Luxury slowdown? Not at haute couture
Alessandro Michele made his couture debut at Valentino and Schiaparelli revived the corset
Valentino creative director Alessandro Michele, the Italian designer who formerly ushered maximalism back into fashion and helped transform Gucci into a €10bn powerhouse between 2015 to 2022, was evidently born for haute couture. He made his debut on that stage on the penultimate night of couture week in Paris, in a show called “Vertigineux” — meaning “breathtaking”, “dizzy”.
The name was apt, inspired by the idea of using lists to form order in chaos and the Italian philosopher Umberto Eco’s essay on that subject. Models in taut, voluminous and excessively ruffled dresses and capes walked out against a black screen that flashed the look number and a running ticker tape of the words that informed each look: boarding school, uniform, plissé, Goethe, et cetera. Silhouettes ran the gamut of costume history, drawing on the 16th- and 18th-century court dresses of Queen Elizabeth and Marie Antoinette respectively, the harem trousers of the late Belle Époque, and the sharp-shouldered jackets and narrow skirts of 1940s Hollywood.
Theatrical, imaginative and ambitious in scale, the looks were also firmly rooted in the Valentino archives of the ’60s and ’70s. There were splashes of cardinal red, while black-and-white polka dots made an appearance on a cropped evening jacket and a ruffled ball dress. A diaphanous chiffon floral-print dress worn by Anjelica Huston in a 1972 shoot was reimagined as a robe à la française with a wide skirt draped over panniers. But the collection was more costume than clothes, and Michele’s exuberant, expansive, more-is-more interpretations lacked the beauty and elegance that have long comprised the essence of the house.
This and the week’s other couture collections were unveiled as luxury groups wrestle with a year-long spending slowdown, particularly acute among young consumers turned off by the recent hike in luxury prices.
But the sector-wide slowdown has not affected haute couture, says Sidney Toledano, former chief executive of LVMH Fashion Group, who spoke to the FT backstage at Dior in his capacity as a member of the executive committee of the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode. “What is suffering is accessible luxury, not the high end,” he said. “The high-end customers [still] have high [spending] power. They buy haute couture because they want quality, they want detail, they want creativity.”
Haute couture represents the pinnacle of high fashion, and while not a significant business in its own right, designers and executives say it is beneficial for strengthening ties with top-tier clients, or VICs; for recruiting talent across all levels of the organisation; and above all for boosting the image of the house. “Who has a big fragrance business?” said Toledano. “J’adore? No 5? Haute couture names. Because it’s the dream.”
There were more than a few Texan accents among the ranks of clients lining Schiaparelli’s white-carpeted catwalk at the Petit Palais. Designer Daniel Roseberry hails from Dallas, and he knows how to woo the long-standing couture clients of that region, with their oil millions. They looked fabulous trading air-kisses in the sinuous black and heavy gold of past couture collections (a combination Schiaparelli has, impressively, come to own).
Drawing on the myth of Icarus and the ultra-feminine forms of mid-century haute couture, Roseberry poured his models into flesh-coloured dresses with improbably small-waisted corsets, with padded hips and necklines swooping low enough to reveal the bras beneath. Founder Elsa Schiaparelli’s bestselling fragrance, Shocking, mimicked the curvaceous silhouette of American actress Mae West, so there was a strong archival link here.
“Whenever we’ve tried to do a bias-cut dress without a silhouette, it doesn’t feel like us,” Roseberry explained backstage. “So we took a silk georgette dress and put it on top of a shaped bustier.”
It was excellently and meticulously executed, drawing on early 19th-century embroidery techniques — liquid Japanese bugle beads, satin stitch — made modern by an almost minimalist restraint in decoration and purity of line. There was however something jarring about seeing models laced into corsets small enough to wrap their hands around later followed by the designer himself, dressed in a polo shirt and Carhartt jeans. “The things I felt were creatively correct three years ago are different today,” Roseberry offered. “I wanted people to be really focused on the work and the craft and what the ateliers can do.”
There was a keen sense of history in this and many of the season’s other collections. At Dior, designer Maria Grazia Chiuri turned to the brief two-year period, from 1958 to 1960, when a young Yves Saint Laurent succeeded Christian Dior as creative director, aged just 21, and introduced the light, simple, youthful Trapeze line. (His tenure there ended when he was called up for military service.) A second reference point was Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — all of which made her look hard at the silhouettes in this collection, Chiuri said backstage before the show.
She recut the house Bar jacket, Mad Hatter-style, into a frock coat paired with a black mini skirt and ballet flats that laced above the knee; teamed ruffled bodices in broderie anglaise with pannier skirts cut away to reveal calves and thighs (black bows referenced Saint Lauren); and draped bronze and gold evening dresses over caged crinolines, built traditionally in horsehair coir and left uncovered but for fine ribbons of floral embroidery that brushed the ground. A neutral palette kept it cohesive. It was one of Chiuri’s stronger couture collections for Dior to date.
Armani Privé, the couture arm of Giorgio Armani, is neither historic nor exactly modern — aesthetically it sits in its own camp of diaphanous sheer silk trousers worn under tunics or soft unstructured jackets (for day) or beaded (for evening). What was nice here was the combination of lightness and freedom of movement, which was largely missing among all the waspish corsets and stiff crinolines found in other collections. And the embroidery was top notch. “It may not be to my taste,” a seatmate observed, “but you can see why the man became a couturier.”
The models were however strikingly thin. Blame Ozempic, or perhaps it’s a sign of a nascent reactionism within the fashion industry, a refusal to kowtow to cancel culture and unofficial watchdogs such as Instagram account Diet Prada. Plus-sized models were almost non-existent at couture week — a rare exception was Paloma Elsesser, who made an appearance at Ludovic de Saint Sernin’s guest collection for Jean Paul Gaultier.
Jean Paul Gaultier began taking on a new guest designer for each couture collection after Gaultier himself retired in 2020, and it has been a surprising success, bringing freshness and novelty to a house with a rich archive and helping to keep its fragrances on the bestseller lists. At 34, Ludovic de Saint Sernin is the youngest designer to step into the role, and he delivered a sensuous, mythical and gender-fluid collection that drew on mermaids, sailors and waterfowl for inspiration (the title was “Le Naufrage” or “Shipwreck”).
Viktor & Rolf is another house bankrolled by a lucrative fragrance business, and whose designers, Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren, don’t take couture too seriously. In fact they often approach it with humour, flipping dresses upside down or adorning them with emojis, and this season they showed the same quintessential French look — a trenchcoat, a white blouse, blue trousers — 24 ways: shrinking or widening or elongating sleeves and shoulders and trains to dramatically change the silhouette. The results were neither beautiful nor wearable, but then they are not destined for the backs of the uber rich — the main clients for their pieces are museums.
Chanel is between designers, announcing in December that Bottega Veneta’s Matthieu Blazy will soon be stepping in the role made vacant by Virginie Viard, who left the house last year. The studio should be proud of the collection they produced here, which was light and simple and unmistakably Chanel with its tweed skirt suits and long pastel dresses, stripped of the cumbersome cuts and cluttery gold jewellery and belts of the past few years. These clothes weren’t exciting or challenging, but they were timeless — pieces a Chanel client could invest in and wear forever.
Also making his debut this week, but in ready-to-wear, was Lanvin’s Peter Copping, formerly the creative director of Oscar de la Renta and Nina Ricci, who for three years quietly directed Balenciaga’s couture collections under creative director Demna. For two years Lanvin has been without a designer and its future looked bleak.
But under Copping, Lanvin is now in safe hands. For his debut he proposed a full wardrobe, comfortable and luxurious, drawing on the Lanvin archives and founder Jeanne Lanvin’s own wardrobe. There were generously cut flannel and tweed coats for men and women, knit dresses with sculptural shoulders and sleeves, and perfect cocktail dresses — a category that has not been well-catered for in recent years — of gold lamé and thin grey grosgrain ribbon stitched together. It all looked comfortable enough to sleep in. Though categorised as ready-to-wear, the collection was more like demi-couture.
Some models carried bags: totes in chocolate and burgundy calf-hair, and leather bucket bags punctuated with metal eyelets, which Copping said are an important part of the strategy to restore Lanvin’s fortunes. He added that he was happy to have a network of 30 stores to build a direct business through; at Nina Ricci he had two.
Copping acknowledged he is starting at the house during a challenging time for luxury. “But I am quite happy to start this during a slowdown. Because for me there’s only one way, and hopefully that’s going to be up.”