HAUTE COUTURE
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2012
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HAUTE COUTURE FEATURES
toujour couture
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the up and comer
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Toujours Cou A STITCH in TIME by amy fine collins 02|HAUTE COUTURE
uture
With the house of Lacroix filing for bankruptcy, and Yves Saint Laurent gone, some fear that haute couture is finished. But Paris’s fashion phoenix has survived world war, cultural revolution, and economic meltdown, reshaped to fit the times. Tracing its lineage—Worth, Poiret, Chanel, Dior, and onward—the author describes the current incarnation: spectacular shows accessible to millions on the Internet and a new global client base in the Middle East, India, and China. ‘Every 10 years,” The New York Times declared in 1965, as the youthquake shook the planet, “the doctors assemble at the bedside of French haute couture and announce that death is imminent.” There was reason to call the undertaker; sex kitten Brigitte Bardot had rebuffed the venerable Coco Chanel’s proposal to transform her into an “elegant woman” (“Haute couture is for grannies,” the starlet said), and space-ager André Courrèges had just hung up his couturier’s scissors to massproduce his “moon-maiden” go-go boots and minis. Earlier, in 1945, Diana Vreeland had implored an assistant to bring back a fabric rose from Paris, as post-diluvian proof that couture had survived World War II. And again in 1973, when Vreeland mounted her elegiac Balenciaga retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Time’s diagnosticians determined that haute couture, a moribund institution, was “breathing very hard.” Now, with the revered maison of Lacroix having filed for bankruptcy protection, the death knell is being sounded once again. “Personally,” says Hubert de Givenchy, “I do not see a future for haute couture as I knew it. Haute couture means for me perfection.” But perhaps the reports of haute couture’s demise are once again greatly exaggerated. At the end of January, reversing the direction of the plummeting stock market, the two grandest fashion houses in Paris, Chanel and Dior, were posting sales increases of 20 and 35 percent, respectively. Even as a mass was held to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Yves Saint Laurent’s passing (the official end of fashion, according to his partner, Pierre Bergé), a new name, Alexandre Matthieu, burst onto the lineup for the fall-winter haute couture shows. “Haute couture is still the best way for a designer to get noticed,” argues a Paris insider. “If you show during ready-to-wear, you’re one among a hundred, crowded into a nine-day week. During the couture shows, you are one among only 20, spread over just three days.”
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What is this Persephone-like phenomenon called haute couture, which cyclically dies only to be reborn? According to the bylaws of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, a division of the French Ministry of Industry, an haute couturier is a designer who presides over the creation of hand-finished made-to-order clothing, in a “laboratory” that employs at least 20 workers in Paris. The haute couturier must present a minimum of 25 ensembles twice a year, in January and July, and construct a garment over the course of several fittings, directly on a client’s body or on a dress form replicating her physique. (Hubert de Givenchy, for example, had a dummy built for
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Audrey Hepburn, whose 31½-22-31½ shape never varied.) From a peak of 200 before World War II, only 11 authentic haute couturiers remain; additionally, there are four correspondent members. (Giorgio Armani joined as one in 2004.) Just two Americans have ever been classified as haute couturiers—Mainbocher (retired 1971) and Ralph Rucci, who was accepted as a guest member in 2002. (After five years and 10 collections, a guest may advance to full membership.) “If someone is simply a couturier,” explains a Parisian expert, “all that means is that you are sewing.” And, the Parisian adds,
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if a dressmaker uses the term “haute couturier” without the Chambre Syndicale’s sanctio n, “he can be arrested.” The origins of haute couture—an appellation contrôlée, or trademarked name, like “champagne,” and “equally a part of our DNA,” says one French fashion professional—date back to Louis XIV, whose finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert established France in the 1660s as the leading manufacturer of silk and other luxury items. Even so, fashion evolved slowly at the court of Versailles until the clever confections of a fat, arrogant Rue St.-Honoré shopkeeper, Rose Bertin, caught the eye of the teenage Marie Antoinette just as she was ascending the throne, in 1774. In fact, Bertin’s costly caprices for Marie Antoinette probably damaged the queen’s reputation as much as the infamous Affair of the Diamond Necklace. For 12 years, Marie Antoinette conferred for two hours daily with her “minister of trinkets,” revising court trends and voraciously hoovering up merchandise. Bertin became such an international darling, says Caroline Weber, author of Queen of Fashion, that her “business accounted for a significant chunk of the French luxury export market.” By the eve of the revolution, Bertin had accumulated unpaid invoices of more than two million livres ($50 million today),
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prompting a contemporary to declare, “This is the bankruptcy of a grande dame!” The founding father of haute couture, however, was an Englishman, Charles Frederick Worth, who opened his shop in Paris on the Rue de la Paix in 1858. Among Worth’s innovations were the designer label and the presentation of seasonal collections, paraded on live models (selected in Worth’s case not for their beauty but for their resemblances to his best customers). Clients came to Worth, not vice versa, and in his plush salon, classes and genders mingled. Charles Dickens, in 1863, reported back in astonishment to his compatriots across the Channel that a bearded man with his “solid fingers” was allowed to take “the exact dimensions of the highest titled women in Paris—robe them, unrobe them, and make them turn backward and forward.” With Empress Eugénie, Napoleon III’s wife, as his ultimate mannequin, Worth and his novelties—hoopskirts, bustles, leg-o’-mutton sleeves—penetrated deep into the New World. Americans, arriving by private steamship, were routinely charged higher prices. Respectable denizens of the Eastern Seaboard, such as Mrs. Baxter Pennilow in Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence, packed away their Worths for two years before wearing them, for fear of appearing too ostentatious.
“Haute Couture is
still the best way to
get
noticed for designers.”
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An average Dior dress could take 135 hours to produce, and the interior could be as intricately wrought as a Gothic cathedral. “A dress could stand up on its own,” remembers my mother, who attended the fall 1951 showings. A woman needed assistance from a maid, or at least a nimble lover, to help her in and out of the myriad layers, a process that might take hours. When Chanel traveled back to Paris from Switzerland, where she had been in “exile” as a collaborator, she fumed, “Look at how ridiculous these women are, wearing clothes by a man who doesn’t know women, never had one, and dreams of being one!” A functionalist to Poiret’s fantasist, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel modernized women’s clothing partly by ransacking her lovers’ closets. Early on, as a milliner,
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she replaced heavy, ornate hats with severe straw boaters. (“How could a brain function normally under all that?” she wondered.) As the girlfriend of the polo-playing entrepreneur Boy Capel, she improvised streamlined sportswear separates. Paramour Grand Duke Dmitri of Russia inspired her to pile on vivid, overscale jewels. Instead of marrying the Duke of Westminster, she appropriated his salmon fisherman’s sweaters and tweeds. The band-trimmed, metal-buttoned, pocketed cardigan that is still the cornerstone of the Chanel empire was based on a Tyrolean jacket the photographer Horst brought her back from Austria. Chanel’s edicts in time became absolutes—high, meticulously engineered armholes for maximum mobility, shoul-
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der bags to free the hands, buttons only with buttonholes, short skirts for ease of walking, but never, ever, a mini. “She thought the knee was the ugliest part of the body,” says Lynn Wyatt, whose first couture purchases came from Chanel in the late 60s. The house of Dior, like all the others of the 50s golden age— Fath, Dessès, Heim, Balmain, Griffe, Rochas—was structured as rigidly as the dresses. Perched at the top of the hierarchy was the directrice, or manageress—in Dior’s case, Suzanne Luling, who, Nancy Mitford recounted, turned away two English duchesses for being too dowdy. Luling’s even more formidable counterpart at Balenciaga, Mlle. Renée, would advise a prospective customer to try again in a few months. The return trip would be worth it: “When a woman wearing a Balenciaga entered a room,” Diana Vreeland gushed, “no other woman existed.” The workrooms were divided into cells: one for the flou (soft dresses and blouses) and one for the tailleur (suits). A première and a seconde presided over each workroom’s petites mains, or little hand-sewers—machine-stitching restricted. A garment would
“An average Dior dress could
take
135 hours to produce,
and the interior could be as intricately wrought as a Gothic cathedral.”
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be produced in stages, first in muslin (toile), so that no precious fabric would be wasted. The final embellishments— beading, feathers, stones, belts, buttons, flowers, shoes—might be produced by artisans at firms outside of the house, such as Lemarié (a plumassier, feather specialist) or Lesage (a brodeur, embroiderer). The saleswomen, or vendeuses, were confidantes and minor celebrities in their own right. “My mother’s at Dior was called Agnès,” Reinaldo Herrera remembers. Sometimes they were vendeuses mondaines, titled ladies (often White Russian émigrés) with important social connections who worked for wardrobe and expenses, plus commissions. Finally, there was the cabine, the in-house stable of models, numbering six or more and
distinctly different at each house. At Dior they were a languid breed with “Egyptian shoulders,” said the mannequin Victoire, one of the few to break out into fashion magazines. At Balenciaga, to offset the mysterious, majestic clothes, they were exotic, aloof creatures. “A woman has no need to be … beautiful to wear my dresses. The dress will do all that for her,” Balenciaga maintained. At Chanel, the cabine was small-bosomed and well-born, and “every man was in love with every one of them,” recalled former model Betty Catroux. Like clockwork every January and July, the collections were shown in the houses, on the girls of the cabine, on whom the finery also had been fitted.
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Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture 10|HAUTE COUTURE
Official Members Adeline Andre Anne Valerie Hash Atelier Gustavolins Chanel Christian Dior Christophe Josse Franck Sorbier Givenchy Jean Paul Gaultier Maurizio Galante Stephane Rolland Giambattista Valli
foreign members Azzedine Alaia Elie Saab Giogio Armani Valentino Versace Gul Ahmed
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CHAMBRE SYNDICALE DE LA HAUTE COUTURE
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The Up and Comer of Co
outurier
MARCHESA
article from vogue, march 2005
“they were pinning the
frothy hems of many an oscar hopeful.”
If Fashion Week is like high school, Marchesa is the prom queen. She doesn’t even have to compete like everyone else—she just prettily reigns, laughing and waving naturally all the way down the runway in her custom Louboutins. The lucky-girl aura surrounding Marchesa is only reinforced by all the A-list celebrities who wear the label on the red carpet. It helps, too, that the line was started by a pair of former models who wear their own brand almost
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exclusively, with Georgina Chapman, the lead designer, often photographed alongside her movie-mogul husband, Harvey Weinstein, in glam dresses at the see-and-be-seen event du jour. “I am not opposed to wearing other designers,”[1] the photogenic Chapman told Vogue in 2008. “The problem is other people find it strange when I do.” Named for the Milanese marchesa Luisa Casati—the Belle Epoque high priestess of fashion eccentricity, who was
MARCHESA TIMELINE credit: Facebook. com/marchesafashion
1976
Georgina Chapman born in England. Keren Craig born in Switzerland.
1995 The two meet at Chelsea College of Art & Design. 2000
Craig graduates from University of Brighton and begins work in print and embroidery design.
2001
Chapman graduates from Wimbledon College of Art. Works as a costume designer.
2004 Marchesa established in Chapman’s London apartment with custom-made pieces. November: Actress Renée Zellweger wears Marchesa to the London premiere of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. Vogue later describes it as “an obscure London label then barely six months old.”
known for taking her pet cheetahs for walks—the line was born in Chapman’s London flat in 2004, with a handful of dresses. The actress Renée Zellweger, who handpicked a crimson-and-gold sari-cloth sheath for a premiere, really set things in motion for Chapman and her partner, Keren Craig. Before long, they were pinning the frothy hems of many an Oscar hopeful. Star power and generous backers, combined with the support of the late British
2005
January: Actress Cate Blanchett wears Marchesa to the Roman premiere of The Aviator. February: The designers set up a showroom at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills just before the Oscars. March: In a profile on the design duo, Chapman tells Vogue’s Mark Holgate, “The perfect dress should look like it was made for your body alone.” May: Chapman appears in the film Match Point.
2006
The designers become CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund finalists. Marchesa designer and Notte diffusion lines hit stores. November: Vogue reports that “it was English tastemaker Isabella Blow who sealed the deal for [Marchesa] as far as dressmaking goes.” Craig is quoted as saying, “She’s such an icon for us. And after seeing one of our dresses, she was just like, ‘Girls, no one is doing this; you must do more.’ ” Adds Chapman, “To think, we almost did daywear!”
2007
February: Pop singer Jennifer Lopez selects a pink Marchesa dress for the Oscars. May: Lopez wears a beaded Marchesa frock to the Met Costume Institute Gala. August: Chapman portrays a “Tribeca fashionista” in The Nanny Diaries. September: Brit It girl Sienna Miller wears white feathery Marchesa on the cover of Vogue. October: The fall collection is presented during Fashion Rocks at London’s Royal Albert Hall, with Dame Shirley Bassey performing. November: Chapman appears in the film Awake. December: Chapman marries movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, wearing an ivory tulle dress of her own design.
2008
February: Marchesa dresses Best Actress nominee continued p. 16
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stylemaker Isabella Blow (who wore an early Marchesa design to the Paris shows and introduced the designers to key industry players), fast-tracked Marchesa’s success. Right out of the gate, Neiman Marcus approached the designers to do a lower-priced diffusion line, which would be called Notte. In short order, the brand added a bridal collection and evening bags. Eveningwear remains the main focus, however. Chapman, who does most of the designing, and Craig—who handles the retail side and concentrates on details like mirrored paillettes and laser-cut roses—continue to whip up dress after dreamy dress. Dipped in fairy dust and edged in embroidery, they could be the handiwork of those nimble-fingered mice of a certain Gloucester tailor’s shop. Marchesa is for girlie girls, all grown up and swathed in white ostrich-plume dresses tied with black satin sashes.
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Anne Hathaway and movie star Jessica Alba (who is pregnant) for the Academy Awards. April: Limited-edition baguette, designed by Marchesa for Fendi, benefits the Robin Hood Foundation. June: English footballer Wayne Rooney’s fiancée Coleen McLoughlin wears a $195,000 Marchesa wedding gown that makes tabloid headlines. July: Craig marries art director Piers North. An off-the-rack bridal capsule collection debuts at Bergdorf Goodman, in New York. August: Backstage Beauty Collection makeup palettes, done in collaboration with Stila, are launched; Stila lipsticks are named for the designers.
2009
February: Actress Halle Berry wears Marchesa to the Oscars. September: Craig gives birth to a daughter, Delilah. Actresses Olivia Wilde and Sandra Oh wear Marchesa to the Emmy Awards. October: Georgina Chapman for Garrard, a line of fine jewelry, debuts. Full bridal collection launched. November: Chart-topper Rihanna wears Marchesa’s black-and-white frock with cut-out roses to the American Music Awards.
2010 January: Actress Kate Hudson wears a sculptural
white Marchesa column to the Golden Globes. March: Best Actress Oscar winner Sandra Bullock is solid gold in her Marchesa dress; nominees Vera Farmiga and Gabourey Sibide also don Marchesa. May: Evening bag collection launched. Marchesa dresses breakout star Blake Lively and actress Joy Bryant for the Met’s Costume Institute Gala. August: Chapman gives birth to a baby girl, India Pearl Weinstein.
2011 February: Land Rover sponsors the fall Marchesa show.
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