Couture, that great Gallic tradition, takes pride in its irreverent luxury, its intricate technical advances, its tropes and tricks and (ideally) always chic, often outlandish ensembles. It is not for you and I but for the sake of beauty, of taste, of a kind of visual gluttony. And like so many intentionally decadent productions from France, it’s not always so easily digestible. Until now—we’ve broken down eye-catching looks from the latest couture collections and boiled down the visual references they conjure. And so with that, we bring you Vogue.com’s Fall 2014 couture calculations: Because sometimes things really are easier than they look. (And really, we’ll use any excuse we can get to reference Dolly Parton.)
