“Couture Clash,” by Hamish Bowles and Katherines Betts, was originally published in the April 1997 issue of Vogue.
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Couture Clash: Diary 1—Agents Provocateurs
NEW YORK, TUESDAY, JANUARY 14
“Is that a real woman?” asks a short mother of two in a baggy Gap sweater examining an Avedon photo of a fifties model. “Sure it is,” says her friend confidently, “look at that neck.”
We’re in the Costume Institute in the basement of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the place is packed, mostly with women pressing their noses against the glass to gawk at Christian Dior’s fantastically feminine dresses from the fifties. Oohs and aahs erupt as the crowd studies the spectacle of fabric swooshing aerodynamically around a hipbone, sequins and seed pearls rising up like a splash from the waistline of a carefully constructed bodice.
“Did you hear they could only be worn once, because they were so fragile?” another woman asks a friend. The placards under each dress explain Dior’s talents: He was adept at modernizing historical garments. Not unlike John Galliano. When I ask, the women at the exhibit are oblivious of the names John Galliano and Alexander McQueen. They have no idea that Dior owner Bernard Arnault has taken a giant risk with two wild-child London boys and that in just five days that risk will either pay off big or flop resoundingly. The pressure is on, and the rumor buzzing through New York fashion circles is that Galliano has already upset the Dior seamstresses by asking them to copy a few old dresses.
PARIS, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 15
Three o’clock appointment at Givenchy with Alexander McQueen. Very exciting. This is definitely the newest thing in Paris, and the idea of this bloke from London mouthing off about fashion while trying to turn around the deeply dull maison de Givenchy is entertaining. In the taxi to avenue George V, I spy Clara Saint—longtime Yves Saint Laurent collaborator—on the avenue, gazing longingly at the maison de Givenchy.
Inside, McQueen, wearing sneakers and cargo pants, tells me he has no intention of becoming the Saint Laurent of the nineties. For a 27-year-old, he’s got a lot of gumption. We’re sitting in the big salon, an elegant room that has fallen into some disrepair, vases of half-dead flowers perched on an ugly makeshift coffee table. McQueen seems pleased with the way things are going, especially with the ateliers. “You know, I, worked for Marc Bohan when he was at Hartnell, and it was the worst experience of my life. He was so snotty with the ateliers. I think they really like me up there,” he says, pointing to the ceiling and the Givenchy workrooms beyond. “They don’t think I’m some silly little kid from London fussing around with a hemline.”
Catherine DeLondre, the premier d’atelier, seems to genuinely like McQueen, even though she was a Givenchy loyalist for 33 years. “At first we weren’t sure, but then when we saw the things coming out of the atelier, we thought, This is really couture.”
“They were quite shocked that the clothes were so chic and so McQueen,” adds McQueen. What does that mean? “Wearable,” he laughs. “The difference between McQueen and Givenchy is that Givenchy is not about attitude, it’s about a lifestyle.” He’s starting to sound like Donna Karan.
He tells me that the theme of the collection is the Search for the Golden Fleece and that everything will be white and gold, like the old Givenchy couture labels. Nearly everything has a corset in or on it. Some of the corsets have more than 200 bones. “Hopefully we’ve designed some shapes that have never been seen before,” he says eagerly. I hope, for his sake, that might be true. When he shows me a white damask Maria Callas dress with a built-in corset and big balloon sleeves, I realize this collection could go one of two ways: either very simple and chic or a kind of Mugler for the twenty-first century. I call Thierry Mugler to get a preview. They say I can watch their hair-and-makeup rehearsal, but nothing else. Typical.
Ralph and Ricky Lauren have been in town, sniffing around, looking for things to buy (sweaters, apartments, companies?). The word is that Azzedine Alaïa has a kid from Central St. Martins working for him and that he will present a small collection next week in his showroom. This rumor floats every season, but Alaïa claims to have a major set of clients. He was offered the Dior job first, but he doesn’t work under anyone else’s name. He’s made his own contribution to fashion, and he won’t compromise that.
“Let’s face it, after the New Look, Dior was nothing special,” one Parisian insider tells me. “Nobody was buying those clothes.”
THURSDAY, JANUARY 16
“It’s very Dior, but not in-your-face,” says Galliano. It’s late afternoon and he’s fitting Diana, the sixteen-year-old sensation from Frankfurt, into a fringed Prince of Wales pantsuit in his third-floor studio at Dior. Three days before the show, and the place is a mess: Jet beads, feathers, and bolts of fabrics are strewn across the tufted leather sofas that Gianfranco Ferre left behind. A jungle remix of Alanis Morissette blasts out of a boom box; several assistants bend over tables studiously, stringing beads into elaborate Masai-inspired chokers; another assistant places leaves of organza on a dress dummy (that’s the wedding dress).
“They’re pretty technically groovy here,” says John, examining a white leather jacket so intricately cut that it looks like lace. John says he’s inspired by the women who inspired Dior, one Mizza Bricard in particular. “She was Coco before Coco, always dressed in lilac, and when people asked, she’d say, ‘Cartier is my florist.’ ”
It’s a good one. Bricard, Boldini, orchids, African lilies—all these things are on John’s mind. But mostly he’s thinking about Christian Dior. “When he first started, Dior didn’t know how to get models, so he put an ad in the paper, and every hooker in Paris turned up.” This little anecdote has been incorporated into the collection, so one passage is about hookers, another is about sexy, short “Miss Dior” suits, and another is very Chinese. Big surprise: Claudia Schiffer made up to look Chinese with a little black pageboy.
John seems very focused. He and his assistant, Steven Robinson, have been working on the collection for eight solid weeks. They took one day off for Christmas and tried to celebrate by roasting a turkey, but they forgot to turn the oven on. “It was awful. We were so tired we just ordered pizza,” says Steven, rolling his eyes. They also took McQueen out to dinner to “welcome him to Paris.” But that’s all they have to say about McQueen.
Rumor: McQueen says he’s shutting the doors of the Beaux-Arts hall at 4:00 p.m. Monday afternoon and starting the Givenchy show on time. When asked about important magazine editors arriving late, he is said to have replied, “I don’t give a fuck.”
He’s quoted in the newspaper Le Figaro today saying that he has “no respect for Hubert de Givenchy.” And what about Bernard Arnault? “He’s Gabriel and the devil. He’s a businessman who can do what he wants. When he asked me to do this job, I did it because I love fashion. I don’t give a shit about money. And when he asked to buy part of my London company, I said no way.”
FRIDAY, JANUARY 17
Snuck behind enemy lines today to get a peek at Chanel. Karl didn’t seem at all afraid of the youthquake at Dior and Givenchy, only said he thought McQueen was a bit disrespectful of M. Givenchy.
Amanda Harlech, who defected from Galliano to Chanel, asked about John and lamented the fact that he doesn’t return her phone calls. I offer up the relationship analogy: When you break up with someone, you don’t talk to them for a while—let the wound heal. She wants the beurre and the argent de beurre, as they say in France—the butter and the money for the butter.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 18
The mood is much heavier today on the third floor of Dior. Makeup artist Stephane Marais is conferring with John about the angel/devil idea for makeup. Steven is teaching the model Kara Young how to walk like a couture hooker. Doors are opening and closing, the music is blaring, and the beaders are starting to look really glassy-eyed.
On my way out, I spot the boss, Bernard Arnault, standing on the corner of the avenue Montaigne in deep conversation with his wife, Hélène. They’re gazing up at the maison Dior, oblivious of the giant Calvin Klein sign looming behind them on a scaffold across the street.
I head over to Mugler’s couture maison near the Marais for a preview. But Mugler is not receiving anyone in his attic studio today. Instead, I poke around the ateliers and watch seamsters (what do you call a male sewer?) sew sequins onto fishnet stockings. The culture at this house is decidedly futuristic and more macho than any other. Instead of little old French ladies in white coats scurrying around the ateliers, there are beefy 20-something guys in muscle shirts. One room on the fourth floor is devoted to computers that are programmed to cut patterns on a huge robotic machine that looks like a cross between a sunbed and a trampoline. The patterns are then mailed directly to the factory in Angers. This is modern couture.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 19
For all of his talk about closing the doors on the dot of four, McQueen keeps his fans waiting for an hour. Some say it’s because Naomi was late, but I saw Naomi backstage hours before the show. Turns out the dressers can’t speak a word of English, and they’re having a hell of a time trying to communicate with McQueen’s assistants as to how to get the girls into the corsets.
The audience is already agitated when the show finally starts. Not even male-model-hunk Marcus Schenkenberg, perched atop a balustrade in only a loincloth and a giant pair of wings, can keep them happy. Finally, Jodie Kidd stomps out in a huge white opera coat with real gold embroidery and a gold lace jumpsuit, her hair in an elaborate chignon of straw. She’s followed by Georgina in a white Sharon Stone-esque pantsuit with a transparent back and Stella in a black snakeskin coat with exaggerated shoulders. By the time the feathered jumpsuit comes out, the Givenchy clients in the front row are rolling their eyes and folding up their programs. “It was hideous and irrelevant,” says Deeda Blair, a longtime Givenchy client and friend, after the show. “It didn’t amuse, and it didn’t enchant, and it had so little to do with the great history of Givenchy. I really don’t understand why Alexander McQueen would want to inflict that on women.”
“The ugliest I’ve ever seen,” pronounces a younger Givenchy loyalist. “Go back to art school,” whispers another. “Forget about corsets,” says Cathy Graham. But not Mouna Al-Ayoub, the flamboyant Saudi divorcée. She raves: “It’s theatrical, and that’s what fashion’s supposed to be. It’s supposed to take you to a different world. The fear of not doing it right is exciting, too.” She has already reserved Jodie Kidd’s opera coat and Stella’s snakeskin coat.
Later on in the evening, Gaultier gives us a witty couture spoof. Men in beaded jeans and corsets work the runway along with women, parodying the old poses of fifties couture. There are two chic Night Porter black pantsuits, but the beaded men’s corset with matching beaded shower shoes is more Dennis Rodman than Charlotte Rampling.
All eyes are on John Galliano.
MONDAY, JANUARY 20
Lunch at the Hôtel Costes. The Hermès Kelly bags have migrated here from the Ritz. This must be the new hot spot. One French couture client dashes into the front room all atwitter about Fergie, who’s just interviewed Galliano for Paris Match to the tune of a reported $500,000. I strain to hear the couture client talk about the collections. Suddenly, she blurts out, “If you think gold spray paint on your tits is couture, then McQueen’s for you!”
McQueen’s reviews are in, and they are not pretty. A particularly frank “diary” in The Spectator notes the “giant nose-rings and . . . Oxfam maharanis” and calls it “less Breakfast at Tiffany’s, perhaps, than dinner at Stringfellow’s.”
Twenty minutes to go before Galliano’s show. The whole lobby of the Grand Hotel has been transformed into a gray-and-white version of Dior’s couture salon. There are 4,000 pink roses and 50 models. The anticipation is palpable. Bernard Arnault has a huge grin on his face. “I think this collection is fantastic,” he tells me before the show. “It’s very creative. There are a lot of things that are wearable, too, you know.” Beatrice Dalle, Dayle Haddon, Sydney Picasso, Fergie, Guy and Emmanuelle Béart, Charlotte Rampling, Marisa Berenson, Susan Gutfreund, Mouna, Nan Kempner, Cathy Graham—everybody is lined up in the front row, waiting. Out come the Prince of Wales minisuits, the Masai corsets, the swingy, fringy pants, and a fabulous duo of pink and chartreuse slinky satin dresses with Chinese embroidery. The girls look beautiful, Manolo Blahnik’s fur stilettos are fantastic, and Claudia Schiffer as a China Girl steals the show. John takes his bow in a little black trilby hat and brings down the house.
“Forget all those other dresses I ordered this morning!” says Mouna, yelling across the lobby as clients and fans dash to the backstage door to congratulate Galliano. “This is the show!” Back in the bar where John is receiving fans, Naomi and Shalom squeal with delight. Arnault is triumphant. Beatrice Dalle, with a cigarette dangling from her mouth, pouts: “Oh, there were some pretty things, but I prefer him on his own.”
TUESDAY, JANUARY 21
Jean Paul Gaultier tells me that he has always wanted to do couture and that he had spoken to Dior president François Baufumé two years ago. “I wasn’t totally disappointed, because M. Arnault wants to buy the designer out completely, and I already have an established ready-to-wear collection. I would have had more money and great ateliers, but their ready-to-wear isn’t very developed.” Gaultier is being very diplomatic. “They called me about Givenchy, too, but I said no. It’s not a fantasy, and you really have to fall in love. Plus, to go after John is not very flattering.”
Gaultier has done unisex couture, which is probably the newest take on the old métier yet. “You know, more and more women and men do things together, they go to the same hairdresser, they wear the same perfume, they buy a lot of the same clothes,” he says. “So why not couture for men? Anyway, men have been going to Savile Row for couture forever.” So far, though, Gaultier has no male customers, although Elton John was at the show.
Galliano gets raves. The New York Times calls it a triumph. The unpleasant memory of McQueen’s giant nose rings at Givenchy is already starting to fade.
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22
Mouna grabs me after the Valentino show and asks if I want to come to her Dior fitting. “They better pay me to come to Valentino next time,” she says under her breath as she hops into her black Mercedes. “30 avenue Montaigne, La Couture!”
Mouna is in a state about Dior. She can’t decide which dresses to order, and she’s afraid she won’t get the ones she wants. “Sometimes you grab the directrice after the show and give her your numbers, but maybe a lot of people want the same dress, so I’m not sure to get it.” Today she’s going in with a fighting spirit. The directrice, Caroline Grouvel, greets us and whisks us up into a private fitting room where Mouna’s choices are hanging on a rolling rack. They look strangely ordinary up close. And the way Mouna flips through them as if she’s shopping at Bloomingdale’s baffles me. Couture! Apart from the dove-gray upholstered chairs and the attentive seamstresses, it doesn’t feel like couture.
Mouna strips off her Chanel couture coat (fall ‘97) and starts thumbing through the look book: “Number 1, number 11, number 20, and, oh, yeah, number 22.” Madame Grouvel writes down the numbers obediently, and the outfits appear on command. Mouna has reserved the coveted pink and chartreuse dresses, the black Mae West lace and violet taffeta dress, the embroidered pants, the chartreuse moire damask cotton opera coat (she’ll buy the runway model at a discounted price), and the ivory lace dress that Esther wore. She also wants the short white tennis dress, the Prince of Wales suit, the lilac chiffon dress, Carla Bruni’s beaded Crazy Horse number, and the black duchesse satin sheath.
The dresses are so small (made on sixteen-year-old models, remember) that Mouna doesn’t actually try them on; she just slips her hands through the armholes and holds them up and then wiggles around in front of the mirror. She immediately banishes the pants and the chocolate sheath; too stricte. She will think about the opera coat (and negotiate the price) tomorrow. She wants the Carla Bruni dress for a couture museum she’s starting, but that will be negotiated tomorrow, too. She knows all of the seamstresses and vendeuses here really well because she was a client of Bohan’s for fifteen years, when, as she likes to say, she had to buy conservative clothes because she was married to a conservative man. “But now I’m free! And I can buy what I want! And why not?”
A vendeuse brings down the beaded black-and-white dress, and Mouna drops everything. “Divine, no?” She holds it up and cocks her head from side to side as she looks in the mirror. “Can we make it long? No tail. And we will repeat the pattern, black, white, white, black, yes? Can I see a sketch tomorrow? And then I’ll decide.” She deposits the $60,000 dress in a heap on the couch and picks the black lace Mae West number off the rack. She stalls in front of the mirror with the black lace dress and the jet-beaded corset. “Which one? The black lace? Or the white lace made in black?” The differences are subtle, but Mouna picks the black lace because it’s irresistible. She will shorten the train and fix the corset so the boning is more flexible. She runs through her order one more time: ten pieces and two negotiations. She will come back tomorrow and put 50 percent down to confirm the order. In twelve days she will come back for the first fittings. She likes four fittings, more than most, so her order will take two and a half months.
“Usually I order ten evening dresses at Chanel and three everywhere else, but this time I will do ten at Dior and three at Chanel,” she announces. She reviews the collections so far this season, ticking off the houses she usually likes: too many feathers at Chanel, too conservative at Balmain, one dress at Saint Laurent, two at Givenchy.
We say goodbye on the avenue Montaigne. As I watch her speed off in her Mercedes I think of the rack of Dior dresses and how hard it must be for the unknowing eye to tell the difference between couture and ready-to-wear. And then I remember what Deeda Blair said when she heard the pearls were real at Chanel: “Who would know the difference unless you were at a dinner party for eight?” □
Couture Clash: Diary 2—Eminences Crises
TUESDAY, JANUARY 14, 11:30 A.M. 59, RUE SAINT DOMINIQUE
Sitting in his elegant Parisian pied-à-terre, where he’s come to escape the cold of his Burgundy house, Marc Bohan is in a reflective mood. As the House of Dior’s designer for nearly 30 years, Bohan confirmed the house as a bastion of understated, uncontroversial Parisian good taste. “I tried to make things that suited and pleased the customer,” he explains, “not to make some striking change, some fun thing every season. I thought that was over. I kept the clientele. That was the main idea, not to make headlines. Now we have that funny phenomenon that nobody wants to dress people, only to make publicity.”
What does Bohan feel about the designers making their haute couture debuts this season, and Galliano taking over the design reins at Dior? “I don’t really see what these young designers know about couture, because they never worked in a couture house,” he says crisply. “Ready-to-wear is about making clothes flat on a table. A couture dress is built up on a body. It’s a completely different way of doing things. You learn as an assistant—the way I worked with Piguet and Molyneux, the way Givenchy has been working. Even Dior started at Piguet.”
What does he think of Alexander McQueen’s oeuvre? “Put that in the hands of the average woman and they just laugh!”
And Galliano’s clothes? “They’re very exotic for the photographs—extreme in a costumey way. I’ve never really seen them on clients. I hope that he won’t fall into the ‘wants to be Dior’ trap. Those old Dior clothes really belong in a museum; they have nothing to do with the women of today.”
3:00 P.M., 13 RUE DE LA GRANGE-BATELIÈRE
At the embroidery house of Lesage, innumerable workers are hunched over their frames, stitching frantically. François Lesage, who was honored with the Légion d’honneur in 1995, is a vital man, full of enthusiasms. The history of the couture is alive in his mind and in the 60,000 embroidery samples in his archives. “I’m a chameleon,” he tells me. “I’m Saint Laurent for Saint Laurent, Lacroix for Lacroix, Galliano for Galliano. There is a complicity. We are more friends than customers. Karl trusts me; he says, ‘I know how to change my mind.’ McQueen I saw once,” he sniffs. “But it’s always good to have young designers—everybody is scared, everybody is watching, and that gives an intensity.”
Lesage feels that this season will crystallize an essential dichotomy in today’s couture world. “For me now, there will be two schools. On one hand there are designers like Oscar, Valentino—very classic, very customer-oriented. The rest will be press, press, press. Couture is a culture; in my youth I went to Patou, Poiret, Vionnet. The ladies would arrive at ten in the morning to order their lingerie. These women were turning clothes inside out to see the finishing. Hardly anyone has that culture now. The new designers have not a deep culture—they have a culture of the flea market.”
The market for Lesage’s magic is buoyant, however; the house repeated nine of Chanel’s extravagant Coromandel embroideries from last season—“more than some ready-to-wear orders” and four of the extraordinary Chanel gold dress whose embroidery alone cost nearly $200,000. “Even Givenchy made some repeats of those little-bit-crazy numbers!”
4:30 P.M., 31 RUE CAMBON
In Mademoiselle’s studio on the rue Cambon, I count 27 people fluttering industriously around Karl Lagerfeld. Lagerfeld’s dazzling new prize, the inspirational Amanda Harlech, has been seduced away from Galliano, whose longtime collaborator she has been. Although she’s still wearing Galliano’s Wallis blue dress, she’s shrugged a skinny black Chanel cardigan over it. “It’s about Chanel proportions and luxury pushed to absolute nervous-breakdown extremes!” Harlech says of the collection. “It’s hysterical Chanel,” confirms Lagerfeld. “The nonexistent dress, the exploded shoe!” This translates into shrunken jackets in aerodynamic tweeds with wide fluid pants; sectioned chiffon dresses with hems like an inverted Chrysler building. The Chanel boater has been extended to Edwardian dimensions, and even the trademark Chanel buttons have been replaced—with real pearls and diamond camellia clips (at $ 14,500 each). In the face of the brash youthquakes elsewhere, Lagerfeld is cannily focusing on the kind of effects that only a couture atelier can produce: perfectly fitted, weightless clothes. “It’s about silhouette and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” Had he read the book? “Of course not! From movies I like only the stills, and from books only the titles!”
11:30 P.M., HOTEL RITZ, 15, PLACE VENDÔME
I have a midnight dinner with Harlech in her suite at the Ritz. She has draped antique black lace over the headboard, tattered Indian silk handkerchiefs over the lamp shades, battered Edwardian millinery roses, scraps of fur, fragments of embroidery, and photographs of her beautiful children over the chimneypiece. Harlech is frankly exhausted. After an afternoon of fittings for Chanel ready-to-wear that segued into couture, she sped off with Lagerfeld for fittings at Karl Lagerfeld with his assistant there, Eric Wright. Back at the Ritz, Lagerfeld called up for an hour or so to discuss a dash to Rome for Fendi on Saturday.
THURSDAY, JANUARY 16, 11:00 A.M., 44, RUE FRANÇOIS-1ER
During fittings for Balmain, Oscar de la Renta is juggling press calls about his inauguration dress for Mrs. Clinton (“She wanted to look sexy”) with social calls from Paris’s grandes dames—and a few temporary American imports. De la Renta’s neat little suits and sophisticated evening dresses have a Kay Kendall feel and are perfectly pitched to please his ladies. Sales last season, according to the vendeuse, were “monstrueusement bien.” “And we’re planning to sell even better this season,” says de la Renta with his wry smile, “with all the disasters happening elsewhere!” Balmain, which has lower prices than the rest of the couture, has picked up a great many ex-Givenchy clients frightened away by the outré developments there. Those clients have also turned to Saint Laurent (which doubled its couture business last year), Lacroix (another record year), and Valentino. “Our clients don’t want to wear fancy dress,” says Balmain vendeuse Katia Smirnoff. “For them, couture is an investment. They want something comfortable and elegant. Last season we sold everything in the collection at least once, and all the most expensive embroidered pieces several times over.” De la Renta adds: “The problem with fashion today is that the most important consumer is out of fashion, Fashion is only interested in people who don’t buy clothes.”
NOON, 2, AVENUE MONTAIGNE
Emanuel Ungaro has the same message, although he expresses it with more force. “It’s like playing with weighted dice,” he says, referring to the seeming publicity-before-clients policy of Bernard Arnault, owner of Givenchy and Dior. “I’m completely disgusted by that. They don’t care if they don’t sell one dress. We are doing two different métiers completely! I hope we have as much success after our show as they have had before!” Ungaro’s is a very client-oriented house. Florence Grinda, his society liaison, takes the clothes wherever there are people to buy them—in Saint Moritz she sold the collection to the new super-rich Russians.
To get a starting point for his collection, Ungaro has defiantly retreated into a couture world he can only just remember. “It’s the dream of a woman who doesn’t exist anymore—Babe Paley, Gloria Guinness, Mona Bismarck, Daisy Fellowes.” Like Lagerfeld’s, Ungaro’s jackets and coats fit as effortlessly as pullovers, worn over unlined chiffon pants or lingerie dresses, so that his ladies can be “dressed and undressed at the same time.”
FRIDAY, JANUARY 17, 10:30 A.M., 3, RUE DE MONTYON
At the hip embroidery house of Montex, Annie Trussart is beside herself trying to deal with eleventh-hour commissions from several of the new designers. "“hey have no idea how much work is involved in all this!” she says. One embroiderer had stayed up until 7:30 in the morning to applique leaves onto McQueen’s jersey hose; the order for a fabulous “Chinese shawl” sheath dress came in from Dior less than a week ago; and before the work itself could even begin, samples had to be made, presented, and approved.
3:00 P.M., 73, RUE DU FAUBOURG ST-HONORÉ
Christian Lacroix is wearing a thrift-store sweater knitted with a Union Jack. “Nowadays, one needs to be a little English,” he jokes. Lacroix’s wall of sketches is dense with inspirational images and richly textured fabric samples. “It’s always the same,” he says, sighing. “I want to start very clean, very geometric, very neat. But I can’t resist adding. I love too much everything—my customers, too, apparently. I want to help the lacemakers!” A photograph of over-the-top romance novelist Barbara Cartland dressed in deep pink, and inexplicably brandishing a bright-blue spray can, sets the color mood for the collection. Francoise Lacroix explains the casting for the show. "We want unreal girls, like insects, blonde and pale—not material girls!”
4:30 P.M., 103, RUE FAUBOURG ST DENIS
Monsieur Lemarié is one of Paris’s last great plumassiers, supplying silk flowers and plumes to the couture; he joined the house in 1946. In this season of diaphanous clothes, his ateliers have come into their own; the feather is ubiquitous. Like Lesage, Monsieur Lemarié is an encyclopedia of couture history. “I worked with them all. Yves Saint Laurent and Laroche and their teams were all the same age as me, so I was like part of the family. And Givenchy,” he adds with pointed emphasis, “was the incarnation of a gentleman. Today, the techniques are still the same, even if the designers are a great deal more décontracté.”
Many pieces have already been delivered, but there’s an extraordinary Papageno breastplate for Givenchy having some finishing touches applied. “There are always last-minute ideas,” he says. “That’s what makes it exciting!”
SATURDAY, JANUARY 18, 11:00 A.M., HOTEL RITZ
Donatella Versace, in a cloud of tuberose (Versace’s Blonde) and jangling a chunky green and yellow sapphire bracelet (1950s by Tiffany), is pairing red fishnet hose with the sleek Latino navy and red lace and jersey pieces that will open her brother’s show this evening. These segue rapidly into diaphanous garden-party chiffons—but what initially appear to be prints are in fact laboriously heat-sealed appliques. “In this collection, everything is so light,” explains Gianni Versace, “all the collection could fit in one bag. My clients want beauty,” he continues, “but things they can wear. They come to me for evening. Daywear beautifully made they can find at the boutique—or at Chanel.”
3:00 P.M., LE GRAND HOTEL, 2, RUE SCRIBE
The Nina Ricci show, first on the Chambre Syndicale’s calendar, provides an insight into the kind of archaic couture world that will be so roundly assaulted this week. Clients like Soraya, the ex-empress of Iran, Leslie Caron, and Princess Alexander of Yugoslavia coo over Gerard Pipart’s fussy bonbon creations, worn by models of a certain age who twirl down the dusty-pink runway, pausing obligingly before key customers. Outside the Grand Hôtel, haute couture workers picket. Their pamphlets cite the closure of five couture ateliers since 1990 (Lanvin, Guy Laroche, Philippe Venet, Grès, Cardin), a 35 percent drop in employees since then, and a failure to take on new apprentices. “If we carry on at this pace, within a few years all the skills will be definitely lost,” the handout states.
7:00 P.M., HOTEL RITZ
Atelier Versace is design for a completely different age and place. Elton John and Maurice Béjart sit side by side, basking in the success of last night’s performance, a new ballet for which Versace designed the costumes. Versace’s übermodels, unmistakable even behind the highwaymen’s lace eye masks they wear to open the show, stalk the runway in sleek clothes that you can imagine them walking off in, or at least wearing to the party Versace will throw for them (and Elton John) later that night.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 19, 1:00 P.M., L’ESPADON, HÔTEL RITZ
Over lunch, I ask Valentino about Alexander McQueen. He waves a hand dismissively over the woven cabbage roses underfoot. “If he designed this carpet I wouldn’t know!” Here is a man who can criticize the costuming in Evita ("She was much more . . . flamboyant. She loved capes, fur hoods”) because he actually knew Eva Perón as a client at Jean Dessès, where he learned the art of couture the hard way. It must be galling to see a young designer speed this rapidly through the ranks, handed a wonderful couture atelier on a plate.
Valentino’s suave business partner, Giancarlo Giammetti, is more pragmatic. “I see Arnault’s point of view,” he says. “You can’t make money on couture, so you might as well make press. Now I give the vendeuses a quota of dresses they can sell to break even. Any more than that, we lose money.” Valentino can afford to pick and choose his clientele; one high-spending ex-Givenchy client told Valentino she would dress with him, but only if he stopped dressing her husband’s best-dressed first wife. The suggestion was laughed off. “If I didn’t make clothes to please my customer, for her to wear—impossible,” exclaims Valentino dramatically. “It would be finished!”
In his fitting rooms, Valentino’s clothes, a tour de force of craftsmanship, can be marveled at in the hand. Well-bred little suits with slits that open prettily over pleated chiffon and tulle; giraffe-spotted jigsaw puzzles of lace and point d’esprit; evening dresses drip- ping with embroidered wisteria and ferns. No wonder that some of these exquisite dresses have been four months in the making. There is no eleventh-hour improvisation here.
MONDAY, JANUARY 20, 12:30 P.M., HÔTEL INTER-CONTINENTAL PARIS, 3, RUE CASTIGLIONE
At the Ungaro show, loyal clients are out in force. Liliane Bettencourt, the vicomtesse de Ribes, and Madame Balladur all wear last season’s tapestry knit jackets. Even proto-waif Jane Birkin has an Ungaro couture coat shrugged over jeans. The ubiquitous Madame Ricard (“the richest woman in Paris”), a flashy blonde with a Côte d’Azur tan, is recovering from the big fete she gave on Saturday night that had le tout Paris clamoring for invites. The girls, drifting by to the sort of languid modern music that accompanies an aromatherapy session, take off their jackets to reveal the diaphanous lace and chiffon dresses beneath. “It looks like my couture underwear!” says Nan Kempner.
9:00 P.M., 27, QUAI VOLTAIRE
At dinner at Le Voltaire that evening, couture client Pauline Karpidas sweeps by in Saint Laurent furs. “Dior was marvelous theater,” she pronounces. “But pas portable!”
Later that night, at Franca Sozzani’s festive birthday party at Les Bains Douches, Gianfranco Ferre and John Galliano embrace warmly, and Issy Blow, relatively understated in McQueen’s asymmetric-hem pants, a twinset pinned with gold and diamond star bursts, and a Philip Treacy confection of black lace and feathers, looks at me earnestly and says, “Every time I see Anna Piaggi she just looks right through me. Why on earth do you think that is?”
TUESDAY, JANUARY 21,10:30 A.M., HÔTEL RITZ
The fusty brocade curtains and bed draperies at the Ritz have been veiled in tulle for the Chanel show, the chimneypieces heaped with branches of gardenia; very Harlech touches. The girls look ravishing with their C. Z. Guest flips and soft powdered faces. The clothes fit like gloves, and they’re light as thistledown.
In the face of these supremely elegant, airy little nothings, a witty friend enacts the Chanel couture client’s predicament this spring. “We’ve got ten minutes to go, and I can’t find my new Chanel dress!” she cries to her husband, who replies, “You’re wearing it, darling.” At the packed client show later that afternoon, the morning’s discordant channel-surfing music has softened and Gianfranco Ferre is mobbed by photographers. Marc Bohan, sitting a few seats away, goes unnoticed.
6:00 P.M., LE GRAND HÔTEL
Christian Lacroix has said that his moonstruck clothes in extraordinary combinations of color and texture are primarily for the clients this season, and the press response seems tepid. A vintage-couture-clad Lucy Ferry, however, is weeping with emotion. “I’m sorry, but nobody beats that. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I just can’t live without those clothes.” We return for a second viewing and sit with the clients. This time the atmosphere is electric, with the ladies applauding every outfit deliriously.
9:00 P.M., MUSÉE DU LOUVRE, PALAIS DU LOUVRE
At Hélène David-Weill’s Musée de la Mode dinner, couture clothes are out in force. Maryll Lanvin and Sydney Picasso look stunning in Lacroix, Anne Bass and Nan Kempner sleek in Saint Laurent, the baronne de Waldner glittering in Balmain. Suzy Menkes, in ropes of fist-size Indian garnets, tells the Chanel-clad Mouna Al-Ayoub that she’s thrilled for once to be wearing jewels bigger than hers. “Yes, Suzy,” says Al-Ayoub, stroking the matchbox-size gems at her throat, “but these are diamonds.”
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22, NOON, HÔTEL RITZ
At lunch, the serious couture ladies are in raptures over Yves Saint Laurent’s collection. “I wanted every single thing,” says Nan Kempner. “When you look at those clothes walking down the runway, you’re looking at perfection. Both Yves and Karl came out with the message I expected. After all, it’s the client, not the press, who buys the clothes.” Madame Karpidas tells me, however, that with 48 hours to think it over, she’s revised her estimation of the Dior show. “After all, we are heading toward the new millennium. We must adapt to the new!”
2:00 P.M., LE GRAND HÔTEL
Henry Kissinger turns up for the Balmain show, and sits between his rangy wife and Madame Pompidou. One witty and forthright client turns to me with her assessment. “Very pretty, but not a new idea in the show,” she says. “But I’m not here to buy ideas—I just want clothes to make my ass look smaller!” You can’t please all of the clients all of the time. Another bandbox-smart lady, who has assiduously marked her Balmain program, tells me that she was bored by Chanel and “insulted” by the Dior show. “I just hope Arnault has a lot of money,” she adds.
4:30 P.M., LE GRAND HÔTEL
Valentino’s exquisite evening dresses are shown without visible underpinnings. Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece is enchanted, but one soignée American client for whom Hubert de Givenchy had all the answers takes my arm as she glides by on her way out. “Help! That man could design for La Perla. It’s a desperate situation—what am I going to wear this spring?”