In Celebration of Couture

In celebration of the couture fashion weeks, here are TWO wonderful videos that transports one through the couture experience. Dior is really synonymous with Couture since it's inception. From the moment it opened it's doors in 1946, Christian Dior (now simply Dior) has amazed the world with their craft and attention to detail. Couture, or really Haute Couture translates from French for "high sewing". The "haute" translates as "high". It is the creation of exclusively custom-fitted clothing. It is hand made from start to finish. It is not mass produced but more like the female equivalent of men's bespoke. It is of the finest quality and done with attention to detail. It is only done by the most experienced of craftsmen and craftswomen. It is very TIME CONSUMING and very, very expensive. A couture dress can be as cost as much as a house. It is like purchasing a Monet. The clientele that buy it are in the upper stratosphere of economic privilege. The haute couture garment is made taking into account the wearers measurements, body stance and figure flaws. The designs may be deceptively simple to look at but often very painstakingly produced. Budget is not of consideration in couture. Artistic impact is of the utmost importance. Many garments utilize precious jewels, including diamonds, in the embroidery for maximum impact and reflectivity.

 

The Haute in the Haute

From a legal standpoint, the words Haute Couture are defined by the Chambre de commerce et d'industrie de Paris. This regulatory body determines which houses can be declared "haute couture". To be legally "haute", a designer must meet a few simple criteria. 

• Each design must be made-to-order for a private client and require more than one fitting.
• The workroom must have a staff of 15 employees working full time in Paris
• The workroom must also employ 20 technical staff working in at least one workroom
• The designer must produce 50 original designs for the public in a collection twice a year.

Few fashion houses have the mean to be considered "haute", however to be considered couture is another story. Couture gets slung around a lot and is often mistake for a luxury ready-to-wear. The two are very different. A high end, ready-to-wear (or pret-a-porter) is often misinterpreted as haute couture and many will align the term with couture. The two are not the same. Most, but not all, couture houses have a ready-to-wear collection that is available to the affluent public. However, that trend is really changing particularly in the last year. Economists take note. Two houses, most recently  Viktor and Rolf and Jean Paul Gaultier have dropped their lucrative ready-to-wear lines and to concentrate on couture. Other fashion houses like Versace have added couture lines to their ready to wear. Thus, there are uber rich shopping as the economic divide has widened. 

The two videos posted are from Dior. The garments are from two distinctly different creators. The first is under the creative vision of the current director Raf Simons. When one looks at it, it appear as a simple top with a striped poof skirt. Don't be deceived. Watch this creation being made and you will see, it is not so simple. 

The second video from Dior is under the creative leadership of John Galliano. A master is creative vision, he has re-entered the design world after a long absence. I can't express how much he was truly missed in his absence. The fashion world was a bit dull and bleak without something to look forward to each season. His new collection for Maison Martin Margiela Margiela was outstanding and showed off his creative talents.

Influences in Fashion – Art

One instantly thinks of art and fashion and probably recalls Yves Saint Laurent’s homage collections to different contemporary artists. He exquisitely reproduced painting as walking canvases of clothing inspired by Matisse. He found inspiration in art and reproduced that in many collections. A younger fashionista may instantly recall Galliano’s collections of couture inspired by Baroque painters Van Dyk and Vermeer from the 2007 Dior Collection. This is really just scratching the surface. It also opens up a Pandora’s Box.

Many designers from the very early 20^th century have been struggling with this question of how art applies to fashion.

• Some choose to replicate the art like YSL, others view it as a leaping off point in how the fabric applies to the body.
• Some then look at the body, what is it and how much do we cover it as the body is art?
• Other designers view the body as limiting and grapple with the idea of changing the body shape or what is the essence of clothing. These designers view fashion as their media, or body as their media or the body as the canvas on which to place “A” media and make art from the wearer and the object they are wearing.

Ya see why this opens up a Pandora’s Box? There is no right or wrong as fashion, like art is subjective. AND one person’s fashion is another person’s art?

And some painters looked at fashion and made it art which inspired other artists to create as well. So let’s start here as it is the most convoluted place to start.

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte – Seurat’s wonder. It plays with light and color. Breaking it down into components of basic color. A huge canvas viewed from a distance, it is a painting. When viewed from up close it is nothing more than dots of color and light. They play with the eye. He took the shape of women at the time and placed them as fundimental shapes. It is basic yet detailed at the same time. This was Impressionism changing how light reflected and refracted and looked to the eye. The question of light and the challenge of how the viewer sees light inspired many.

Jean Dunard was inspired by how light reflects and experimented with lacquer. She had seen Japanese lacquered objects and pondered the refractability of the light. She came up with Lamé — a cloth with a lacquered texture that reflects light. It glitters and sparkles. It inspired Vionnet to drape. She used it in garments where Cubism (where objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form) was applied to the body. She broke the fabric in to geometric forms or cut the fabric into cubes and based her design theories on a treatice of geometry and cubism.

Cubism was intensely popular. It was modern and new. It presented the viewer with a new visual construct of how to view things. Sonia Delaunay a painter, also designed textiles and adapted her abstract paintings into textiles and then into simple, easy garments. So this question of “art and clothing” really starts to dance and take hold. Other designers like Schiaparelli liked to dapple with this question as well. She enlisted Dadaists and Surrealists perspectives to help expand the vocabulary of fashion/art. Sometimes it was embracing the work of artists like Christian Bernard to creative a design. Other times, she converted conventional objects into new ways of wearing clothing like a shoe as a hat. (Dadaism was at it’s root an artistic expression of a rejection of an ideology that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality.) Thus a shoe as a hat, gloves as sleeves or accentuating the ribcage instead of hiding it supported the “theory” of dadasm. It was a new way to express art and clothing.

An extension of this could be seen through the work of designer Rei Kawadubo. She looked at the body from a new viewpoint: that is to free the body of it’s shape. She was inspired to recreate what people view as “the body” and rearrange the standard idea of what the body looks like in clothing. She tried to “deform” the body in a new way.

Other artists like Martin Margeila take a different approach in molding the body into a ‘standard’ shape that is obviously not real for the wearer, thus the body of the wearer is secondary in the garment… No matter what shape the body is in.

Take this a step further… Hussein Chalayan made a nifty little top made of wood and bolts. This challenged the concept not only the body, but what is the fabric that the body is wearing. One could look at early armor as a similar answer to this question but answered many years prior… but in this case, the garment requirement answered the question as the requirement of the garment was to be used in warfare. Chalayan later expanded this wearer requirement to include the question warmth in answering “what is the purpose of the garment to be worn?” He proposed a coat made of blankets.

With this in mind, the question of what is the purpose of the clothing can be taken and spun around. The new question is “what is the message the wearer or designer is wanting to give?” Opening up an artistic response almost similar to abstract expressionism where the action of the creation is the expression of art and fashion, not necessarily the garment itself. I put Yoshi Yamamoto’s more controversial work in line with abstract expressionism. It is not fabric, is is not really wearable. It is less an expression of clothing as it is more art.

One could say also say the expression of graffiti in cloth is perhaps also an solution to this question of expressionism. Vivienne Westwood has taken this expressionism and moved it into the realm of topical subjects with slogans of environmental protection and anti-consumerism printed on her clothing.

It is here that I must stop to pause. First to reflect on all of this as art really does inspire clothing on many levels. And secondly, I pause to this last entry of fashion and clothing as a sounding board or billboard for a message. I have never been a major fan of consumerism with trends of miscellaneously inspired/concocted clothing styles demanding purchase. I do have to take note with Westwood and her placing anti-consumerism slogans on clothing. Is this somehow supposed to provoke consumers to be inspired to buy? It is kind of a little bit oxymoronic or at least hypocritical.

Madeleine Vionnet Chronicle Books, San Francisco, CA 1998

Valerie Mendes, Amy De La Haye. 20^th Century Fashion. Thames & Hudson London/New York 2005

Kay Durland Spilker, Sharon Sadako Takeda. Breaking the Mode Skira Editore S.p.A. 2007

Akiko Fukai, Tamami Suoh, Miki Iwagami, Reiko Koga, Rii Nie. Fashion. A History from the 18^th to the 20^th Century. The Collection of the Kyoto Costume Institute. Taschen London, LA, Madrid, Paris, Tokyo 2006