Sidney Toledano, who was recently elected for a two-year term as head of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, praised it as a “great” week marked by “creativity, quality and desirability”. “Couture is the absolute dream, so of course young people are fascinated by the images, but this is not the point. That’s a side effect,” he says. “The goal for the designers is to really work with their ateliers, the petites mains, the amazing suppliers. This is what Paris is about.”
Couture has a small client base globally: estimates vary between a few hundred to a few thousand. Still, the French fashion industry has been struggling to recruit enough artisans to meet demand, and has launched campaigns to bring younger generations to these jobs. “It’s not the couture clients that are lacking, it’s the artisans,” says Toledano.
Jordan Roth, a theatre producer and self-proclaimed “couture devotee”, says the growing attention on couture week is a natural evolution: “The ambition of couture is that it is the highest expression of what these artists can create. Jean Paul Gaultier by Haider Ackermann, Viktor & Rolf, Schiaparelli, Iris van Herpen, that’s the fullest expression of their art. Couture is extreme at its best: the extreme of what each artist can create and the extremes between and among them,” he says. “It’s not about trends or what can sell in stores. People are, more and more, starting to value this work as they value art and seek to understand it. If you stand in front of a painting, you’d say I want to understand. Often we don’t stand in front of clothing and say I want to understand this. That’s what couture invites us to do, to dive deeper.”
The Instagrammer behind Couturfu, a meme account specialising in runway imagery, who wishes to stay anonymous, tells Vogue Business: “Couture crystallises the love and the hate for the fashion industry. Couture houses must acknowledge that it now gets equal visibility as ready-to-wear, but that doesn’t equal with democratic access at all. In that way it is very similar to art. If I can’t afford it, I want to be entertained, questioned, and shocked by it. This meme-worthy season ticked that box perfectly.”
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