The Allure of Couture

Parisian haute couture is the last bastion of a world that tries to deny that famous historical episode known as the Industrial Revolution. There is either charm or folly in that position, depending which side of the hand-embroidered, made-to-order gown you’re standing on.

Until recently, the significance and future of couture, which ended five days of fall-winter shows in Paris on Wednesday, was debated among the small number of people in fashion and related businesses. As with any subculture, their affairs would ordinarily be little noted nor long remembered by the rest of the world, which tends to be more concerned with presidential peccadilloes and strategies for surviving post-”Seinfeld” ennui than with slinky bias-cut gowns worn with pearl chokers.

To the extent that fashion is a spectator sport, however, the fortunes of its major players hold the same curious fascination as celebrity romances for a select audience of voyeurs. A two-hour show to be broadcast on ABC-TV tonight will, for the first time, expose the couture to a mass television audience.

Donatella Versace’s first couture collection since her brother Gianni’s death and the debut of the newly appointed Yves Saint Laurent designer, American Alber Elbaz, will be among the highlights. Couture shows normally range from the sublime to the excessive. With Anastasia lost in the Amazon as inspiration at Givenchy and a Henry-VIII-meets-the-Plains-Indians theme at Dior, it’s a good bet this season’s crop won’t disappoint the TV audience.

L.A. sports producer Terry Jastrow, a multiple Emmy winner who has produced or directed the Super Bowl as well as six Olympic opening and closing ceremonies, saw the French haute couture shows as an opportunity to present “event television for women.”

Jastrow rightly sees the fashion shows as great theater.

“This isn’t about buying this stuff,” he said. “Less than 1% of my audience is a customer for these clothes. It’s about the romance and glamour of it all.”

Jastrow brought four crews to Paris to cover 21 collections and film profiles of designers and other backstage players for “The World Fashion Premiere From Paris,” airing at 9 p.m. Background stories, including some segments intended to play like lively history lessons or travelogues, could help put the couture in perspective. That challenge is the key to the risk his program faces, because if viewers don’t understand that couture is about much more than clothes and, in fact, has very little to do with what most women wear, they might be alienated rather than intrigued. What is presented in most couture shows bears so little resemblance to normal clothes that if the parades of eccentric outfits worn by models adorned with bizarre makeup and outlandish hairdos aren’t put into context, the fingers that operate millions of remote controls might start to itch.

The program wasn’t available for advance viewing because it will be delivered to the network by satellite from Paris only hours before airing. Since the shows began Saturday, Jastrow and his team have been shooting the collections during the day and editing at night.

Although millions will be able to see more of rites of Paris than ever, couture actually has a limited reach--evidence either of its importance or its irrelevance. Throughout the world, there are only 2,000 to 3,000 couture customers, so if desirability exists in direct proportion to exclusivity, it scores on that count.

Who buys it? The idle rich, the working rich, the noisy rich and the quiet, anonymous rich. Among the crowd of international press and store fashion directors, one might spot Princess Alexandra of Greece, Princess Firyal of Jordan, a baron here, a countess there, rubbing shoulders with American business tycoons like Warnaco’s Linda Wachner. Celebs sometimes attend but rarely buy. Yet their presence is important to couture’s image, signifying the interest of young, glamorous women, and dispelling the idea that couture customers are dinosaurs. The notion that famous faces in the front row might purchase couture gave one designer’s representative a good laugh.

“Celebrities buy? You must be kidding,” she said.

*

Anyone who wants to attend the shows can request an invitation. The process of actually getting one is similar to gaining membership in a country club: It helps to have a sponsor. Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus, who have strong relationships with designers based on their purchase of ready-to-wear collections, will often act as liaison for valued customers. A good client in a designer’s New York or Los Angeles ready-to-wear boutique would have no trouble securing an invite.

Of the 50 or more outfits in a show, only some will be sold. Elaborate evening gowns are usually ordered by one customer, if at all.

“Certain suits in a collection will be ordered by several women,” said Anne Fahey, a Chanel publicist. “Two-thirds of a typical collection are considered bestsellers, and one-third are one of a kind.” Eight women ordered a cashmere coat from Valentino’s last winter show, making it a bestseller by couture standards.

Couture prices and sales information are usually closely guarded secrets, but Valentino spokeswoman Pam Stine revealed that the popular coat cost “more than $35,000 and less than $60,000.” Prices start at $6,000 for a plain top destined to be hidden under a suit jacket. Suits are $15,000 and up, a simple dress costs about the same, and $250,000 is not unheard of for a beaded evening gown. Each couture garment is made for the woman who orders it, and she must undergo at least three fittings. At the first, she tries on a replica of what she ordered made in muslin, since the fabrics used in couture are considered too precious to waste on a first draft.

If most women will never own a couture garment, or even expect to find themselves in the same room with one, why should they be interested? The most frequently cited reason is the trickle-down theory, which holds that colors, fabrics and silhouettes that appear first in the couture eventually filter throughout the marketplace. In the 1950s, arguably the golden age of couture’s 130-year history, that concept was far more valid than it is now. Fahey, who has been with Chanel for 10 years, said, “The couture can stimulate ready-to-wear design, but the flow of ideas travels in the other direction as well. It’s almost circular.”

*

William Middleton, former Paris bureau chief of the fashion trade publication Women’s Wear Daily, said, “We can pick out a few examples of couture’s influence on fashion in the last few years, but there aren’t a lot.”

The ‘90s, when styles could as likely be inspired by garage bands, beach volleyball players or TV sitcoms as designers, have been a tough time for the couture. With women in retreat from the design and financial excesses of the ‘80s and minimalism reigning, fancy clothes suddenly looked tasteless and silly. Jil Sander, Miuccia Prada, Giorgio Armani and Calvin Klein were among the clever stars in the vanguard of what the fashion world termed “understated luxury.”

Fashion can be maddeningly unpredictable anyway, a fact that argues against couture’s importance. No one could have guessed that the most potent fashion force of the last year would come from a tiny London boutique, where the creators of Voyage (pronounced voy-ahzz), single-handedly revived colorful, exquisitely detailed clothing that harked to the rich hippie looks of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Talk about trickle down. The ethereal Voyage look was imitated by everyone from inexpensive Los Angeles designers to trendy chain stores like Club Monaco. No couture shot went ‘round the world with comparable impact.

Another apologia for couture is the design laboratory theory, which maintains that couture is the only place were there are no commercial compromises, where the designer-as-artist can experiment. But the pull between the creative and the commercial is precisely what often separates the real designers from the pretenders. Designers shouldn’t create without caring about costs or sales any more than professional basketball players should ignore playing to win. If athletes played just for the sport of it, they’d be amateurs, wouldn’t they?

A list of fashion giants who don’t create couture includes Giorgio Armani, the world’s biggest-selling designer; Ralph Lauren; Donna Karan; and Dolce & Gabbana. They manage to design without using couture as a research and development wing.

“There can be a laboratory-of-ideas element to the couture,” Middleton said, “but I don’t think that should be overstated.” In reality, every collection of every designer at any level functions as a trial run.

Those who have seen and worn couture point out that it provides a haven for a nearly extinct tradition of craftsmanship. Nicole Fischelis, fashion director of Saks Fifth Avenue said, “There’s a company in Paris that does nothing but make feathers for the couture. The attention to detail is remarkable. Couture is very much about quality and the beauty of craft.”

Yet after all the paeans to art and creativity have been sung, the real rationale behind couture’s continued existence can be found closer to the bottom line. That is its role as a global marketing vehicle, a flashy loss-leader for sprawling fashion businesses.

“In the last few years, the clients have become less important, and in the fashion press we were talking about couture as a marketing tool,” Paris-based Middleton said.

*

The fairy dust of a celebrated designer’s talent sparkles on perfume and cosmetics, hosiery, handbags, costume jewelry and underwear--all those ancillary products that make design houses piles of money. It is a phenomenon of modern consumerism that the simple act of buying a scarf can give a woman the exciting illusion that she has something in common with the stratospherically wealthy women who buy couture clothes from the same designer.

To support this delusion, couture must cast quite a spell.

“The couture is a way for a designer to say, ‘This is my dream,’ ” Middleton said. “And as a woman at one of the houses said to me, ‘That sells a lot of lipstick.’ ”

John Galliano, who designed Givenchy for a year before ascending to the throne at Christian Dior, best understands the showmanship high fashion can deliver. Even his ready-to-wear shows are eccentric masterworks, giddily decadent and maniacally over the top. As if the clothes weren’t sensational enough, Galliano directs his models to swoon about the runway like neurasthenic Tennessee Williams heroines. Costumed animals and chorus boys, dressed as gypsy tango dancers one season, half-naked Nijinski sprites another, move about the gaudy scenery.

Come to think of it, the couture shows just might make great television, because they feature clothes so fantastic they approach high camp. Add a strain of model lust already rampant in much of the audience, and producer Jastrow might have found the antidote to summer reruns. It’s hard to argue with the allure of a teenage beauty from Kansas City tarted up like a courtesan from the last fin de siecle.

But if couture and its trappings are a hit on TV, the audience least enamored of the spectacle it has become are the paying clients.

“I stopped going to the shows,” Judy Price, president of Avenue Magazine said. Price has been buying couture suits, gowns and dresses for more than 20 years. “The designers send me a tape of the show,” she said. “It’s so theatrical that when I look at the tape, I say there isn’t a way in the world I’m going to buy anything. Then they bring the collections to New York at the end of September, and the clothes look very different up close.”

Major couture houses do much of their real selling by traveling to New York and London, where clients make appointments to view the clothes in hotel suites. With a fitter in tow, the directrice of couture will pack her trunks and follow the money anywhere demand seems serious. So much for the romance of the shows.

Price bought her first couture dress, a Pierre Cardin, when she was a 22-year-old researcher at Time magazine making $7,500 a year. “I love sculpture and lithographs and paintings, and I look at couture as just an extension of that,” she said. “Couture fits like a glove. You can’t imagine that something would fit like that or how beautiful the fabrics are. But you know it’s impossible to get into a couture gown or cocktail dress by yourself. The way they go on is so intricate that it reminds me of another time, when a woman had a maid to help her get dressed. “

So irrelevant or not, assuming the cash, the maid, a respect for tradition and a hunger for opulence and exclusivity are all in place, wouldn’t anyone want a wearable relic of fashion history? Fischelis of Saks thinks so.

“If you could afford it, wouldn’t you want a dream tuxedo pantsuit by Saint Laurent or a fabulous gown by Galliano? Of course you would. It’s the ultimate luxury, to have something made totally for you. There’s a magic to the couture.”