oh couture you say

Yeah, it's couture season, the amuse bouche to the all out fashion binging that will come up very soon with fall 09 fashion week starting in February. So far, the great majority of media surrounding the Paris shows are pertaining to the appropriateness of showing $40,000 dresses during a recession. Well, mes petits choux, couture doesn't really care. As I have intimated before, couture is the grand hand of a fashion house lending fantasy and escape to the grind of the RTW calender. Not to mention that not everyone is feeling the tightening of their Dior crystal purse strings and there will, inevitably, always be a Middle Eastern princess or Oil heiress to support this art form in cloth. My main point of interest is the Chanel show. Not because OMG Chanel or LOLZ Krazy Karl. But because the hats and hair wreaths were made from recycled paper from the Chanel offices. The entire collection was as well inspired by paper, crisp white and inky blacks, but the hats just put it from elusive and aspirationally beautiful to hyper modern, current, and still historically enduring. If it were up to me and my bank account I would wear the head-pieces with a see through tee shirt, washed down black jeans, silver flats, and a navy blazer. You know for my spring 09' "greco-roman sculpture goes all Pygmalion and had to rush getting ready for its first day of liberal arts private school". That's the money shot.

100th post! all about the inadequacies of this batch of couture shows!

how riveting you say! well get over it, this shit is rubbin' me raw. so, only about 30 women in the world purchase couture, most being from european/middle eastern origin. thus, generally, couture shows are made without profit in mind. if someone wants to commission a $40,000 dress from galliano that's cool, but couture shows most often exist to put the art and whimsy back into fashion. the pure, base, sensual desire for expressing any idea you can think of; shooting for the stars, if you will. it is not practical and it is oft not even wearable without help getting dressed from a friend or two. which is why, this year's offerings were a let down. they were either unimaginative or referentially dated or even both. most veered more towards being, gasp, RTW than couture. yes, chanel showed models in flats ( quelle shoque!) and had them loping out of a giant stone chanel jacket, but the clothes looked more like they belonged on the set of gossip girl than on a museum pedestal. also, i have a problem with models in flats, why make the owners of some of the world's most unique and beautiful collection of genes look like normal women schlepping around? maybe it's to be blase about luxury, but really, those girls just look like the awkward teens they really are, which is disconcerting as i want my RTW models to be inaccessible and the clothes to be irreverently accessible and, therefore, my couture models to look like they are from an entirely different planet with clothes that are made of daydreams, dirty alleyways, and rainbow ponies! mass pictures below, form your own opinions, but mine are:
yawn chanel & lacroix (only because they look dated and done)
chanel:












lacroix:












tiiight: givenchy, dior, and galliano (he dressed coco rocha as a MERMAID! a MERMAID! how perfect is that!?)

givenchy:


dior & coco rocha as galliano's mermaid:

so creessy

pre-info: just this year designers have shown pre-fall runway looks. this is new. new new. and entirely retail, not vision/design, driven. you see, in real life time, january-early march and late june-early august are death for the retail world; it's those times referred to as 'winter' and 'summer'. generally, no high-end or directional lines set in stores in those months so buyers rely on late or replenishment shipments of already owned goods to carry them through to the big fashion seasons of fall and spring, but now with the release of pre-fall retailers have 'fresh' goods to bolster their profits in the summer death months. this can also be construed as an optimistic look for the next years economy with designers betting on people wanting to buy medium weight coats and pre-fall-y luxury goods in july. fyi: there is no pre-spring because resort exists, but it generally is not a big enough draw to be carried in stores outside of the 3 b's: bloomingdales, bergdorf, and barney's. so far only a handful of designers have shown pre-fall looks, most showing 12-24 looks posed in look-book/resort style and true to their purpose they are more conservative and would be appealing to a bigger selection of potential shoppers. however, chanel showed as well, and it's as if karl lagerfeld said 'homie dont play that' . chanel showed 64 (sixty four!) separate looks, menswear included and is said to be influenced by amy winehouse. some of the looks seem to be influenced, at least a little, by marc by marc jacobs circa 2003, but that is just me, you can compare yourself. he said she said aside, 64 looks is a ridiculous amount of clothing to produce, even just as samples for a runway show, especially when chanel already shows full 60+ look shows for fall and spring with resort clocking in with over 40 looks. so creesy.

Signe Chanel

There is a documentary on YouTube that gives an inside look at how top haute-couture home on Rue de Cambon cranks out collections not with little double C emblazoned elves like I would want to believe, but with the hard work of very skilled seamstresses, embroiderers, pattern makers, illustrators, and one Karl Lagerfeld. The attention to detail is mind-bending, even in just the first episode a seamstress rips out two rows of beading and re-constructs a hyper-intricate dress for a haute-couture client who demands the dress be delivered to her (at the Ritz, naturellement) in less than an hour. There are a gajillion parts, but they are all sub-titled if your ears have trouble with the rapid-fire weirdly lilting and dramatic french of the narrator.


(Swiped from Fashionologie)