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subscribe to style file blog via RSSfree speech: hadley freeman on practical (yes, practical) couture
July 2, 2008 10:27 am
There’s a new trend emerging from couture fashion week and, for once, the word “new” before “trend” should be read literally. It is one so shocking, so daring, so completely surprising, and yet so totally logical that it even merits the phrase “heretofore unseen.” It is…practicality. Not, it has to be said, a word that is generally associated with couture. Couture, so the clichés usually go, is supposed to be a “laboratory” for designers, a place where they can indulge their every artistic whim without having to worry about funds and commerciality. In other words, want to show how you can make an oversize kimono accessorized with platform sandals so high they look like blocks of wood rather than shoes? You go for it, kiddo. Always dreamed of making a coat out of fox’s heads and crystals? Why the devil not?
But something is definitely changing.
Although there is some showboating still going on (to cut it out completely threatens media coverage), it’s still far from the full story. This week, I’ve seen clothes you can actually envisage people wearing. At Dior, probably the purveyor of the most extreme form of couture in the past, there were simple beige cocktail dresses. At Chanel, there were just beautifully cut, daintily embellished suits and slim-fitting evening gowns. At Armani, there were trouser suits—trouser suits! As in something a lady could wear to an office (I’m guessing most buyers of couture don’t actually go to an office, but you get the point).
But this doesn’t signify that designers are kowtowing to a changing economic climate and diluting their designs. Quite the opposite: It suggests that people are actually BUYING the clothes. The newspapers may be full of dire predictions about the economy, but the truth is that although the masses may be feeling the pinch, there is a small elite—mostly in Russia and the Far East—that is getting rich beyond anyone’s imagination. Moreover, this is a customer for whom forking over $40,000 for a frock really is achievable. But if their approach to money may seem fantastical, these people still want to wear the clothes, and an oversize kimono is just not going to work, not even at a Moscow ball. And so designers are no longer thinking of couture as something for themselves or their brand image. It’s now something to sell. At the Armani show, in between the requisite celebrities and fashion editors, I met a Thai princess who was there to (gasp) shop. Forget about high hems suggesting a confident state of world of affairs: the real fashion/economy indicator of an increasingly unbalanced world is the couture trouser suit.
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