Even though Yves Saint Laurent declared couture was dead in the mid-1960s, as recently as two years ago it was still an elegant spectacle to be seen attending. Or at least, in an ironic post-modern comment on society sort of way, it was a diverting one. The front row celebrities ensured that. But now that — publicly at least — good housekeeping (what netaporter’s Natalie Massenet termed “chiconomics”) has become the fashionable mindset , couture’s weaknesses — the same ones that Saint Laurent railed at four decades ago — become harder to justify. So this week the question wasn’t so much “look who’s here”, but “where is everyone?” The number of couturiers has been dwindling for years. Now the spectators are falling by the wayside.
Two key Vogue editors (Anna Wintour and Alexandra Shulman) remained conspicuous by their absence. The big US department store buyers who used to come on “fact-finding” missions were in absentia, as was the stalwart front-row fixture Dita Von Teese, one of the few women under 40 who can wear couture convincingly and who used to be flown over regularly by one designer or another. One website filed a missing person’s report and speculated that Von Teese, like many of those not present, was a victim of budget cuts. And God knows about the clients, since being spotted in the front row at couture is not deemed a particularly sassy move for the socially ambitious wives of disgraced bankers just now.
At Jean Paul Gaultier’s show, for the first time in memory, the white-gloved ushers urged those at the back to move forward and fill the rows of empty seats. Madonna, freshly arrived in Paris on her tour and rumoured to be coming to support her old collaborator, was, in the end, a no-show.
Late the previous night I had watched In Bed With Madonna in my hotel room (no swanky parties to go to this season) and had been reminded how brilliant Gaultier can be. There were flashes of that old camp genius in this show — extraordinary corsetry that works better than any muscle-pumping steroids, undulating sequined siren dresses, stripey red and white sequined T-shirts, sequined dungarees and Grace Jones-esque wasp-waisted leather trenches with ice-pick shoulders. But a lot seemed quite sober. Perhaps it was just because so much of it was black.
And, oh, how the photographers yearned, with the ache of masters of hounds who haven’t heard the klaxon of the hunt in months, for the Material Girl to materialise — so much so that when Micky Rourke appeared at Gaultier, they worked themselves into a frenzy of something that almost approximated excitement.
Either because of genuine cost-cutting motives or because overblown spectacles now seem gauche, Dior switched venues from an enormous tent in the Bois de Boulogne to its HQ on the Avenue Montaigne. Up the grand stone staircase we trooped, past the black and white portraits of Dior and Ava Gardner, into the Dior-grey (you’ve arrived when you have your own colour) salons where the models swept past our knees in New Look skirts (albeit translucent net ones), Smarties-coloured wasp-waisted bar jackets (albeit ones with external nudecoloured silk 1950s lingerie attached) and adopted the haughty scowls and calligraphic eyeliner of Dior’s old house models — Victoire, Yolande or Lucky. If intimacy and a relative injection of realism (relative to Dior’s previous theatrical excesses, that is) is an upside of recession, then all is not lost.
It still didn’t seem tremendously modern — one observer likened watching the show to being kissed by an ancient great-aunt, powdery, but not unpleasant. Besides, nostalgia seems to be the order of the day and this was colourful and uplifting. Can we please see that heavenly lingerie in the stores please?
I’m beginning to love all those beaded, sequined and chainmail trousers as well. I know, hold the front page: couture’s two biggest trends — retro bras and jewelled harem pants. At Givenchy, Riccardo Tisci had the most daring, an extreme dropped-crotch, don’t-try-this-at-home version. Tisci had gold yashmaks too. Was this an up-yours Nicolas Sarkozy gesture or a calculating homage to Middle Eastern women — the only clients buying couture in any quantity, now that the US and Russia are somewhat billionaire-challenged? Armani’s Privé show, thanks to fashion finally coming back round to Armani’s founding tenets, was his most relevant looking in years (snub-shoulders, heavy metal and crystal embellishment across jackets and sinuous, tapered velvet trousers that I actually found myself coveting).
Yet it was barely over before guests were politely funnelled next door for the launch of Armani Idole, his latest perfume and “the ultimate expression of his vision of femininity”. Old guard couturiers for whom couture was the apex of their art and not some fudged figures in the marketing budget, would have had a fit.
But there is almost no old guard left: Karl Lagerfeld has always been too commercial. True to tongue-in-cheek form, he had white fibreglass perfume bottles the size of tepees adorning the Chanel catwalk. The collection was notable for being pared back — a condensed, über-luxurious version of recent ready-to-wear shows; immaculate tweed suits with flared or narrow skirts, short, beaded cocktail dresses with trains and that Poiret-esque silhouette (lampshade dress over slender lace tube skirt) with which Lagerfeld has flirted with for a while. Beautiful, yes, but it didn’t really bear out couture’s claim of being an ideas laboratory.
Armani’s mighty commercial success at least means that he could feed the celebrity-starved press what they craved. Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert were the class turns, notable for not having the pumped-up cheeks, chins and lips of their neighbours. Blanchett, so pale and flawless in real life, is Armani’s reward for sponsoring the Sydney Theatre Company of which she and her husband Andrew Upton are artistic directors. Cold commerce, perhaps, but highbrow cold commerce.
Not even perfume could save Christian Lacroix. In 1989, flying high on hype and at a reported cost of $40 million, he launched C’est La Vie, the scent that proved a turkey, not a goose. On Tuesday, in front of an audience that comprised a fraction of the crowd that he normally invites, he held what may be his last couture show. Even his name belongs to his owners, the Falic brothers. If a white knight investor doesn’t charge to the rescue by the end of the month, Lacroix will lose his name, his house will close its doors and 112 people will lose their jobs. No wonder the invitation, like the collection, was black. Lacroix, a master colourist, said that was because the show, which had been on-off for weeks, was hurriedly cobbled together from the left-over fabrics in his atelier. I don’t think he was entirely joking.
“Why doesn’t one of the big high street chains buy up the flailing couture names?” asked one industry consultant. He wasn’t joking either. Without the summit, can the foothills survive, since it’s the summit that ultimately drives traffic through the hills? “Payback time,” said the consultant. It’s a thought. But whatever happens, Elie Saab, who can — with some grounds, I suspect — claim to be the bestselling couturier in the world, will probably be the last couturier standing. The Lebanese designer’s show was packed with his Middle-Eastern clients, some in veils, who follow him to Paris like a great big colourful caravan. Never mind that this all-white collection was an overly faithful tribute to Chanel’s all-white couture collection that showed in the same building in January. Never mind that the workmanship lacked the miraculous airiness that only the French (and Valentino’s Roman) ateliers know how to produce. Saab’s va-va-voom makes great pictures and will look fabulous on Halle Berry on a red carpet.
Besides, he tried doing pared-down last time and while fashion journalists heralded it a new dawn for Saab, the clients hated it.
Some couture ateliers are innovating. Before the Valentino show, I visited Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli, Valentino’s latest designers at the company’s Parisian HQ on the Place Vendôme. Grazia Chiuri and Piccioli were slammed last season for being too slavish to Valentino’s archives for their first ready-to-wear collection but, up close, I thought that their ballgowns were astonishingly accomplished.
Who knows what Valentino’s faithful clients will make of the Goth effect, but those strapless tulle and patchwork lace soufflés were, in their way, small miracles, bound together with feathery stitches, internal corsetry and in some cases 50 years of technical knowhow that will vanish if couture really is on its last legs.
Perhaps it will die anyway, since few young people want to toil in the back rooms like Valentino’s team of grandmothers do. The chiarascuro effect of black-upon-grey-upon-taupe layers turned the dresses into moving shadows. “We wanted to create a new shade of black,” Piccioli told me. How couture to think you can invent a new colour. And in the week in which another couture star began its descent, how fitting it should be black.
