In a slippery, transient world, it is reassuring to know that there are some things that always stay the same — in, of all places, the fashion world, not an industry known for its interest in consistency. First, someone, somewhere, is planning the return of the puffball skirt. Next, handbags will get more expensive every year. We haven’t even mentioned all the black-is-back clichés. But here is one that is right on up there: after the biannual couture fashion shows there will be, sure as eggs are eggs, articles by fashion editors desperately justifying couture’s continuing ‘relevance”.
In Paris recently, I heard a cracking example of this. There we were at the Versace couture presentation, surrounded by some truly beautiful dresses that would be just perfect for an actress looking for that little bit more attention on the next red carpet, with sweeping trains of tulle and mirror shards on the bodice. Two United States fashion journalists studied the aforementioned dresses acutely. ‘Yeeees,” mused one to the other.
‘I’ve noticed a trend this season for armour, a need for protection, that sorta thing …”
Well, God bless the lady who can make a leap from international turmoil to all-but-priceless dresses, that is what I say. And, yes, there was a bit of armour on the catwalks, not least at Dior, where models donned helmets.
But couture is not about trends. It is barely about the clothes. It is about branding. At a couture show, where price and practicality are pretty much no object, a designer can best further a brand’s image — whether it is Chanel’s French chic (cue pretty tweed miniskirts encrusted with sequinned violets) or a life going from one charity do to the next at Armani (et voila! — a stream of cropped, boxy, crystal-studded jackets and mink coats). These are the images that sell millions of handbags, perfumes and nail polishes every year and so, in a roundabout way, couture fashion week is relevant to the hoi polloi. It is just the couture fashion that is generally less so.
Well, less to most, that is: for celebrities, it seems to have become the norm. Not one show this week lacked a celeb in the front row and the designer’s choice of which ones to invite arguably does more for a brand’s image than the clothes he makes. At Dior, for example, we got Drew Barrymore, teen actress Mischa Barton and Cher. That translates as: Dior is a sexy, glamorous label but with a bit of, you know, history too.
Although it was certainly a pleasure to sit behind Kylie at Chanel, you do not know the meaning of embarrassing fatuity until you see publishing heir Dan Macmillan at a Givenchy couture show studying the dreary, heavy gowns with the intensity of Albert Einstein unearthing the theory of relativity.
But Couture Fashion Week is not devoid of worthy personal instruction. On the contrary, valuable lessons are very much on offer and number one has to be that pricier does not always mean better. Calm down, this is not going to be some ‘My nan can make nicer clothes out of a piece of sackcloth and twine†rant. The truth is, some undeniably beautiful clothes were trotted out, particularly by Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel, who understands that for $90 000, a lady wants to look pretty. Other designers, however, make the mistake of thinking that what a woman wants is to look like she has spent $90 000. This accounts for their tendency to laden the dresses with more sequins, gems and crystals than you would ever see in Accessorize and the Non-Stop Party Shop combined. This is usually described as ‘craftsmanship”, which is just a fancy-pants word for ‘fussiness”.
This underlines just how wrong some people get it when it comes to looking good. Many women think that looking thinner is synonymous with being more attractive and therefore starve themselves into looking like emaciated grasshoppers, resulting in them having little sex appeal but a reassuringly extensive knowledge of the number of calories in every flavour of Cup-a-Soup. Similarly, they think that spending lots of money will make them look good and therefore they should show off how much they have spent.
They thus look like a resurrected Barbara Cartland. Not wholly surprisingly, there is a definite overlap in the women who make these mistakes, many of whom were at the couture shows, sequin-stiffened jackets slung atop their wing-tip shoulder blades. Hot babes, every one of them.
And speaking of these ladies, nothing will put you off plastic surgery faster than a couture fashion show. Not since the day George Michael came out have I seen a group of women who should have known better look so surprised for so long. Put it this way, Cher was by far the most natural-looking woman older than 50 at Christian Dior.
Couture is rarely chic because its few remaining customers tend to be at the older, richer end of the human spectrum and often had their heydays in the 1980s and seem desirous of reliving that decade, if only sartorially.
Thus, more than one show revived memories of Ivana Trump (particularly at Lacroix, in which the models were even topped with Trump’s helmet-like chignon — the original of which, not wholly coincidentally, sat in the front row) or her modern-day equivalent, Barbara Amiel. This may not result in the most elegant of shows, but it does make for what little immediate commercial sense couture still has.
But couture does not have to be just about selling eyeshadow and pleasing power wives. Jean Paul Gaultier’s best pieces were ones that focused on pleating and cutting instead of slapping on animal pelts.
Similarly, beneath the pyrotechnics, Dior had lovely jersey dresses and beautiful tulip skirts. Chanel was the best show all week, not least because Lagerfeld knows that bejewelling looks best when it is done with a restrained hand. But the most intriguing collection was one with no perfume to flog; Rodarte, a US label that is made by the astonishingly young Mulleavy sisters — Kate (25) and Laura (26). Their clothes are detailed but linear and unfussy, such as a beautiful long white column dress made of gentle, handcut folds of white chiffon and ripples of tulle down the front.
This is precisely what couture should be like: with its financial resources, the designer should be showing off his more subtle skills, and that does not mean his dab hand with the glitter gun. —