Couture, where slow fashion and glamour combine, can seem like an anomaly in our fast-paced, throwaway world. But despite recurrent pronouncements that the curtain is falling on the métier, nevertheless it persists. I would argue that is largely due to its hidebound traditions.
Not anyone can be a couturier, for starters. The Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode has criteria that designers must meet to be defined as such. There are also rules regarding numbers of looks and methods of production.
The 1950s are considered its Golden Age of couture. The hauteur of the models, with their arched brows, impossibly small waists, and bouffant evening dresses have become, for many, the measure of the couture, although that reading is basically shorthand—and not entirely accurate.
In the Vogue archive I came across “A Seat at the Paris Openings, Spring 1923,” a story that captures, in words and images, a couture season that preceded the current one by almost 100 years, and—spoiler alert—it’s not all about evening wear. Couture shows used to be hundreds of looks long. For many decades fashionable women changed throughout the day. Certain garment names, like cocktail dress and opera cloak, even refer to time-specific events.
While it’s the dazzlingly, incredibly worked evening looks that command our attention, and make journalist’s prose run purple, we can see from Porter Woodruff’s almost century-old sketch of a Chanel show that daywear was on the menu. As the decades wore on, Hubert de Givenchy proposed couture separates when he launched his couture, and Yves Saint Laurent made his Christian Dior debut with a trickle-up take on the Mod look in the form of a crocodile jacket with mink trim.
This seems important to remember as we take stock of the spring 2021 collections in which designers touched a magic wand to wardrobe basics and in so doing suggested a mix-and-match approach to made-to-measure dressing. There was a haute hoodie at Valentino, and jeans got the couture treatment at Ronald van der Kemp.
The traditions of couture can provide a sense of consistency, comfort, and continuity. Alternatively, they represent the possibility of transgression and tempt designers to rebel against them—within limits. You might say that Daniel Roseberry “punk’d” couture this season with his surreal collection. His Madonna and Child getup certainly turned heads. It’s “just something that’s not as polite as couture typically tends to be,” Roseberry said. Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli broke with tradition in another way when he put couture men’s looks on his Roman runway. declared “Couture is for people, ”he said. “I don’t care about gendered (fashion).”
Another tenet of couture is exclusivity, which is often analogous with rarity. Typically only the most exquisite materials are used to make a single dress. The one ordered by a client will be a variation on the original, unique, but not identical. Recently designers have started to redefine the concept of rarity, expanding it from limited amounts of expensive materials available to few, to include existing materials of which there are limited quantities. At Viktor Rolf this season the designers pieced together looks from all sorts of found objects, turning the notion of made-by-hand on its head with their crafty DIY aesthetic.
Iris van Herpen took a different path to working sustainably. She paired with Parley for the Oceans and used its proprietary fabric, made from ocean waste, arguing that the quality had finally reached the couture level. “Basically, there’s not a lot of reason not to use sustainable materials anymore, other than changing your mindset,” she said.
A new way of thinking was also proposed by Area’s Beckett Fogg and Piotrek Panszczyk, New York designers who showed their couture on the curve model Precious Lee. For too long, these made-to-measure clothes have only been on one kind of body: one that is extremely thin.
Couture needn’t be fussy or for women of a certain age or body type, but it has parameters regarding quality and skill, and as we saw this week, designers never tire of daring to reach those heights.
Here, more boundary-pushing looks from the spring 2021 collections.
Solid Investments
The Masculine Mode
Art Wear
Madame Vice President
Homage à Emanuel Ungaro
Natural Extensions
