Haute Couture

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With the Couture season fast approaching, I thought it would be proper to give everyone a crash-course on Couture. Enjoy!

Haute couture was invented there at the end of the 19th century and has felt most at home there ever since. Paris, whose influence in the world of fashion may even go as far back as the court of Louis XIV, still ranks as the capital of haute couture, with its crafts and its almost legendary fashion houses of international renown, its extravagances and its unique savoir faire. As the proving ground for design and research, Paris continues to inspire and attract talents from all over the world. Generation after generation, it breathes new life into haute couture, this luxurious and ephemeral art which, undoubtedly, must go on evolving if it is to survive.
Label France invites you to discover the world of French haute couture through its retrospective, portraits, interviews and its special feature. Those who, today as in the past, adorn the models: the embroiderer Lesage; the designer of "barbaric jewels", Robert Goossens; and the young shoe designer, Christian Louboutin; those who, on its fringes, make it move: Jean-Paul Gaultier, Claude Montana and Thierry Mugler; those who buy it and make it live. And finally, bien sûr, the great houses of couture themselves: Chanel, Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Laroche, Givenchy, Paco Rabanne, Ungaro, Christian Lacroix, whose collections, thanks to television, are now presented all over the world.

The founder of a refined yet practical style, the great Coco Chanel (1883-1971) was a pioneer of French haute couture. Photographed by Horst in 1937.

Since the great age of Louis XIV and his opulent and extravagant court, France has been the yardstick for fashion. Established in Paris, at the close of the 19th century, haute couture emerged as the confirmation of that supremacy. Today, it remains a French speciality, gratefully borrowing from foreign talents.


With her curls, powdered wig, perfume and ribbons, her crinoline and her lace, her embroidered stockings and her court shoes, the "Doll from the Rue Saint-Honoré" was as eagerly awaited as a crowned head by all and sundry in 18th century Europe. Particularly in prosperous London, where she would land once a month, and in Venice, too, as well as Vienna, St Petersburg and Constantinople, where her visits were more infrequent. The travelling dress stand served to showcase the Paris fashion or, rather, the fashion of the Versailles Court, whose whims and extravagances set the tone in every boudoir. Whence the following quatrain by Abbé Delille:
"Thus sovereign of adornment fair,
France is still queen of fashion's flair,
Bearing to remotest north our tastes diverse,
The despotic doll enslaves the universe."
The products of Parisian workshops and their accessories followed the doll, with a retinue of craftsmen, perfumers, wigmakers and sundry manufacturers of beauty spots, hair pieces and pomades. To the great indignation of local manufacturers and their governments, even of the sovereigns themselves. Indeed, Catherine II, Empress of Russia, promulgated a sumptuary law by declaring war on French fashions.


"The minister of fashion"

Enough to arouse the interest of the British chargé d'affaires, who did not fail to report to London the blow thus dealt to French commerce: "Embroideries and furbelows are banned. Coiffures are not to exceed two and a half inches in height. The enormous growth in the export of fashion articles from France was the prime reason for this reform in ladies' dress," reported Sir James Harris, adding that the tsarina's fury extended also to her daughter-in-law, the grand duchess Maria Feodorovna, "passionately in love with France and her fashions". She had returned from Paris "with two hundred trunks filled with muslin, pom-poms and other toiletries" and was in regular correspondence with Mlle Bertin, a young, highly talented milliner to whom Marie-Antoinette, recently arrived at Versailles to marry the future Louis XVI, had taken a fancy and whom the Parisians nicknamed "the minister of fashion".

Paris's primacy in matters of ladies' fashions was to survive the French cultural hegemony specific to the 18th century and the Revolution. It went on to establish itself during the 19th and 20th centuries with the emergence of haute couture. Foreign attempts to put an end to any such supremacy were certainly not lacking: after the French defeat of 1940, Hitler had the idea of transferring the hub of the fashion world to Vienna and Berlin. It was the couturier Lucien Lelong, then chairman of the Syndical Chamber, who came to Paris's rescue, with the support of Madame Grès. Her fashion house was subsequently closed down by the Germans, who felt she was attaching excessive importance to the colours blue, white and red in her collections. But Lelong did manage to convince Goebbels that a concept as exclusively Parisian as that of haute couture could not be developed anywhere but in Paris.

After the War, American companies went on to resist Parisian designers, with the idea of putting an end, once and for all, to their dominance. In vain, as was seen in 1947 when Dior established his new look- only the name was American - with the midi skirt. Given the size of the markets they could open or close to Parisians as they saw fit, the Americans made up for lost ground. But why did a line have to be launched by Paris in order to establish itself in the United States? Even today, in spite of their massive power and the strength of their ready-to-wear, indignant Americans still openly ask themselves that very question.

If Paris has managed to preserve its status as master of haute couture to this very day, it is because of its ability, among others, to provide opportunities to talents from abroad. In this respect, the first and most famous was a Briton, Charles Frédéric Worth, who left London for Paris in 1846. Initially, he worked in the cloth trade, cutting dresses for his wife Marie, before setting up his own business, in 1858, at 7, rue de la Paix, not far from the Opera.



Haute couture: Worth inventing

Worth hit upon the idea of presenting his designs to his clients - first and foremost among them, the Princess of Metternich and the Empress Eugénie - by getting real models to wear them. Thus came about the fashion parade, today inseparable even from the very idea of a collection. It is also to Charles Frédéric, and later to his son, Gaston, that we owe the organisation of the Syndical Chamber for Parisian Fashion. This body stipulates which criteria, among others, make a designer a "couturier", the seasonal calendar for the collections and the registration of dresses on a file, complete with a sketch of the model and a sample of its fabric.

The ups and downs of history could not impede the rise of Parisian haute couture: after the ostentatious displays of the Second Empire came the heyday of the Republic and the Belle Epoque, preceding the Roaring Twenties between the two world wars. Worth and his two sons were followed by Paul Poiret, who declared war on the corset and redesigned ladies' fashions by simplifying the line. Ankles first emerged in 1915. When would the knee appear? Soon, the increasingly sporting line would erase bustlines and other curves.

In the space of a single generation, the world of couture had become organised and well established in a setting of luxury and perfection, bustling with the coming and going of crowned heads and stars: all the trappings you need to seduce clients prepared to pay as much for their clothes as for a racing car while making the dreams of middle-class housewives and midinettes.

A fashion house is first and foremost a hierarchy of tasks orchestrated with the discipline of a ballet company: at the bottom of the ladder are the "arpettes" or apprentices, who pin the fabrics and run from floor to floor. Next in line are qualified chief assistants, second assistants, fitters, chief and assistant sales staff At the top of the pyramid is the designer. He is the great couturier and, in French, is always referred to by a masculine gender, regardless of whether the position is held by a man or a woman, with Madeleine Vionnet, Mme Grès, Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli competing with Balenciaga, Lelong, who trained Dior, and Jacques Fath, who opened during the war. Finally, alongside the designer and leading light, the director, who has authority over the entire set-up.

The key to success is the right blend of artistic temperament and business sense. "Am I a fool to dream of putting art into my dresses?" Poiret once asked. Not to mention Dior, who wanted to be an architect and was director of two art galleries: "I think of my work as ephemeral architecture". Mme Grès was a musician and sculptress; Chanel was very close to Colette, Stravinsky and Balanchine But a fashion house also requires a sound financial foundation: Dior supported by Boussac, the textile magnate; Saint-Laurent backed by Pierre Bergé.

The final and perhaps most fascinating aspect of this unique activity is the perpetual state of stand-by, with the designer and his machine permanently monitoring life and events throughout the world in order to avoid the risk of being swept along with the flow or left stranded on the shore. From the new look to mini skirts, tailored dresses to trousers, stiletto heels to flat casuals, from Poiret to Chanel, Dior, Saint-Laurent, Courrèges and Paco Rabanne, haute couture has registered all the tremors of the century, the changes in the condition of woman, of course, but also the poverty of wars, the nostalgia of periods of plenty, the discovery of space, new materials, the general appetite for freedom...

The world is changing and haute couture is changing with it. The whirlwind of mass consumption, a world economy and the revolution of ready-to-wear have all come and gone. When Balenciaga closed down, in 1968, many felt it was the last note of a swan song predicted for a redundant form of luxury. "Haute couture is dying! Haute couture is dead!" "Long live haute couture," chorused the magazines. Back at Avenue Montaigne, "boutiques" steady the "houses" and the "stylists", the "great" couturiers of the past, to serve as a more powerful, more resistant driving force for designer ready-to-wear. For as long as there are women...

Jean-Louis Arnaud

 

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What is haute couture? How does it differ from ready-to-wear? Who is behind it today? An overview.


A model must both maintain and surprise. As a garment, it observes certain rules; as a dress, it transgresses them with insolence. It allows audacity within tradition." Thus spoke Christian Dior, the inventor of the new look, who caught the essence of haute couture in his dresses: "the art of the well executed, the sense of the accomplished" inseparable from the image of Paris.
What is haute couture? It is first and foremost a form of expertise or savoir faire, involving a craft that has endured for more than one hundred and fifty years. The origins of haute couture date back to Charles Frédéric Worth who, in 1858, founded the first true house of haute couture at 7, rue de la Paix, in Paris, creating original models for individual clients. Haute couture involves craftsmanship, the skill of the seamstress and embellisher (feather makers, embroiderers, milliners) who, each season, create the finery of the exceptional.

The term haute couture is a designation protected by law and "only those companies mentioned on the list drawn up each year by a commission domiciled at the Ministry for Industry are entitled to avail themselves thereof," to quote the Syndical Chamber for Haute Couture. The main criteria, set forth in 1945 and updated in 1992, are as follows: to employ a minimum of fifteen people at the workshops, to present to the press in Paris each season (spring/summer and autumn/winter) a collection of at least thirty-five runs consisting of models for daytime wear and evening wear.


The art of perfection

In January and July, some 1,000 journalists from all over the world (2,000 for ready-to-wear) come to see the haute couture collections which, by tradition, are held in some of Paris's most prestigious hotels such as the Intercontinental, the Ritz, the Grand Hôtel and, from time to time, the new rooms at the Louvre Carrousel, which is the venue mainly for the prêt-à-porter shows. The atmosphere is always unique: the glitter of fabrics, the sumptuous accessories and the stage directions for each appearance affording each model the presence of a diva. In the first row, clients and celebrities take notes: Paloma Picasso for Christian Lacroix, Catherine Deneuve for Yves Saint Laurent, and, all around them, wealthy Americans (60% of the clientele) who have travelled to Paris to breathe the fresh air of perfection.

Haute couture implies precision in lines. "Haute couture consists of secrets whispered from generation to generation," says Yves Saint Laurent, who is careful to achieve a supreme balance in all his clothes, designed in the secrecy of the "studio". If, in ready-to-wear, a garment is manufactured according to standard sizes, the haute couture garment adapts to any imperfection in order to eliminate it (see box). Haute couture is the art of raising a collar, adjusting the sleeve of a suit or a plunging neckline, to hide a sloping shoulder or admirably emphasise a bustline One of the century's great French designers, Madeleine Vionnet, defined herself as "a physician of the figure". On average a dress will require three fittings.

There are eighteen houses of haute couture in France today: Balmain, Pierre Cardin, Carven, Chanel, Christian Dior, Louis Féraud, Givenchy, Lecoanet Henant, Christian Lacroix, Lapidus, Guy Laroche, Hanae Mori, Paco Rabanne, Nina Ricci, Yves Saint Laurent, Jean-Louis Scherrer, Torrente, Emanuel Ungaro.

Haute couture employs 4,500 people (including 2,200 workshop seamstresses); there were some 35,000 of them prior to the Second World War. Haute couture is an important economic factor: in 1994, direct turnover from haute couture excluding tax amounted to five billion French francs (1 billion dollars), with exports accounting for 73%. Besides the made-to-measure business, which represents 6% of turnover, there is also luxury prêt-à-porter (33%), men's prêt-à-porter (18%) and accessories (43%), which spread the influence of French labels all over the world.


From the golden age of the fifties to the year 2000


The golden age of haute couture dates from the fifties. The star models of the day were Capucine, Sophie Litwak and Bettina, who gave her name to a light, flimsy blouse subsequently copied thousands of times. Famous clients were American, such as Mrs Lopez, Rachel Lambert Mellon, Babe Paley and even the Duchess of Windsor, of whom Hubert de Givenchy admitted: "She was impeccable, but she didn't have the audacity of Gloria Guiness." On that subject, he also remembered: "She transformed our models. She found a poncho. She said to me: 'Copy that for me; you should put the back to the front and the front to the back.' She was right. Others wanted dresses to go with their jewellery. Emeralds had to come to within one centimetre of their necklines. They inspired us, it was very fulfilling..."

Today, the cards have changed. Yves Saint Laurent has been bought up by Sanofi; Paco Rabanne and Jean-Louis Scherrer are managed by Spain's Puig and Japan's Seibu respectively. 1994 saw the closing-down of two houses, Per Spook and Philippe Venet. French couturiers have not prepared a generation of successors. That is the case with Givenchy, who trained with Elsa Schiaparelli, Coco Chanel's rival; or that of Yves Saint Laurent, Dior's protégé; or Emanuel Ungaro, who joined Balenciaga at the lowest rung of the ladder at the age of seventeen. They all share the common advantage of having trained with a master.

The labels that resist most successfully often belong to large groups for whom haute couture is the driving force that sells perfumes, cosmetics and all derivated products. Yesterday's haute couture existed in answer to a need, occasions justified by social life: theatre premieres, dinners, gala balls. The dwindling number of clients (from 15,000 in 1947 to fewer than 1500 today) proves that lifestyles have well and truly changed. More importantly still, the cost price of a dress has increased substantially enough to give this luxury item, which yesterday may have seemed necessary, the price tag of the exceptional. The price of a model can range from 80,000 to 100,000 French francs for a woman's tailored suit (US$ 16,000 to 20,000), to 300,000 francs (US$ 60,000) and more for an evening gown. These prices do reflect hundreds of hours of work.

Will luxury survive the year 2000? Yes, judging by the incredible prestige enjoyed by haute couture outside France. Haute couture, unrivalled and inaccessible, continues to fascinate. Naturally, one could deplore the fact that, today, it is an art whose style is orientated towards the past when its foremost aim is to act as a creative laboratory. All one can do is measure the changes from one age to the next: "I used my talent as one uses explosives," Chanel once stated.

Besides the courses provided by the College of the Syndical Chamber of Haute Couture, the private Esmod College, founded in 1841, even offers a specialisation following requests from its students keen to learn this special technique: clothes are not cut on a flat surface but moulded from body lines, in the search for the right "hang". Abandoning their miserabilist togs, today's fashions willingly draw on haute couture's exercises in style. "For the great danger of our age is standardisation," explains Michel Klein, from Guy Laroche.


Laurence Benaïm

Designing a model

A model of haute couture is first and foremost the fruit of many hours of craftsmanship. As the head seamstress of a workshop explains: "Everything is in the technique: the reverse must be as beautiful as the face." The first stage is the drawing. The couturier makes a series of sketches and hands them over to the workshop, which uses them as the basis for the "canvasses". This is a generic term for the models cut from cotton cloth, generally unbleached. Lines are traced and "bolducs" - or red tape ribbons - placed onto it to define the structure of the garment.

Haute couture deals in millimetres: everything is measured so that the fabric "hangs" correctly and follows the contours of the body perfectly without hugging it. Sometimes, couturiers dispense with drawings and cut directly into the fabric: this was the case of Chanel and also Balenciaga, the great, unrivalled master, one of the first capable of cutting and even sewing as a virtuoso Next comes the stage of the fabric, which is cut, assembled, overcast before being sewn, then ironed lengthily. Up until the final fitting (on the model herself), it is possible to alter a dart, redo a shoulder, under the watchful eye of the couturier who signals his or her wishes to the head seamstress, the only dressmaker "privileged" to have access to the "studio" (the design office).

There are two types of workshop: the "suit" workshops, generally reserved for daytime wear, which are more structured, more padded; and the "dressmaking" workshops, which tend to handle evening wear. Workshops are a veritable beehive, with head seamstresses, seconds and the "arpettes" or apprentices busily working away: it is said in the trade that, in order to be a success, "a model has to give the impression that it has not been touched," especially if its pleats hide hundreds of hours of work. On the eve of the show, the final details are adjusted and everything is tidied up. Some superstitious women of couture refuse to use green thread (an omen of bad luck). Then the day of the parade arrives. The dresses set off for the catwalk. "You see them go; it's a little like watching your children go..."

L. B.
A sketch from Laroche's autumn/winter 95-96 collection

 

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Now on the Pioneers of Haute Couture

A woman who governs without parliament for longer than any minister. A woman who has to take four hundred decisions a year and whose decrees have force of law beyond the borders of our nation" That portrait of Mademoiselle Chanel, sketched by Princess Bibesco, remains as a metaphor of fashion, "clothing realities and furnishing dreams".
Chanel once said that "a great couturier is a man whose spirit has a future". Born in 1883, Chanel died one Sunday in 1971. She was, to quote the writer Edmonde Charles-Roux, "of another century", yet managed to revolutionise her own: by affording women the sort of comfort and ease hitherto reserved to men's fashions, she contributed to the emancipation of women.

Having frequented the demi-monde in her youth, she stated her independence by opening a milliner's shop, in Paris, as early as 1909. The fashionable world of the race-courses immediately flocked to it: her hats, of an astonishing simplicity, were already contrasting with the "tortes" and "ridiculous bibis" fashionable at the time. In 1913, she opened a boutique in Deauville, in Normandy, and launched her first jersey tailored suits. As a patron introduced to the world of the arts by her friend Misia Sert, Chanel presented Diaghilev, the director of the Russian ballet troupe, with his first cheque, thus supporting the work of the Russian ballet from a very early stage.

In 1920, Paris was the world's capital of the arts and Chanel established herself in that world as the arbiter of elegance and good taste. Her story is a succession of milestones in design: from the famous No.5, the first perfume ever launched by a couturier, one that became legendary, to the black dress and the ubiquitous tweed suit, not forgetting the "barbaric jewels"*. More than a signature, she imposed a way of life.

The German Karl Lagerfeld has assumed the artistic directorship of the House of Chanel since 1984. With his media coups, personified by such super models as his fellow countrywoman Claudia Schiffer, who succeeded the French model Inès de la Fressange, he has lent a new dimension to an institution which still fills the dreams of Americans and the whole world.

 

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If, from New York to Paris and from Sydney to Peking, more than two million visitors have admired his creations in museums, his style is expressed first and foremost through colour, life, movement and the history of women, which he lovingly accompanies since 1958, the date of his first collection for Christian Dior, which made him famous all over the world. Born in Oran, Algeria, in 1936, he was a mere twenty-one-years-old when, already, he was referred to as "Christian II". He founded his own house of couture in 1962, with Pierre Bergé, and, in 1966, his "Rive Gauche" line of ready-to-wear, which allowed thousands of women to blend elegance and comfort. Thus the bush shirt (1968) and the pantsuit (1969) became classics of the contemporary wardrobe. "A happy woman is a woman in a black skirt, with a black pullover, black stockings, a piece of costume jewellery and a man who loves her by her side."
In order to assert himself as the leading outfitter of his day, this aesthete succeeded, better than anyone else, in transcribing his dreams inspired by artists: Andy Warhol, Mondrian and Tom Wesselman during the sixties, Picasso in the seventies, Van Gogh and Bonnard in the eighties. His creations have always caused a scandal, from the first see-through blouses (1968) to his perfume, Opium, launched in 1977. But his strength is his ability also to embody absolute classicism, with Catherine Deneuve as his ambassador. As the heir to Chanel and Balenciaga, he remains true to their lines, uncluttered by detail: "Elegance is a way of moving".

Yves Saint Laurent, a passionate collector and opera enthusiast, remains one of the last great aesthetes at the close of this century. From Cyrano de Bergerac to The Two-Headed Eagle, he has created many costumes for the theatre, his first love. His art has become purer and, in a whisper of muslin, he recreates dreams worthy of a Botticelli, as if to say: "A man or a woman's most beautiful adornment is love."

 

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As the one-man show of fashion, he has, over the last forty-three years, accumulated every role: as a visionary designer and tireless businessman, he is so famous that, in China, he is sometimes mistaken for the French President... Throughout his career, he has always preceded his peers in conquering the world: in 1957, he took the inaugural flight on the Paris to Tokyo route; he was also the first couturier to launch a line of ready-to-wear.
There is little he has not invented in his tireless quest for the future: the "cosmocorps" (1963), coloured tights, roulette trousers... "Working for him, I learnt that you could make a hat out of a chair," says one of his former assistants, a certain Jean-Paul Gaultier. As the first designer to diversify, he bought the former Théâtre des Ambassadeurs, near the Champs-Elysées, and, in 1970, transformed it into a show venue, the Espace Cardin. In 1978, he signed production agreements with the Soviet Union. In 1983, he opened the West's first restaurant in China, Maxim's.

At the head of a veritable empire, Pierre Cardin loves contrasts, electing, since 1994, to present his haute couture collections only to a privileged circle of clients. He is not afraid of contradictions. Received abroad as no lesser figure than a head of state, he sleeps in a monk's cell, with a view on the Elysée Palace. He is a futurist who hates computers. The former cutter from the House of Dior is one of the magnates of "business fashion". He has never borrowed a single franc from a bank. He auto-finances everything, does not advertise (except for his perfumes) and re-invests his profits in property. "Money is only a means," he says, "my lifestyle has not changed in twenty years."

His empire extends to more than one hundred countries and indirectly provides employment to 180,000 people in 700 factories. His name is already on some 800 products, including floor tiles, jams, pots and pans, ties. Like Chanel, Pierre Cardin undoubtedly knows that "only fools dare link money earned with success". Driven by ambition, he accumulates titles as he does his Boule furniture, parrots and dresses, which he keeps in a "personal museum".

 

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Founded in 1947, the House at 30, Avenue Montaigne, near the Champs-Elysées, rhymes with the unavoidable new look and the image of the eternal Parisian woman with her fine shoulders and narrow waist. In the space of ten years, from 1947 to 1957 (the date of his death), Christian Dior succeeded in creating a fashion house whose name is famous the world over. He was a pioneer inasmuch as he was the first to develop "licences" for stockings, cosmetics and all accessories, a policy that has been much imitated since.

The "CD" set within a Louis XVI style medallion is more than a trademark, it is a legend. The House of Dior was bought up in 1987; today, it belongs to the world's leading manufacturer of luxury goods, the Louis-Vuitton-Moët-Hennessy Group. The artistic directorship of the fashion house is now in the hands of the Italian Gianfranco Ferré for whom "Dior is the Watteau of couturiers, full of nuances, delicate and chic. Being Italian in a house of French tradition is to participate ahead of one's time in the Europe of 1992."

Hence, the loyalty displayed by this Pavarotti of the fashion world to a savoir faire guaranteed by the Dior workshops, from suits with sable piping to sumptuous gala gowns that afford a sense of structure to romantic dreams. For the 1995 winter season, Gianfranco Ferré has chosen to pay tribute to Cézanne, on the occasion of the retrospective dedicated to the artist by the Grand Palais, in Paris. Hence the blue-green muslin and chiffon in the hues of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, near Aix-en-Provence. The Dior touch is all there, noticeable in the cut of the suits, the sense of detail, the inlays and hidden seams, the embroidered, white guipure coats, the swallow-tail jacket trains and the velvet evening gowns, faithful to that "sense of the accomplished and perfect" dear to the inventor of the new look.

 

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was in 1987, forty years exactly after the opening of the House of Dior, that Christian Lacroix founded his own house, financed by LVMH. Born in Arles, in the south of France, in 1951, Christian Lacroix has brought sunshine into haute couture with his palette of colours, daring to blend every one of them, making him an advocate of the "neo-Baroque" style. His hammer-wrought, gilt metal jewellery, his lace of Arles and his taffeta bustles continue to infuse life into luxury which, in his hands, is drawn from its customary reserve to venture between modernity and tradition, technology and heritage, reinterpreting with brio the popular cultures of all the countries of the world.
His story is that of a theatre enthusiast who dreamt of making costumes for the stage. After a spell at Hermès, he designed his first haute couture collections for Patou before launching his own house, the latest to be founded to this day. Christian Lacroix, to whom the Marseilles Museum of Fashion recently dedicated an exhibition, also designs costumes for the theatre and opera: for Carmen by Bizet, staged at the Nîmes arena in 1989, and, more recently, for Phèdre by Racine, at the Comédie Française, in Paris. His recent haute couture collections received standing ovations from the public, heralding as they did a new romanticism with the magic of colours cast like shadows, the flows of muslin and silk inspired by the American artist Whistler. At the same time, his "Bazaar" ready-to-wear collection is enjoying an encouraging commercial success.

 

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With his one metre ninety-six of gallantry and the air of couture's grand chamberlain, Hubert de Givenchy bade farewell to the profession on July 11, 1995, the date of his last haute couture show. Balenciaga, whom Givenchy regards as his master, had suddenly closed his house of couture in 1968, as if to say: "This age is no longer to my liking". Hubert de Givenchy, faced with a problem of personal funds, sold his company to the LVMH Group (Dior, Christian Lacroix, Céline, Kenzo) in 1988.
Hubert de Givenchy is the stuff of legends: his name remains inseparably linked with that of Audrey Hepburn, whose finely elegant body he clothed both on and off the stage for forty years. The embroidered white dress in Sabrina to dance with Bogart and William Holden; the cloche hat and ripple silk sheath dress in Breakfast at Tiffany's. "Hubert is like a tall tree, straight and beautiful,..." the girl with the doe eyes once said.

In 1952, Hubert de Givenchy officially opened his house of couture on the Plaine Monceau. Seven years after the advent of Dior's very corseted new look, Givenchy brought a breath of fresh air into the world of haute couture, adapting it to the new requirements of the elegant travelling woman. Today, he leaves the stage and is replaced by another. His name? John Galliano, the turbulent dandy, British to a fault, voted best designer of the year by his fellow countrymen. Chosen by LVMH, he presented his first show for the House in January 1996.

This is a little old though.

 

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Born in San Sebastian in Spain, Rabanne's real name is Francisco Rabaneda-Cuervo. Coco Chanel called him the "metallurgist". Guided by a silver thread, the man of steel of haute couture launched his first "experimental and unwearable" dresses "made from contemporary materials" back in 1964. From metal models to paper dresses, the inventor of the sixties' coat of mail is something of a reference figure for a good many stylists.
Thirty years later, the costume designer for Barbarella, the comic strip character created by Jean-Claude Forrest and played on screen by Jane Fonda, continues in the same vein. In his laboratory workshop, he remains loyal to plastic, metal and his faith in the future. Besides a pencil, his favourite instruments are pliers and blow torches... His Muse is none other than Joan of Arc of the Year 2000: "A headstrong woman, a battler who dominates men in the most astonishing fashion."

Heaped with honours and awards, with shows all over the world, from Berlin to Seville, he likens himself to the line of designer couturiers: what is important for him is to create volumes, unique models designed like mobiles in spaces: "picnic" dresses decorated with plastic cutlery, boleros made from bottle necks, tunics of small articulated metal plates. His name sparkles in silver letters all over the world with 140 licensing agreements. In France, his cosmetics plant employs 150 people and dispatches 3,000 tonnes of products (from the perfume Calandre to the very latest XS) each year.

 

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It is my intention to try and adapt haute couture to modern requirements: to make dresses that are simple and chic." Guy Laroche, opened his own house of couture in 1957. Breaking with the academism and the furbelows of the post-war period, this cutter technician was to gradually impose himself, without confrontation or aloofness, as the creator of a real-life fashion; indeed, he was one of the first to create, for the United States, a collection of separates. Guy Laroche died in 1989. He was succeeded in 1994 by Michel Klein (see interview), whose first haute couture collection revealed continuity in one requirement: "To make women more beautiful still. If a garment is cause for concern, then the right words have not been found. A garment has to look completely natural. It must follow the body and let it live. Otherwise, it's empty, it's virtually dead."

His first model dates from childhood: a satin tunic, with a plain gold braid, which his sister sold to friends of the family. Then, a kimono, also in black. The colour in which this enemy of good taste and false pleats often designs his canvasses. "It gives you a better view," he says. For, indeed, with black, "no faults are permitted".
After leaving school, he embarked on a career of self-education, Parisian style, which he pursued with the carefree abandon of the supremely gifted. Aged fifteen, he sold sketches of prints at Yves Saint Laurent. At the age of seventeen, he was taken in as assistant at Dorothée Bis. Today, his work is divided between his two activities: the ready-to-wear under his own label and the haute couture for Guy Laroche.

 

[ignitioned32]

This couturier and great opera enthusiast, whom some see as "a Mediterranean with the airs of Werther", describes his work as a constant battle: "I am Baroque and ******** at that". The son of Italian emigrants, then a modest tailor in the South of France, he discovered Paris at the age of twenty-two. Between 1958 and 1963, he served his apprenticeship with a master, Cristobal Balenciaga, from whom, as a cutter, he maintains he learnt everything. "I dreamt passionately of haute couture," he says, today, faithful to his white blouse and his poet's beard. "Haute couture is like opera, it's a ritual. It is part of these great celebrations of sophistication, elitism, luxury and refinement. You cannot improvise couture. It is linked to a tradition, a craft and the excellence of expertise..."

At his beginnings, he worked in fifty square metres of workshop space with seven seamstresses. Today, he operates within Paris's golden triangle, at the Avenue Montaigne. At the head of one of the last independent couture houses, he employs some 90 skilled workers to create his ball gowns. In 1995, he celebrated his twenty-five years of couture. He recalls: "Today, everyone wants to be an artist... Me, I used to sweep up after the seamstresses had left because I would have been embarrassed for them to know I was the cleaning lady..." His rich, flowery, sensuous style is expressed through a spectrum of labels, including "Parallèle", a line of ready-to-wear. Although widely marketed, this success has not prevented him from chasing his fantasies: "To grasp the ungraspable that gives me a friendly wave before disappearing in an unknown direction."

 

[ignitioned32]

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.

Claude Montana
The couturier of leather

With 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.

Jean Paul Gaultier
A classical iconoclast

In 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."

Thierry Mugler
The Hollywood dreamer

In 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.

 

[Spacemiu]

wow tahts so much, i ddint read it all but thx

 

[PrinceOfCats]

I've just printed that to take it to the resteraunt with me!

 

[Acid]

i just wanted to add this from my class notes...........


'To qualify as a Couture house, each house must produce at least 50 items per season and show twice a year (july and january) and they must also employ a minimum of 20 technical workers in at least 1 atelier'

 

[Alejandro]

Thanks for the info Igni! Now I have my homework done

 

[LolitaLuxe]

good educational post, igni !

 

[marc jacobs addict]

thanks for the info. i just printed it out to read on the train.

 

[ignitioned32]

Originally posted by Acid@Dec 6th, 2003 - 4:37 pm
'To qualify as a Couture house, each house must produce at least 50 items per season and show twice a year (july and january) and they must also employ a minimum of 20 technical workers in at least 1 atelier'

Thanks Sean that was informative! .. and your welcome everyone!

 

[pinkcouture]

Thanks..very educational! I actually learned something new!