Haute Couture: Fantasy, Gatekeepers & That 47-Metre Swirl
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Down the Rabbit Hole
It started, like all good bad ideas, with an innocent late-night thumb-scroll. One moment I’m in bed, the next I’m neck-deep in TikToks of Alexander McQueen’s Givenchy show from autumn ’99. There she is: a model gliding by in black tulle, 100,000 beads, an Elizabethan ruff, hips caged in netting—basically Hamlet meets nightclub. Kendall Jenner just re-wore the thing at the Met Gala and it hasn’t aged a minute. Haute couture, you seductive time-traveller.
Problem: I’m no insider. When I asked Chanel and Dior for press photos, the replies were so frostily polite I needed mittens to open the emails. That was April; the silence since has been deafening. Apparently my inbox isn’t Vogue enough. Couture isn’t just luxury—it’s a filter system.
Dress Code: Museum vs. Zoom
Couture in real life is tricky. Gianni Versace’s 1997 mesh gown—golden chain mail, Swarovski galaxies, Byzantine crosses—looks divine opposite a 12th-century reliquary at the Louvre. On a Monday morning Teams call? Less so. Try muting yourself while wearing Constantinople on your clavicle.
The museum labels were bolted so low I had to genuflect just to read them; after two bruised knees I gave up and simply admired the clothes. Detail research, I decided, could wait for the exhibition catalogue and a latte. Karl Lagerfeld once insisted couture “belongs to the moment, not the museum,” yet here we are, reverently filing past gowns like pilgrims at a textile altar.
Couture or Content?
Balenciaga’s Demna pushed the point last season: Look 39 was 47 metres of black nylon whipped round a guest in 30 minutes, then unwrapped and packed away forever. Performance art? Disposable fashion? Both? When the “hand” part of haute handwork vanishes under synthetic yardage, you start craving the old-school métiers—plumasserie, pliage, 800-hour embroidery sessions fuelled by espresso and tendonitis.
Since 1945, “Maison de Couture” has been a protected term. The rules: at least 15 full-time petites mains, an atelier in Paris, and 35 new, made-to-measure looks per season. Fewer than 25 houses on Earth still qualify; the client list hovers around 4,000 people, give or take a bored oligarch’s wife. They are fashion’s equivalent of black-card centurions.
Scarcity Sells
And yet—ten million #hautecouture posts on Instagram. Couture is everywhere and nowhere, Schrödinger’s evening gown. The rarer the product, the louder the reposts, the hotter the desire. Possess a couture look and you’re signalling not just wealth but membership in a realm where private fittings resemble minor royal coronations. The rest of us get a backstage pass via the camera roll.
The Instagram Paradox
Worth paraded dresses on live models in the 1850s; today we’ve merely swapped candlelight for ring lights. Social feeds gush runway clips because video is the algorithm’s favourite snack. More action, more spectacle, more chances to go viral. The word “democratisation” gets thrown around, but as Susan Sontag warned, photography turns the world into a department store-cum-museum—everything on display, nothing truly ours. Millions can double-tap a McQueen clip; only a handful will ever feel those 100,000 beads brush their skin.
Final Stitch
So where does that leave the rest of us? Probably in the museum gift shop buying the postcard. And yet the spell endures. Couture is fashion’s impossible object: too precious for the office, too expensive for the masses, too dazzling to ignore. Its contradictions—hand-sewn yet hyper-digital, ultra-rare yet ultra-visible—are exactly what make it irresistible.
Maybe that’s the point. Couture isn’t designed to fit our lives; it’s designed to make our lives feel, for a split second, wildly insufficient. And if the only ticket inside is a late-night scroll into McQueen’s fever dream, then so be it. Just try not to bruise your knees on the way down.
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