Toujours Couture

This is one of my very very favorite articles I’ve come to find in my monthly favorite, Vanity Fair. The article goes through the entire history of Haute Couture… How it used to be in the good ol’ days and how its transformed to what it has become today. Although the article is quite lengthly, any girl who flaunts her femininity and appreciates the art of a well made gown will just adore the following read. I’ve highlighted some of my favorite parts in what other color then…pink! – THE WIFE

With the house of Lacroix filing for bankruptcy, and Yves Saint Laurent gone, some fear that haute couture is finished. But Paris’s fashion phoenix has survived world war, cultural revolution, and economic meltdown, reshaped to fit the times. Tracing its lineage—Worth, Poiret, Chanel, Dior, and onward—the author describes the current incarnation: spectacular shows accessible to millions on the Internet and a new global client base in the Middle East, India, and China.

By AMY FINE COLLINS

Chanel’s edicts in time became absolutes—high, meticulously engineered armholes for maximum mobility, shoulder bags to free the hands, buttons only with buttonholes, short skirts for ease of walking, but never, ever, a mini. “She thought the knee was the ugliest part of the body,” says Lynn Wyatt, whose first couture purchases came from Chanel in the late 60s.

Madeleine Vionnet, the subject of a comprehensive exhibition now at the Louvre, was a Euclidean purist, a celebrator rather than a disguiser of flesh. Devoid of hooks, zippers, and adornment, Vionnet’s silk-crêpe gowns, cut on the bias (a technique she perfected), clung so liquidly to the anatomy it was impossible for a woman to wear undergarments. “She redefined the way the body is looked at,” says Pamela Golbin, curator in chief of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris. “She believed the body had no side seams, so neither should clothes.” Beneath their slinky sheaths, the ladies powdered their pubic hair to preserve a smooth line, but nipple exposure was acceptable. At her peak, Vionnet employed 1,200 workers in a six-story Avenue Montaigne factory, equipped with an in-house dentist, nursery, and podiatrist. But the vast Vionnet ateliers were infested with spies. Contraband patterns, dresses, even labels, were routinely smuggled out to counterfeiting rings. “The biggest copyists were the Americans,” says Golbin. “They were the Chinese of their day.” The shadow business of haute couture knockoffs was so huge that, between 1925 and 1928, The New York Times estimated, exports of original dresses from Paris dropped from half a billion francs to 10 million francs.

To stem these losses, a legitimate system known as patronage (patrons papier), commonplace until the 70s, was instituted. Foreign department stores and manufacturers could buy (at exorbitant rates) entrance to haute couture shows, and the price of admission was then deducted from their purchase of dress patterns or, for still more money, of the actual finished samples. Some big department stores, such as Ohrbach’s and Neiman Marcus, would buy up an entire collection’s worth of samples. Certain couturiers, such as Balenciaga, would not sell their patterns at any price. If a copyist had a tighter budget, he could acquire the more modest right of première vision—or “sneak peak.” As late as the mid-60s, 60 percent of the $20-million-per-annum turnover of Paris couture houses came from the sale of these reproduction rights—a rough precursor of present-day licensing. In 1949 an American model caught red-handed with bootleg Dior and Fath dress patterns by the French secret police was freed upon payment of a $9,000 fine to the Chambre Syndicale.

Vionnet closed in 1939, just before the German occupation, never to reopen. Elsa Schiaparelli, Chanel’s arch-rival, fled to America, where she toured, lecturing the nation’s women on their lack of elegance. Chanel, after presenting a patriotic tricolor-theme collection in 1939, shuttered her couture house, took up with a Nazi lover, and grandiosely conceived with him an espionage operation to help forge a separate peace between England and Germany. In his capacity as head of the Chambre Syndicale, master couturier Lucien Lelong established the membership regulations still more or less in place, and negotiated with the Nazis to allow the haute couture to remain in Paris. Hitler’s megalomaniacal plan had been to relocate Paris fashion lock, stock, and barrel to Berlin or Vienna. By thwarting this transfer, Lelong succeeded in keeping open 60 houses, and preserving the jobs of 12,000 workers. Among his own were the young Christian Dior, Pierre Balmain, and Hubert de Givenchy.

More than Diana Vreeland’s single fabric rose, what blossomed from the ruins of the Second World War was an entire hothouse of “women-flowers,” wrote Christian Dior, who founded his own firm in 1946, at 30 Avenue Montaigne. “Soft shoulders, full busts, fine waists like vines and wide skirts like petals.” Carmel Snow, the high priestess of Harper’s Bazaar, christened Dior’s curving, floriated, feminine creations the “New Look,” and until his death, a decade later, Dior could “lower forty million hems by lowering his pencil,” an American journalist wrote. Backed by the textile magnate Marcel Boussac, Dior could lavish on one pleated day dress a profligate 20 yards of fabric—a shock after wartime rationing. And the fortunes poured into Dior’s coffers exceeded even the extravagance of his clothing. One American customer confided to her saleswoman, “This year, as my husband is bankrupt, I shall order only ten dresses”—at an estimated cost of $10,000 each. “People knew Dior’s dresses by name, like horses,” says Reinaldo Herrera, whose mother, Mimi, was a client. “I was at a dinner one night, and I told a woman, ‘You’re wearing Byzance.’ She asked, ‘How do you know?’ And I answered, ‘Because my mother has the same one.’” Countess Jacqueline de Ribes arrived at the Duchess of Windsor’s for New Year’s Eve in a sumptuous, densely embroidered red number called “Opium”—only to find her hostess identically attired. Noticing that the Duchess was shod in the matching Roger Vivier for Dior pumps, de Ribes saved the day “by telling her I had not been able to afford the shoes too…. One did have a budget!”

An average Dior dress could take 135 hours to produce, and the interior could be as intricately wrought as a Gothic cathedral. “A dress could stand up on its own,” remembers my mother, who attended the fall 1951 showings. A woman needed assistance from a maid, or at least a nimble lover, to help her in and out of the myriad layers, a process that might take hours. When Chanel traveled back to Paris from Switzerland, where she had been in “exile” as a collaborator, she fumed, “Look at how ridiculous these women are, wearing clothes by a man who doesn’t know women, never had one, and dreams of being one!”

The workrooms were divided into cells: one for the flou (soft dresses and blouses) and one for the tailleur (suits). A première and a seconde presided over each workroom’s petites mains, or little hand-sewers—machine-stitching restricted. A garment would be produced in stages, first in muslin (toile), so that no precious fabric would be wasted. The final embellishments—beading, feathers, stones, belts, buttons, flowers, shoes—might be produced by artisans at firms outside of the house, such as Lemarié (a plumassier, feather specialist) or Lesage (abrodeur, embroiderer). The saleswomen, or vendeuses, were confidantes and minor celebrities in their own right. “My mother’s at Dior was called Agnès,” Reinaldo Herrera remembers. Sometimes they were vendeuses mondaines, titled ladies (often White Russian émigrés) with important social connections who worked for wardrobe and expenses, plus commissions. Finally, there was the cabine, the in-house stable of models, numbering six or more and distinctly different at each house. At Dior they were a languid breed with “Egyptian shoulders,” said the mannequin Victoire, one of the few to break out into fashion magazines. At Balenciaga, to offset the mysterious, majestic clothes, they were exotic, aloof creatures. “A woman has no need to be ? beautiful to wear my dresses. The dress will do all that for her,” Balenciaga maintained. At Chanel, the cabine was small-bosomed and well-born, and “every man was in love with every one of them,” recalled former model Betty Catroux. But “the ones at Balmain were ravishing too,” says Herrera, who used to watch the défilés with his father in order to inspect the girls, among them the willowy Greek beauty Marina Logaridis.

Like clockwork every January and July, the collections were shown in the houses, on the girls of the cabine, on whom the finery also had been fitted. “No music, and the models were carrying a number,” a longtime American client recalls. “It was reverential instead of rock.” And with up to 150 passages (looks) the parade of fashion could last for nearly two hours. The designer never appeared after the show, says Jacqueline de Ribes, “but we would go backstage to kiss him.” Only the top-tier press—Diana Vreeland, Carmel Snow, John Fairchild—and the very rare, glamorous client, a pet of the house, were asked to attend. “No flashes in your face,” de Ribes says, “and you were just a meter away from the clothes.”

So great was the fear of piracy that photography was banned, and there was an embargo on all publicity for one month. Photo shoots for the upcoming editions of the major fashion glossies often took place under the cover of midnight—“and then there’d be a rush come February to buy the big collections issues of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar,” de Ribes says. “There was no advertising for haute couture, only beautiful magazine pictures, or word-of-mouth.” Society beauties—such as Maxime de la Falaise for Schiaparelli—were conscripted to act as viral marketers. “As soon as I married,” Jacqueline de Ribes says, “Jean Dessès asked me to become his mondaine mannequin. But I refused. I wanted to be free to buy whatever I wanted.”

On the day after a show, a prospective client, strictly by referral, could start viewing the new season’s collections at the couture salons, at three in the afternoon, three days a week, for about a month, again on the models of the cabine. Then a customer ordered her wardrobe—shoes, bags, and gloves included—based on her program notations, she was cosseted within an inch of her life. “The directrice greeted you,” de Ribes says. “Thevendeuse, with her assistant, was there for the fittings. They brought tea. The première came down, too, with assistants. You felt very important, and at the same time cozy and nice. You talked to everybody about everything. It was a big organization to make you feel very happy.” Says Hélène de Ludinghausen, directrice of Yves Saint Laurent from 1971 to 2002, “Each client was received as a queen—we were there to serve them. The clients were stars, and the houses were like movie studios—each a whole world unto itself.”

The finished garment arrived at a customer’s door in an enormous handmade box, fastidiously packed with mounds of tissue paper. So exquisite were the delivery cartons themselves that clotheshorse Nan Kempner said she hoped to be buried in one. “And when we traveled, we’d have to pack everything with the tissue paper all over again,” de Ribes says. “We didn’t mind reappearing in the same dress. We preferred three perfect dresses over a dozen imperfect ones.” After four years, if de Ribes had ceased to wear an outfit, she donated it, either to the dancers of the de Cuevas Ballet or to the A.N.F. (Association for the Mutual Assistance of French Nobility), a charity that aids impoverished French nobles.

With lucrative licenses for lingerie, underwear, and perfumes, Dior, “the General Motors of haute couture,” fanned out over 24 countries and accounted for three-fifths of all haute couture sales. Yet Christian Dior himself was not necessarily received socially. Couturiers were still considered fournisseurs, tradesmen who, if admitted into homes at all, had to enter by the back door. “Jacques Fath and his wife, Geneviève, a glamour-puss with important lovers, which always helps, and Givenchy were exceptions, the only ones that you saw at people’s houses for dinner,” Reinaldo Herrera says.

The corporate Dior torch was handed down in 1957 to design assistant Yves Saint Laurent, who soon after sued the company, when he was replaced by Marc Bohan. With the proceeds from the lawsuit, and the farsighted impresario Pierre Bergé to guide him, Saint Laurent established his own house in 1961. The advent of the new couture prince stirred up what Time called “a tempest in a B cup.” Says John Fairchild, former publisher ofWomen’s Wear Daily, “Saint Laurent was the first couturier to capture the new youth mood—with the motorcycle jacket, the boots, the peacoat—but not in a cheap, eccentric, or freaky way. He made older women want to dress young, and he wanted all women to be beautiful.” Men’s wear, laborers’ uniforms, peasant garb, modern art, Morocco, and flea-market finds were all fair game for appropriation and inspiration. A color-spewing “super child,” in Vreeland’s words, the triumphant Saint Laurent was for her the “master of the streets of the world.”

H

Saint Laurent had kick-started the ready-to-wear movement in 1966 with the launch of the first Rive Gauche boutique, on Rue de Tournon. By 1968, in keeping with the general climate of upheaval and reform in France, Courrèges, Emanuel Ungaro, Philippe Venet, and even the patrician Givenchy, with his “Givenchy New Boutique” on Avenue Victor Hugo, had all followed suit. Says de Ludinghausen, who eventually oversaw 70 Rive Gauche boutiques globally, “It was a major revolution in the couture world.” Explains de Ribes, “There had never been boutiques or good ready-to-wear in France. Instead we all had little seamstresses in our lives.” Gradually, with the arrival of high-quality off-the-rack merchandise for one-tenth the cost of couture, “the little seamstresses disappeared,” she says. Pamela Golbin explains, “Everything blended and blurred in the 60s. And in the 70s, with Thierry Mugler, Claude Montana, and Jean Paul Gaultier, all creativity goes straight to ready-to-wear.” The haute couture presentations fled the staid salons and leapt onto kinetic runways. To drive sales of ready-to-wear and lucrative perfumes, the media were encouraged to storm the barricades. Video cameras were introduced into couture shows, and “then everything slipped, slipped, slipped,” de Ribes says. “In order to survive,” explains designer John Galliano, haute couture “had to be a chameleon as much as a muse.” Even as Saint Laurent was conjuring up his most dazzling tours de force, Pierre Bergé recognized that an epoch was passing. “One day around 1975, I wanted to buy a sample at Saint Laurent,” recalls de Ribes. “But the vendeuse told me that I couldn’t, because it was for the archive. It was the first time I had ever heard that a dress should be saved for posterity. I realized then that I should start preserving my clothes.”

B

America’s flush Nouvelle Society, spirited to France this time by the Concorde instead of the steamship, descended in droves upon the re-invigorated Chanel and on the other exuberant 80s favorite, Emanuel Ungaro. The frenzy among Americans for custom-made Paris clothes was so great, says erstwhile couture client Louise Grunwald, “it was like the last days of Nero’s Rome.” One adulterous American couple was found out because they were spotted together ordering up a storm at Dior. When they divorced their respective spouses and married each other, the besotted groom bought his couture-mad bride “the entire Givenchy collection,” a New Yorker remembers. Recalls another Manhattanite, Susan Gutfreund, “There was a moment when you could take the Concorde to Paris, have Madame Grès [a legend since 1934] make a dress for you—and she herself would drape it on you. And then you’d come back—and it would still cost less than a Bill Blass in New York. The exchange rate was 11 francs to one dollar!”

Into this delirious setting alighted Christian Lacroix, who had been designing at Jean Patou. “Launching the house was both ‘evident’ and madly unconscious,” Lacroix says. “I was 36, not so young, and it exploded with press success at once.” John Fairchild remembers, “Nothing exciting had arrived in a long time. Lacroix was a very theatrical designer. And, lucky for Lacroix, Saint Laurent had closed down press at the same moment.” Lacroix believes U.S. customers embraced his work so wholeheartedly out of a sense of déjà vu; his taste for vivacious, outsize dots, bows, and flounces was formed by the upbeat Hollywood musicals of the 50s and 60s. Says Susan Gutfreund, “The prettiest ball dress I ever owned was by Lacroix, a deep, deep blue with an embroidery of subtle stars. I felt like a princess when I put it on, and I wore it to the Fairy Tale Ball at the Hôtel Lambert,” the 17th-century Île Saint-Louis palace of pre-eminent Paris hostess Baroness Marie-Hélène de Rothschild. Haute couture, says de Ludinghausen, gave women “the feeling that you never were going to be in the wrong—a tremendous sense of security.”

But, Lacroix notes, “after the 1988 [financial] crisis and the 90s Gulf War, society was no more the same. In the past, customers were spending months in European spots, the Riviera or the Alps, patiently waiting for fittings in Paris. Now they want their dresses at once.”

Reflects Jacqueline de Ribes, “I used to have four fittings for a dress at Dior, and wait a month. We had clothes for travel, for lunch, for the races, for weddings, for cocktails, for evening, for balls. We would change three or four times a day. That way of life is part of history. It is completely out of sync with the rhythm of the world today. Then came Arnault. Arnault was brilliant in the way he turned the page. It’s another vision.”

W

When Arnault, as chairman of LVMH, hired the electrifying Brit John Galliano, first for Givenchy and then for Dior, in 1997, the illusion that haute couture served private clients only, rather than a brand, vanished for good. “It was a turning point for the company,” says Sidney Toledano, C.E.O. of Christian Dior Couture since 1998. “We had 50 years of history and we needed to change the model. We wanted to make young people say ‘Wow!’ even if it took 10 years for them to make a purchase. Dior is a brand based on real haute couture, and John is the mastermind. His signature is on everything—every shoe, every bag.” Fairchild says, “Galliano brought back fantasy and romance. Arnault had the instinct to choose the right person, and to leave him alone so long as he succeeded.”

Haute couture is now the effulgent sun from which radiates all manner of products—handbags, eyewear, shoes, cosmetics—gold-flecked motes that reach a maximum number of consumers all over the earth. After shooting off its sparks, Galliano’s spectacular, historicizing, high-concept haute couture pieces move directly from the runway to museums. And an audience larger than even Arnault could have projected participates, like upscale sports fans, in haute couture—judging it, viewing it, sharing it, and buying up “team” paraphernalia, in the form of status accessories, via the Internet. “It has been like a rocket taking off,” Toledano says. “First there was a lot of noise, and now that we’ve reached a high altitude we are driving differently.” Galliano says, “Over the 12 years I have been here, haute couture has been redefined.”

With his sensational, super-refined showmanship—more “Dior than Dior,” he says—Galliano, in fact, is a direct descendant of Poiret. Lagerfeld continues to build prolifically on the Chanel code of wearability, toying with its component parts, as recognizable as those of a Greek temple. An echo of Vionnet’s body-worshipping virtuosity can be found in the oeuvre of Azzedine Alaïa, who, though he broke with the Chambre Syndicale, would be welcomed back.

To elevate their images, designers now annex haute couture (price range: approximately $50,000 to $200,000 per garment) to their ready-to-wear offerings rather than the reverse. Says Gaultier, who inaugurated his haute couture division in 1997, during the halcyon days of the dot-com, “It’s what I wanted to do for a long time, but I did not have the money.” Thanks to just 16 clients, among them the Sheikha of Qatar, Nicole Kidman, and Catherine Deneuve, he has managed to break even (although he recently lost one customer to Bernie Madoff). “He has a very good perfume business, so why not do couture?,” Lagerfeld reasons. In 2005, with the stock market soaring, Giorgio Armani unveiled his Privé haute couture label. A Chambre Syndicale insider notes, “Because Armani does so much red carpet with Privé, suddenly his ready-to-wear is strengthened and he has publicity everywhere.”

Against all odds, there are still small houses such as Elie Saab and Dominique Sirop quietly dressing private clients, as in the old days. “Over the past years,” says Saab, a correspondent member whose couture revenues account for 45 percent of his total sales, “we have witnessed the increase of customers coming from the emergent countries: Turkey, Greece, Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, etc.” For houses large and small, the biggest moneymakers are “weddings, weddings, weddings,” Golbin says. Gaultier notes, “It is a couture tradition, for good luck, to sew a hair into the hemline of a wedding dress—if a bride looks at her hemline she could be surprised!”

That young ladies the world over still dream of a made-to-measure, hand-sewn Paris original is proved annually, around Thanksgivingtime, when two dozen debutantes, aged 16 to 19, gather in Paris for “le Bal,” a coming-out ritual at which each girl is presented in a ball gown from one of the couture houses. “They come from the most privileged families in the world,” says le Bal’s founder, Ophélie Renouard. “And one of the main reasons for them to do le Bal is the chance to wear for the first, and often the last, time a genuine haute couture dress.”

Lagerfeld says, “It is the people who do not have a business anymore who think couture is finished. There is now a different kind of couture for what different circumstances permit. Luxury ready-to-wear is not so far from what couture used to be. Fashion houses are not landmarks. The idea of couture in the 20s through the 50s is false anyway, idealized. Behind the scenes, workers’ conditions were sordid, sleazy, horrible. Now the workrooms are like spas, and the workers are treated like movie stars, because it is so rare to find anyone with skill. The new couture clients are beautiful, young. We have Russians, Indians, Chinese, South Americans. Women from the Gulf countries don’t even come to Paris—the première flies the collections to them.”

To ensure the survival of the contributing artisans of couture, the house of Chanel in 2002 bought up the embroidery firm Lesage (around since the days of Worth), Lemarié (the feather specialist), Goossens (the silversmiths), Massaro (the shoemaker), and Michel (the milliner). And in a move that certainly would have pleased Vreeland, Chanel also acquired Guillet, since 1896 the maker of fabric flowers. “So long as the house of Chanel exists, couture exists,” Lagerfeld says.

And ditto for Dior, Sidney Toledano believes. “The big houses are the leaders in creativity, because we have the workers with the know-how,” he says. “The craftspeople with the savoir faire are unique to Paris, which is why an haute couturier can be English or German or Italian or American, but he must work in Paris. The future of haute couture needs the transmission of this savoir faire. We will do anything to maintain it.”

Says Gaultier, the last Frenchman to open a sizable haute couture house under his own name, “I am not a prophet, but my feeling is there will always be couture. And in a moment of crisis you need even more to make these little dreams.”

For Christian Lacroix—who, before what may have been his final presentation, on July 7, was briefly facing a possible buyout by the daughter of the president of Uzbekistan—the seductive, enduring enterprise that is haute couture represents nothing less than “civilization.” – Vanity Fair, September 2009

Amy Fine Collins, a Vanity Fair special correspondent, helps supervise the annual International Best-Dressed List.