller scale with only some 2000 clients when once there were 15,000. But the signs are that it will continue to survive. It may even be growing.
Most "designer fashion'' is ready-towear, expensive, famous-label clothes that you buy off the peg in nominated shops. Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche is ready-to-wear; you can buy it at the Rive Gauche boutique in David Jones.
Yves Saint Laurent Haute Couture, on the other hand, is entirely made-to-measure clothing, every stitch done by hand and requiring three to six fittings, after introduction (good luck), at the Paris salons permitted to use the haute-couture designation.
Any up-market dressmaker from Brisbane to Birmingham can style themselves a "couturier''. But, to the French, who take such things very seriously, the term "haute couture'' is as specific as the word "champagne'' (as Australian winemakers know all too well). The appellation is protected by law and applies only to houses that belong to the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, a body with stringent membership conditions, which was created in 1868 by the first great couturier, Charles Frederick Worth.
"The couture'', as the fashionisti call it, has its own elegant fashion weeks each January and July in Paris, quite separate from the razzamatazz readytowear collections each March and October, although some of the big names (Chanel, Dior, Givenchy, Lacroix) appear on both schedules.
Haute-couture shows are the public face of an elite, rarefied world of the very rich, who can afford $100,000 and up (way up) for suits and evening dresses, and the very famous.
Extravagant outfits that make it on to the evening news have the same role to play in fashion as concept cars and motor show specials do in the automotive industry. They will never be made and worn in real life; they were never meant to be. The fashion houses make them because they can. Just like the Ferrari workshop, the haute couture is a laboratory of creativity for the whole fashion food chain, a training ground and, increasingly, a showcase for young talent in the new wave of ``cool couture'', as well as an international billboard for the global luxury brands to sell their dream.
However, YSL's decision to stand down is a neat illustration of the shift of emphasis now taking place in high fashion. The first designer to treat haute couture and ready-to-wear as equally important, Yves Saint Laurent invented the idea of the upscale ready-to-wear boutique in the late 1960s, when he opened his first walk-in Rive Gauche store on the racier, younger Left Bank of the Seine.
The location itself was a statement of its difference from haute couture (which is by appointment only).That boutique was the young designer's brilliant response to the Mary Quant level of British fashion, which was seriously threatening the old order with its fast-paced, high-trend clothes sold in funky environments. All the other great couture houses swiftly followed suit, creating ready-to-wear high fashion as we now know it.
Saint Laurent's three-stage retirement began in 1999 when he and his business partner sold the ready-to-wear, cosmetics and perfume side of the business to the Italian Gucci group, where it is now designed by Tom Ford.
Saint Laurent carried on designing the couture collections. Ford's ready-to-wear collections are big news in the fashion world, but when Saint Laurent announced his complete retirement - the second stage - and showed his final haute couture collection in January, it was an event worthy of comment in news media around the world.
Last month, it was announced that the business would close forever - the final stage.
So, when the exquisite, handmade suits and evening dresses from January's collection are delivered to Saint Laurent's couture clients in time for the northern summer's social seasons at Chantilly, Glyndebourne and Palm Beach (Florida), they will be the last ones ever to bear the label. Fin.
Far from signalling that haute couture is on the way out, however, it could well be the last flourish of Saint Laurent, fashion visionary. For instead of selling his priceless name, which could be devalued in the hands of a lesser designer, Saint Laurent and his business partners have sold the nuts and bolts of the couture atelier to the French fashion firm SLPB Prestige Services.
Under this arrangement, the YSL Haute Couture name will go but the services, staff and expertise of the atelier will remain intact, operating as a consultancy to fashion houses wishing to open or develop a haute couture atelier, alongside their ready-to-wear operations.
One way to interpret this move is that YSL is taking the longer view - that the highest level of the fashion arts may be poised for a revival, in which case his team's rare skills will be in high demand.
As great names like his disappear from the haute couture schedules, a batch of new ones appears.
One of these is Jean Paul Gaultier, who, in 1997, started a couture atelier alongside his already successful ready-to-wear labels. Didier Grumbach, president of the body that governs Paris fashion, had decided that the only way to keep it alive was to attract exciting new names to it. Gaultier has certainly lived up to his expectations, producing some of the most beautiful and relevant couture of recent seasons.
Far from being irrelevant to most of the shopping public, it seems that haute couture has several new roles to play in the broader fashion system, not only confirming and promoting the luxury status of brands but also fostering new talent.
Another increasingly important role is the opportunity couture provides for well-heeled consumers to find unique clothing in a mass-produced, globally marketed world. It's the same impulse - the search for something different - that has created the current vogue for vintage clothes, particularly old couture pieces.
By going to one of the younger, new, ``cool'' couturiers, who make dresses for $6000, as opposed to the six figures charged by the big names, the cashed-up fashion victim can find virtually the same values of quality and uniqueness that appeal in vintage couture, but which actually fit and don't smell funny.
The sheer price of designer clothing these days is another reason why the lower rungs of couture are beginning to attract a new following. Take these examples, which are in stores now. An embroidered coat from Louis Vuitton will cost you nearly $45,000; a ``chainmail and patchwork'' top by the label of the moment, Balenciaga, $10,000; bikini bottoms by SportMax, $1800; a sequined T-shirt from Dior, $1500.
Please note, these are all ready-to-wear prices. Not a single stitch or tuck has been specially fitted and adjusted for the customer and there is no guarantee that five other women won't turn up at the same party wearing the same piece, which is another service the haute couture salons provide, keeping precise notes on clients' records of who else in their particular social milieu has ordered what.
Of course, this all raises the question: why has ready-to-wear become so expensive? There are two reasons: to maintain the luxury mystique and to beat off the relentless chain-store copyists.
These days, hot new trends are in the stores just a few weeks after the fashion shows, sometimes even before they are in the shops of the designers who came up with them.
Which is why the pret-a-porter collections appear to have become more reliant on such complex elements as elaborate embroidery or exquisite fabrics, creating a new rung on the fashion ladder, described as ``demi-couture'', with the prices to match.
This demi-couture ready-to-wear is helping to keep the luxury brand mystique in place, but at $45,000 for an off-the-peg coat, those who can afford it are starting to ask themselves: why not have the real thing?
So perhaps we can finally answer the question: is couture dead? Au contraire, it's being reborn.
, but I did not think you got my point. Sure you enjoy it, as I do, but should it still exist when you have designers like Yohji Yamamoto being able to do couture-like clothes and I wasn't being sarcastic. Emanuel Ungaro said it himself.
)...And wouldn't designing couture like clothing still almost be like designing couture? Look at Ralph Rucci, his RTW line is made and priced like couture and still really only appeals to a select clientelle (with lots of $) just the couture... 
Its a shame, he's brilliant with details and workmanship, but most just look out for the fireworks in Couture, unfortunately -and mainly due to Galliano- workmanship and style seem to come in second place and this LEADS couture's 'death'. Some people mix Spectacle and Workmanship, sad.
