What is the point of haute couture? As the Pre-Fall collections continue to trickle out, and the menswear shows wrap up, couture starts tonight with Atelier Versace in Paris. Since everything tends to mush into everything else as far as shows are concerned these days, it’s worth remembering that this round of collections is the only branch of fashion—other than fast fashion, ironically—that deals with making clothes for the season it’s showing in. So this week, we’ll be looking at collections whereby a woman, a very well-off woman, may survey her choices in January, place her orders, have a couple of fittings, and then have her handmade wardrobe delivered in time for weddings and other summer social engagements. That service is always carried out privately; neither clients, nor the houses want to disclose anything as vulgar as the money changing hands, although, riding the boom in emerging markets—China, the Middle East, India—Valentino, Christian Dior, and Chanel all say they’ve been seeing new customers and growing sales. But for Spring, haute couture takes on its most publicly understandable face: It becomes the competitive arena for dressing the stars at the Academy Awards, which fall on February 28.
This year’s Oscar nominees for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress include names whose relationships with couture houses have long been cemented. It’s the strongest likelihood that Cate Blanchett will be wearing Armani Privé as she contends against a Christian Dior–clad Jennifer Lawrence, while Rooney Mara might turn once more to Givenchy, which she wore while launching her career with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in 2011. Chanel, Valentino, Giambattista Valli, and Elie Saab will be looking to dress everyone else: Brie Larson, Charlotte Rampling, Saoirse Ronan, Alicia Vikander, Rachel McAdams, Kate Winslet.
The Academy Awards are a time when the world expects stars to look like stars, the set tableau of gowns and borrowed diamonds that has become a massive publicity-generating convention. To that extent, red carpet content has largely parted ways with avant-garde fashion, but will anything change this year? And should it?
Laying aside the point that, to bored fashion eyes, it would be refreshing to see more actresses breaking away from the mono-look of the strapless gown, there are the vexing questions over what choices might look appropriate when there are so many troubles in the world. The couture shows are taking place amid high security in a Paris still tensed after the terrorist massacre of November 13. International stock markets are nervy on news of faltering growth in China. The haute couture world has its own problems: Christian Dior again has no creative director. And the gilding has already been chipped off the aura of this year’s Oscars by the protest against the whiteness of the nominee lists. If black actresses decide to stay away, the evening will look poorer all round—losing some of fashion’s very best dressers, as well as, of course, great movie talent.
So hitting the right note, reading the mood, must be on the minds of all the couturiers as they prepare their collections. Finding sensitive responses to the times we live in is their expertise, after all. But what will we see? Something simpler, quieter, and less ostentatious? A chance for tailoring to make its presence felt? That would be no comedown. For an actress, choosing looks imbued with elegance and reserve would constitute the canniest route to standing out on a red carpet jammed with trains and crinolines—and the skills of the couturiers take simplicity to its highest point of perfection.
Still, only one thing’s certain, both for fashion and for the movie industry: The shows will go on, as they always have, through wars and financial crashes. Down the long perspective of history, the relationship between couture and movie-making can be argued to have a valid social function in the hardest of times: holding hands to offer escapist fantasies. For fashion fanatics, the next few days will offer the sheer orgiastic visual pleasure of looking close up at the inventiveness of teeny-weeny fragile techniques and being knocked out by grand sweeping volumes and color combinations of retina-vibrating intensity.
Nonetheless, many will ask: What is the moral justification for holding a three-day ceremonial of dresses and diamonds for the superrich and the super-famous? Beauty, creativity, and artistic merit are arguably defensible in their own rights, values that should not be defeated by terrorism or anything else. But the social relevance of haute couture has a greater claim on a reality that matters: It is an employer of thousands, not just the seamstresses and tailors who work at the houses in Paris, in Milan (Versace), and in Rome (Valentino), but the specialists who make the embroidery, the beads, the feathers, the hats, the shoes and bags, and others who weave the fabric, who dye it, and produce the fine raw materials. Few of us will ever think of the down-to-earth facts of the workforce and the families who make a living in unemployment-hit Europe because this apparent dreamworld exists, but in a time like this, that is just as worth applauding as the finale laps of every collection we’ll be seeing this week.
Photo: Jennifer Lawrence in Dior Haute Couture, Alicia Vikander in Valentino Haute Couture, Cate Blanchett in Armani Prive, Saoirse Ronan in Valentino Haute Couture, Rooney Mara in Givenchy Haute Couture, Brie Larson in Giambattista Valli Haute Couture.
The post Why the Haute Couture Shows Are (Still) Worth Applauding appeared first on Vogue.