I found this kinda interesting blurb thing on a French website called "Label France" and thought everyone might like to see, while we're on the topic of haute couture. Granted, it was written in 1996 but I had no idea that people say Claude Montana, Thierry Mugler, and JPG are not technically "haute couture." Sticklers for technicalities, I guess.
http://www.france.diplomatie.fr/label_france/ENGLISH/DOSSIER/MODE/MOD.html
http://www.france.diplomatie.fr/label_france/ENGLISH/DOSSIER/MODE/cre2.html
Claude Montana, Thierry Mugler, Jean-Paul Gaultier are not, strictly speaking, part of the world of haute couture. But they are irresistibly linked to it by their creativity, a touch of folly, and their models, sometimes sold to special order, emphasising the love of well executed work.
[size=+1]The couturier of leather[/size]
ith his Minervan collars and outsized zips and shoulders, Claude Montana set his style in the eighties, with the appearance of his divine women,
superwomen with an icy, ultra sophisticated look. His own brand of perfume with its pure, crisp, cold lines is the mark of a designer with no inhibitions about dreaming up tracksuits made of pastel mink and luxury tailored leather suits.
Born in Paris of German and Spanish parents, he first lived in London, initially designing jewellery made of papier mâché. As an assistant to Mac Douglas from 1971, he familiarised himself with his passion for leather. In 1979, he founded his own couture house, situated in an old banana plantation in Paris. After a spell with Lanvin, where he produced a number of haute couture collections, Claude Montana continues to show his ultra-perfect prêt-à-porter, in the colours of his fanciful dreams.
[size=+1]A classical iconoclast[/size] n 1976, this former assistant of Cardin brought out his first collection under his own name. In 1993, the launch of his first perfume, a corset of crystal wittily packaged inside a can, was a triumph. Under the theme of cultural mix, the so-called
"enfant terrible of the fashion world" knows how to impose himself in true classic fashion, expressing the spirit of the times in his clothes: ethnic mix, nomadism, recovery. His jackets, jean blousons, short navy sweaters, which he alters from season to season, form the wardrobe of a very masculine, very feminine range of clothes, linked with a very French fantasy.
"I dream of doing haute couture," he says today. As the outfitter for the show business world, his clients and friends include such celebrities as Madonna; in fact, he designed her stage costumes. The pop star once said:
"He's the only man ever to have dressed me."
[size=+1]The Hollywood dreamer[/size]
n 1984, on the stage of the Zenith theatre, in Paris, he presented his collection to 6,000 people (of whom 4,000 had paid for their seat). Times have changed, but Thierry Mugler has remained true to himself: last March, he celebrated the twenty years of his label at the Cirque d'Hiver, in Paris. To the beat of
Sex Machine, soul singer James Brown leapt out of a giant star. With Thierry Mugler, Paris burns with happiness and madness: sheaths of crystal, sequin sirens, fitted corsets. From Teppi Hedren (the star of Hitchcock's
Birds) to Claudia Schiffer, 75 stars have modeled for him.
He is one of the few French designers to own his own factory, where models are manufactured from prototypes perfected in the workshops. However, a good many of his models are made to order, for the century's last divas. Born in Strasbourg, Alsace, in 1947, Thierry Mugler was initially a dancer with the Opéra du Rhin. As an enemy of naturalness, he has always magnified Hollywood and comic strips to recreate, with extraordinary virtuosity, their vamps and vampirellas in their crested suits and spiked heels. Gigantism and stage sense are also evident in his photographs of statuesque characters. In New York, he had no hesitation in tying a model to a ladder that projected above the void from the 65th floor of the Chrysler Building. Scandals pass but his style endures.