"Cost is not an issue.” I am sitting in the Plaza Athénée hotel in Paris, talking to three South American couture customers in the hope that I might uncover some of the mysteries of the world of high fashion. Who buys? How much? Is the credit crunch biting? “You mean you pay whatever?” I ask. The ladies look at each other and smile. “You realise,” the youngest says, “buying couture is not like buying other clothes. You don’t buy, wear for a season, then throw away.”
“Oh, no,” her friend interjects. “At couture, you buy for life. Some seasons you buy a lot, others nothing.” “A lot?” I query. “Maybe three or four evening gowns, say from Lacroix or Elie Saab. A silk undercoat from Chanel. Couture is made to last. I send things back to be altered as the fashion moves and my figure changes.”
“So, how much do you pay?” Laughter. “You are an English gentleman. You cannot ask a lady that!” “Would your husband tell me?” More laughter. “He would hit you on the nose!” And that’s as far as I got. But there are ways of working out probable costs. When, for example, a couture evening dress is sent out to be photographed by a magazine, the insurance is usually about £100,000.
So, what about the customer base — and are more clothes being ordered? I asked Daphne Guinness, one of the few British women who regularly buys at this level. “It depends,” she says. “Last season, I bought nothing. This time, there are some things at Chanel that I like. I always look to fill holes in my wardrobe. I love Dior.” The Dior show cost £2m to put on. “Rich people haven’t all gone into hiding, you know.
W “Anyhow,” Guinness continues, “the big corporations have kept young designers like Gareth Pugh out for far too long. Maybe they can get a look-in now. And of course couture will survive. The world needs to be filled with romance and otherworldly dreams.”
So, who is buying? Chanel’s fashion president, Bruno Pavlovsky, tells me that, since 2007, demand for couture at Chanel has increased so much that a new atelier has opened; they now have 200 couture specialists. “We are putting a lot of resources behind this current collection,” he says. “We sense a great need for couture at this moment. We expect good sales worldwide.”
It’s important to remember, though, that sales of the showstoppers in any house are usually confined to no more than three per continent. The purpose of couture is publicity, which stimulates the market for less stratospherically priced clothes ranges, beauty and make-up, all bearing the company name.
Middle East sales are static. Surprisingly, all houses report keen interest from America. Russia is wobbling. Asian interest is not high. But it is the French who buy couture in serious numbers, often from the smaller couturiers such as Dominique Sirop, Stéphane Rolland and Franck Sorbier, who, along with Elie Saab, have healthy sales because they give sophisticated working women individual clothes at prices their high salaries can cope with, and which fit their lifestyles.
In terms of quality of fashion, it was a better couture week than most. The most dramatic statement was at Dior, where John Galliano continued along his tactful path of using Christian Dior’s thinking as the basis for his own statement. The mood was a continuation of 1950s Dior (though there was a spectacular new take on Bar, the iconic black-and-white suit in Dior’s first collection in 1947), all flouncy full skirts and needle-thin elegance. And, like the maestro, Galliano focused on corsets and the underpinnings of couture.
At Chanel, Lagerfeld gave us refinement, delicacy and a monochrome palette. It was very Chanel, personifying her comment that “as a woman advances in years, she should wear white . . . White smooths out everything”. At Gaultier, things looked up after a few lacklustre seasons. This was high-camp high fashion of the sort Paris does best. Razor-sharp tailoring, straight-cut shoulders and Gaultier’s trademark lingerie looks — very 1980s. More delicate but just as consummate, Christian Lacroix referenced the theatre, circus, corrida and a whore’s parlour in a gloriously colourful collection.
Of the others, Versace Atelier was a virtuoso performance of brilliant cutting and fabulous colour; Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy presented a beautifully feminine parade of brilliant shapes and cutting in a preponderance of beige tones. The same soft shades were clearly up the street of the customers at Elie Saab, which is why it is the only fashion house in Paris with seriously substantial sales at this level.
To quote Chanel from the 1920s: “The poetry of couture was responsible for cocktails, balls, dinner parties. The champagne flowed . . . we walked on a floor strewn with orchids.” Let’s hope couture can pull it off again to brighten these cash-strapped times.
CAN LUXURY SURVIVE THE CREDIT CRUNCH?
In his new book, The Luxury Strategy (Kogan Page £30), the marketing expert Jean-Noël Kapferer says brands such as Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Cartier, whose core profits come from their high-end goods, should come through the credit crunch unscathed. Those who rely heavily on sales of handbags, make-up and cheaper accessories will be harder hit.
“The luxury brand is the ordinary of extraordinary people and the extraordinary of ordinary people. Slashing prices makes you more for ordinary people. And that’s the beginning of the end.” Eek. “Luxury is about timelessness,” he goes on, saying it’s no coincidence that some of the most successful brands are family-run. “Cartier will tell you they’ve been through two world wars, one economic depression, three slumps . . . They take the long-term view.”
His advice: don’t panic. And employ counterintuitive strategies. “Raise your prices. Don’t pander to your customers’ wishes. Make it more difficult for your clients to buy. And don’t compare yourself with others. Gauguin did not compare himself with Renoir.”
Then he quotes a high-up executive at Mercedes-Benz: “ ’Our job is to make people dream of new products. As soon as they have money, they will buy. Life goes on.’ ”
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