I’ve been at this for over 10 years now and have been involved in fashion for a half of a century and I believe I’ve learned a few things and a lot of it came rushing back to me after this season’s presentation of Haute Couture and whatever season we seem to be showing simultaneously so I thought I’d share them and see what you have to say ….
Haute couture used to be the mad scientist’s laboratory of fashion. For so many years it foreshadowed what was to come in a designer’s ready to wear collection or it was just a way of translating fantasy into reality. This season, in particular, given the most straining of circumstances, we have seen everything from fantasy to horror to who cares. What complicates matters on the grand scale is that what’s left of the fashion media rarely speaks of the clothes themselves and instead writes about venue, models, inspirations and all sorts of hidden esoteric reasons. We are offered some sort of presentation that you are supposed to intuit by seeing the clothes. None of these extraneous aspects mean squat if the clothes are not both beautiful and that is a highly subjective opinion…. As the saying goes… beauty is in the eye of the beholder!
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The reality of the fashion show cycle is to inspire, aspire and create a mood for a season that will draw people out to actually purchase the clothes and hopefully in due time wear them and have places to wear them to. Remember fashion is a business of selling clothes unless you have a laundry list of contiguous products that render the clothes unimportant to the bottom line. Couture this season went far afield and opted for more shock and awe rather than exquisite clothes that make women salivate and covet. In other words, all this peripheral crap that appears in reviews doesn’t mean a damn. It is about clothes …plain and simple no matter what the price, no matter what the designer.
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In these challenging times, one might think that off the wall styling would take a back seat to the clothes but instead it takes a starring role much to the detriment of the already unappealing creations. No one speaks to that aspect as some of these looks have been done 2,3 or maybe 4 times by other designers in fashion’s history because no one has the knowledge of the past because in my opinion, it means that so many of these collections are derivative or so highly referenced as to make them look like nothing more than rehashed ideas of years gone by. Might I mention that so many reviewers can only reference the last 20 minutes and certainly not the last 20 or 30 years.
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Those of us enmeshed in fashion know that there is a vast difference in haute couture and RTW and yet these days so much of what we see could carry the same distinction…. At least to the naked eye as haute couture is a product of “invisible” ateliers and petits mains with little machine work involved but nowadays it is hard to decipher the difference and that might include price as well.
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Do I think couture is dead … absolutely not, but I think that couture needs to be repositioned back to where it once was as clothes for women of means and supposedly women of the most refined and finest of taste and lest I forget the largest wallets…the shock and awe should be emanating from clothes and artistry and not from tricky styling, models, venues or background information and inspiration. It should be coming from what you see gliding down a runway via some sort of presentation.
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No names but here are some collections that have been lauded for no particular reasons other than for everything except the clothes! And very few for the actual creations themselves!
PS. As for these “feature films” that accompany many of the collections they serve no purpose other than supposedly to see the collection in motion which so many don’t even try to do and instead spin some sort of tale that has nothing to do with the collection!
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