What happened to haute couture and who needs it

In Paris, the spring-summer season of haute couture Fashion Week ended, which turned out to be rich in notable events. Here Marco Dzanini showed the debut collection for Schiaparelli, and Vionnet demonstrated the line of de-crochet created by Hussein Shalayan. Traditional market players, Chanel and Dior, also made a stir in our news feeds: on their shows, models went to elegant evening dresses with sneakers, which is a precedent for couture. We decided to understand what real haute couture is, what happens to this institution in the 21st century, and why ordinary people need it.

In a nutshell, haute couture is what started the fashion in its current sense. The term was introduced by the English designer Charles Frederick Worth, whose collections were sewn in Paris in the middle of the 19th century. Strict frame couture acquired a hundred years. In 1945, the influential French organization Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture decided that in order to become a couturier, you need to make a couple of simple manipulations. For example, open your own atelier in Paris, hire at least 15 people full-time and sew clothes for private clients with fittings, and also - as a small bonus - show 25 bows for everyday life and evenings during Paris Haute Couture Week twice a year . After reading this list, you will not be surprised that now there are about 10 members of Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture: Alexis Mabille, Chanel, Giambattista Valli, Jean Paul Gaultier, Maison Martin Margiela and others. There are several guest designers who followed a little less stringent rules and were able to get into the official schedule of couture Week. These are, for example, Atelier Versace, Rad Hourani and Viktor & Rolf. At the same time, the pret-a-porte show two hundred marks - it turns out that haute couture is rather dead. I wonder how small the list of participants at Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture should be in order for the unviable couture to be officially recognized.

When was this process started? In the 1950s and 60s, when clothes began to be produced in print runs. Couturiers, who kept to the orders of private clients, closed their houses or switched to ready-to-wear, if only because they could not withstand the competition in price. By the early 1990s, most of the remaining couture stamps were in debt. Then began the change in the meaning of the whole process, which is going on around the couture, the content of the atelier's employees and the show. Previously, couture set trends for the year and was the main source of income for the designer. Now it is difficult to say that the next collection of Giorgio Armani Prive or Elie Saab, dedicated to a) 1920; b) East; c) 1960, sets any trends. How are dresses with belt bags and Chanel sneakers and Maison Martin Margiela tattoo clothes that we saw last week? They, again, do not set trends or assert them. It is, rather, the final proof that street culture dominates the fashion now. As for income, everything is simple: ready-to-wear, accessories and perfumery give companies much more money than 30 hand-sewn dresses, which you spend on money to display as much as a celebrity's advertising fee.

The haute couture of the 21st century is rather a marketing story for big fashion houses, a way to give people a fairy tale originally promised by the fashion industry. Get at least Chanel. There seems to be no limit to Karl Lagerfeld’s maximalism: his defiles are held around an iceberg, in a space decorated under the planet after the apocalypse, and in the forest. Everyone comes to see the show, from Alexa Chung and Inés de la Fressange to Lily Allen and Audrey Tautou. Their photos are watched by thousands of simple girls - and no, no, yes, and they will buy a bottle of fragrance No. 5 or, if they are rational, a bag or shoes. Same story with clothes. The dress from the Raf Simons collection for Dior, which Jennifer Lawrence donated to the Oscars, became part of one of the most popular memes of 2013. Why not the best advertising campaign in the days of Instagram and Facebook? What can we say about the most traditional case of this kind of marketing - celebrities on the red carpet and celebrities in the first row of the show, who are on countless lists of the best dressed in Cosmopolitan / Tatler / New York Magazine opinion - that is, come across .

Of course, it is stupid to regard haute couture so unequivocally: after all, it helps to preserve the traditions of tailoring and handicrafts, which are especially important in times when H & M, Topshop and Zara flooded literally everything. Thanks to the couture, old technicians acquire life and do not stand idle in the archives of the Museum of Applied Art. According to press stamps of the brand, for example, Givenchy, it takes 1-2 thousand hours to create a single haute couture dress. And by the way, most of the time these dresses are not created by regular decorators or brand lace makers, but by masters from small vintage ateliers, such as atelier decorating with L'Ecole Lesage Paris glitter or atelier by flowers and Maison Lemarié feathers. For such small, old haute couture companies, one of the few ways to give employment to dozens of people and pass on their skills from generation to generation.

It is impossible to say for sure whether haute couture is waiting for a wonderful future: we rather see a kind of stagnation. The high fashion week lasts about three days and is filled with 20 shows, of which just over half are officially recognized: these are the shows of the members of Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture mentioned above. Note that the show of Russians Yulia Yanina and Ulyana Sergeenko is not in the official schedule, which means that the high fashion syndicate does not recognize them, and there are objective reasons for that. Even two dozen shows become excellent information channels: there is always a lot of talk around couture Week. That Givenchy closes the couture line, then Viktor & Rolf returns with the first couture collection for 15 years. This season, among the high-profile events was the debut of Marco Zanini at Schiaparelli - quite successful, by the way - and Hussein Shalayan’s demicutural line for Vionnet. The problem is that the fashion week from haute couture is hardly replenished with new names - talented young designers: it is too expensive to contain a couture brand. Remember the example of the Dutchwoman Iris van Herpen: she started with haute couture clothes, but now she is moving to ready-to-wear. Obviously, in the near future, couture shows will be perceived as a marketing tool. But what.