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Why We Cover High Fashion
The Times’s fashion director and chief fashion critic reflects on what makes haute couture relevant.
Times Insider delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how news, features and opinion come together at The New York Times.
When people ask me why I like covering fashion, one of my answers is that clothes are one of the very few universal subjects: Everyone has to think about food, shelter and what they put on their bodies. Even nudists think about what they wear — they just reject the idea of wearing anything.
But there are parts of the clothes conversation that are less accessible than others. Most notably, the haute couture.
The what?
Exactly.
Quick crib sheet: Haute couture is a twice-yearly five-day show fiesta in Paris where a select handful of brands produce handmade-to-order garments that cost approximately $10,000 to $100,000 a piece. Yes, you read that right.
To qualify as a couture house, which is an official designation like champagne, a brand must maintain an atelier of a certain number of artisans full time and produce a specific number of garments twice a year for a show. There are only a very few that can fulfill the requirements, including Chanel, Dior and Valentino. A lot have dropped out over the years (Balmain, Versace, Saint Laurent), and the governing organization that adjudicates this has relaxed some of its rules to admit younger, less resourced and guest designers, like Iris van Herpen and Guo Pei, who made Rihanna’s Met Gala sunny-side-up egg cape.
Still, there are only a few hundred clients in the world who regularly buy couture, including Middle Eastern royalty and American businesswomen. Guests often sit on gold ballroom chairs. At Chanel, the designer Karl Lagerfeld has a tendency to recreate gardens from around the world, from Versailles to Norway, as his sets.
Sounds like the ultimate let-them-eat-cake event, right? In a world struggling with income inequality, riven by tides of immigration and deep social divisions, where streetwear is on the rise, why cover it at all?
For me, it’s never been about imagining myself in the clothes, or even being able to buy the clothes, any more than watching great sports is about being able to play soccer like Lionel Messi.
It’s about using this particular craft form as a wormhole into what’s going on in the world. The gowns themselves may not seem that relevant. But the issues they raise are.
Like, for example, the fact that to a certain extent any women’s wear collection, at any level, is a treatise on female identity at that particular moment in time. At least if it’s any good. That’s why Karl Lagerfeld made his Chanel bride wear the pants last January, not the corseted meringue; why at Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri paid homage to Leonor Fini, an early 20th-century Surrealist (I don’t think anyone would dispute the surreal nature of our current era); why at Givenchy, Clare Waight Keller protected gowns dripping in silver fringe with military greatcoats.
Like the fact that the mostly French gatekeepers of couture, the most rigid of fashion sectors, have increasingly lowered barriers to entry to woo and admit designers from China, Lebanon and Russia. Fashion is acknowledging the value of porous borders, even as its Western European home grows more skittish about them.
Like the fact that this is as good a way as any to talk about the current tension between the handmade and human (and historical) and the technological. It’s the fashion equivalent of reading books versus watching YouTube.
After all, these are all garments created mostly by hand as part of a long tradition. Last season at Valentino, the designer Pierpaolo Piccioli named each dress after the person who made it, practically fetishizing the artisan in the face of … well, Facebook.
Sound familiar?
If you’re still wondering what this has to do with you, I’ll leave you with two words: Melania Trump.
She wore Chanel couture to the French state dinner last April. And all those gilded pigeons suddenly came home to roost.
Keep up with Times Insider stories on Twitter, via the Reader Center: @ReaderCenter.
Vanessa Friedman is The Times's fashion director and chief fashion critic. She was previously the fashion editor of the Financial Times. @VVFriedman
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