If there are two sartorial worlds that have any truly shared threads, they are the whimsy and technique driven haute couture and costume design. For costume designer Catherine Martin, who has won both widespread acclaim and Academy Awards for her designs for The Great Gatsby and Moulin Rouge!, the intricacies and creativity within haute couture go hand-in-hand in her own work creating made-to-measure garments with a highly-skilled team. “Couture stretches the bounds of the imagination. Whether it is a wisp of chiffon or a single feather [on a piece], in order for that to be constructed and to get on a human body, it’s a feat of engineering.” says Martin, “Every show I saw was in its own movie, and in the movie of the creator’s head.” Here, Martin weighs in on her favorite looks from Fall 2014 Couture as only a fellow design visionary can:
Academy Award Winning Costume Designer Catherine Martin Weighs in on Couture Fall 2014
Academy Award Winning Costume Designer Catherine Martin weighs in on her favorite looks from Fall 2014 Couture.
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Giambattista Valli
Look 11 and Look 13 are interesting explorations of the same shape using completely different techniques.
Look 11 uses incredible floral surface appliqué within an enormous amount of relief and embroidery to accentuate the cinched-waist full-skirted dress shape. This embroidery is as it can only be in couture—worked seemingly over all the seams. This would have involved an enormous amount of handwork and the conception of the embroidery design at the same time as the construction of the dress. I can only imagine how many hours went into the extraordinarily textured embroidery.
In Look 13 we see a very similar shape explored using striped fabric. The way in which this dress has been cut to emphasize the shape, cutting the stripes into a chevron pattern down the front of the bodice, is technically extremely difficult. This is because you’re working against different grains of the fabric while having to maintain structure and fit.
Both dresses are as difficult to make as each other but use different techniques. This is one of the ways that the designers show off their skill in couture and provide the couture customer with something out of the ordinary. They’re techniques that really cannot be supported in a ready to wear setting where things are made in a factory.
See the collection.