Couture
Shock

I suppose you could say that my introduction to the rites and spells of Parisian haute couture occurred early on a Sunday morning, at the Valentino show, when the ladies in the front row suddenly, and pretty much in unison, folded their programs over and began to fan themselves ferociously with the gold and brown paper. The Valentino show was being held at nine-thirty in the morning for reasons of protocol so complicated that they resembled one of those nineteenth-century diplomatic negotiations, like the Schleswig-Holstein question, comprehensible to only three people in Europe. The cream of the fashion press had turned up anyway, although Anna Wintour and Suzy Menkes and the rest had the pained, aren’t-you-a-clever-boy-to-wake-me-up-this-early smiles otherwise seen only on parents of two-year-olds. The music had begun, Stella Tennant had come out (head angled, shoulders thrown back, hips a little forward, rolling the works) in ivory wool and silk chevron trousers with two patch pockets, an ivory blouse with matching lace, and a beige cashmere shawl bordered in lace, looking game despite the hour and all that lace. Then the ladies in the front row, the rich clients, began to fan. They fanned hard, expertly—my God, it’s hot in here—just the way veteran dé-flé watchers always do. And this was odd, because it was freezing cold inside the Salon Opéra at the Grand Hôtel: the coldest July in Paris anyone could recall; cassoulet and topcoat weather. But the ladies fanned as they always do, in the gasping heat of July at the collections.

I turned to a friend sitting next to me, a French television journalist, and directed at her my version of the French shrug-and-frown that means, Why on earth? She, in turn, made the French O with her mouth that means, Please, my friend, discard this elaborate pretense of naïveté. Then she shrugged too. “They are at the collections. It is July. They fan,” she said. She thought for a moment. “It is a reflex. We watch, therefore we fan. No. I fan, therefore I am.” Then she looked around the salon and made the encompassing shrug-and-pout-and-flex-your-hands-from-the-wrist French gesture that in the context meant that the apparent absurdity of the act of fanning yourself in the cold is no more absurd than the whole enterprise of traveling to Paris to look at clothes that you will never wear, displayed on models to whom you bear no resemblance, in order to help a designer get people who will never attend shows like this someday to buy a perfume or a scarf that will give them the consoling illusion that they have a vague association with the kind of people who do attend shows like this—even though the people who attend shows like this are the kind who fan themselves against July heat that happens not to exist. It is these formulations—packed tight with contradictions that spiral around, turn in on themselves, bite their own tails, and eventually come out dressed in taffeta and lace tulle—that give haute couture its charm, or, anyway, help it cast its spell.

Participating in the haute couture is more like entering a yacht in the America’s Cup than it is like opening a Seventh Avenue showroom: The collections are overseen by the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, which demands, among other things, that its members maintain a working atelier in Paris, and put on a show each season of no fewer than fifty costumes each. Belonging is an expensive, exacting business, and every year one more house just drops out. This season there were sixteen shows—about a thousand outfits, from Stella’s silky pants to the wedding dress at Saint Laurent. First an event and then a theme dominated the five days of the shows. The event was the separation of Gianfranco Ferré as head designer from the House of Dior, which was significant because it threw a major house into a “crisis,” and the theme was the crisis of haute couture. Of course, haute couture is always in crisis, like Cyprus or the New York theater. But by now the crisis has become almost existential; not even a hit will help. Even very, very rich women don’t buy bespoke clothes in Paris anymore, and the widely understood, though never openly articulated, justification for losing money in couture for the past twenty years or so—the loss leader justification—no longer works. By now, most fashionable people feel, the average woman who buys, say, a box of Pierre Cardin handkerchiefs is probably buying them less because of the glamorous association of Pierre Cardin haute couture than because of the glamorous association of Pierre Cardin socks and Pierre Cardin sunglasses. (As a consequence, Pierre Cardin, who seems to have figured this out, doesn’t even show his haute couture line in the défilés.)

Fashionable people have two contradictory theories to explain the persistence of couture despite its troubles—theories usually mentioned in succession and often in the same sentence. The first—a kind of Tang and Teflon explanation, which is promoted by the Chambre—is that haute couture is the R&D wing of the fashion business, an investment in its future, since the “techniques” and “styles” that the designers wheel out today will somehow affect the kind of clothes that people wear tomorrow. (Veteran explainers offering this view can make it sound as though the défilés were taking place in a particle accelerator.) The other, contradictory explanation is that haute couture is the living memory of French fashion, where vanishing standards of workmanship, craftsmanship, and imagination are kept alive as a necessary act of filial piety. When you point out that both these explanations can’t be true at the same time, you generally get in response a kind of Paris Zen. “Ah, you are right. Both things cannot be true at once. That is the point of haute couture,” one fashion prince explained to me. Then he walked off seraphically.

 

The haute couture remains a rite. There are the photographers, who push to get inside, and who form, on their bleachers, a little island of happy heterosexual lust amid two seas of becalmed aestheticism. They’re the only free men at the collections; they whoop, whistle, and call out to the models anything they feel like calling out to the models. (“They could come out dressed in paper bags for all I care,” one photographer said that morning as he looked over the Valentino program. “Well, plastic bags anyway.”) Then there are the models themselves, who can undress and dress again so quickly that when the show is over, they climb out of the last evening dress and are on the street, wearing jeans and T-shirts and Prada knapsacks, getting a taxi before the applause has stopped. And there are the fashionable people, lining up in order not to be allowed in. (The shows never start on time, or near it, but everybody comes to the security desk and waves the invitation anyway.)

It’s the clothes, of course, that differ from show to show. At Valentino the collection soon settles into a look—clothes in colors that the regular guy might describe as “sort of brown,” although a fashionable person might call them chestnut, chocolate, beige, coffee, and bronze. The sequence of styles is fixed. Day wear comes first, then what are still called, touchingly, cocktail dresses, and then evening wear. Usually a wedding dress comes last, but Valentino replaced it with a long red chiffon sheath. As the models come out, almost everyone in the room begins one task of translation or another. The press has the simple job of translating the descriptions of the clothes, which are written in fashionese, into ordinary language. Valentino’s program was relatively taciturn compared to most. Lacroix, for example, later in the week showed a “ ‘cold dawn’ shot razimir spiral sheath dress with ‘apricot’ and ‘melon’ kick pleat”). Still, even Valentino’s “Mordoré silk laminated ottoman pinstriped pantsuit, gold lace polo T-shirt, black cashmere shawl bordered in gold lace” became, in the margin of one journalist’s program, “beige slacks.” The garment industry people are looking for something—a range of colors, a shape, a new line—that they can translate from cashmere and laminated ottoman into cottons and synthetics and sell. They sketch shapes, which to the unpracticed eye all look more or less the same. A tight bodice with a big skirt represents evening wear; a short, tight jacket with big pleated flowing pants stands in for day wear. The few unattached, noncommercial, nonbuying spectators in the room are waiting for what they call a couture moment—a moment, the newcomer is assured, that is roughly equivalent to the moment in opera when the clouds of shlock lift and something crazily artificial becomes transporting.

Only the top fashion editors—at whom all the expense is in a way directed—cannot sketch or make notes, for fear of seeming rude. They leave that to their underlings and try to look interested and amused as each costume passes by. A haute couture défilé is an oddly heart-lifting occasion, inflected with hope. The fashion editors are hoping that one of the models’ dresses will give them a point, a theme, something to write about. The fashion merchants are hoping that one of the models’ dresses, suitably adapted, will make them a fortune. The aficionados are hoping that one of the models’ dresses will supply a couture moment. The photographers are hoping that one of the models’ dresses will fall off. The press scribbles. The photographers hoot. The ladies fan.

 

Most of the collections are shown either in the ballroom of the Hôtel InterContinental, which is long and narrow and mock grand siècle, or, like the Valentino show, in the ballroom of the Grand Hôtel, which is high and circular and Second Empire. On Sunday afternoon, though, every fashionable person has to find a taxi or get a lift all the way out to the periphery of Paris, where John Galliano is showing his fall collection for Givenchy at the Stade Français—the old French indoor sports arena. What no one at Givenchy has considered, though, is that holding the show in a stadium means holding the waiting period before the show outside the stadium—in the open air, where few fashionable people are inclined to spend a lot of the day and, as it happens on this Sunday, in a steady Paris drizzle too.

Things get ugly fast. “It is insupportable!” one distinguished-looking dowager is crying as the rain pelts her perfectly constructed face. “I have been a Givenchy client for decades, and now I am being made to stand outside, exposed to the wind, naked to the rain!”

“In the rain! In the rain!” the lady next to her cries out, and she goes on, “I too have been a client for a period of time.” She resists saying “decades,” despite its obvious pathetic force; she is a little younger than the first lady. “The thing is insupportable.”

“No! It is worse! It is a scandal!” the first lady cries, definitively. Insupportable is a bitter word in French, but scandal is a fighting one. Even the Givenchy guards at the chain-link gate, in their double-breasted jackets, are beginning to get uneasy. When the crowd gathered outside the Bastille, the trouble began after some old lady said the thing was a scandal.

At this point the fashion editor André Leon Talley comes up, pushing people aside on his way to the ritual “No, you see, I’ve been invited. What! You mean these people have too?” moment. André Leon Talley is a big guy, and for a second or two it seems likely that the guards are going to let him in. This makes the dowagers, standing behind me, plain crazy, and they charge, blind to the consequences. We are storming the Givenchy gates when the guards just give way: They open the gate and let everyone walk across the lawn toward the stadium. We file in, feeling vindicated, and take our seats. At least thirty more minutes pass before anything happens.

The Givenchy show, appropriately, takes as its subject the ever-popular fashion themes of decapitation and mass murder. Inside the stadium Galliano has constructed a Fragonard-like forest of feathery trees and dark ferns. Then, instead of sending the models one by one down a runway, he sends them out in groups, to wander around the artificial forest. The setting is meant to recall eighteenth-century French aristocratic life, and the dresses what became of it. The dress worn by Inès de la Fressange, for instance, is frankly described as an “ivory lace Empire Trench with blood pre-guillotine velvet sash.” All the girls are meant to look as if they were on their way to the tumbrels, and in fact the Revolutionary-era Empire dresses, with their long, columnar lines and soft, clinging bodices, in beaded ivories and reds and champagnes and olives and emeralds, are quite unreal in their loveliness. They are by far the most memorable “pure” design of the week and, toned down and deblooded, the obvious tip to become this autumn’s look.

 

Haute couture, everyone says, no longer has much to do with what normal women normally wear. The besetting sin of haute couture, though, is not unreality but corniness: not that it looks like things no women would actually wear but that it looks exactly like what your aunt Ida always wears “for best”—that shiny black thing, say, covered with sequins and accompanied by a little shoulder-hugging jacket.

This is a thought that occurs on Monday afternoon, at the Ungaro show—a collection of pantsuits and long dresses so standard and uneventful that it gives you a lot of time to think. There is a reason, you realize, that even women who could afford to do not wear what the models in Ungaro are wearing: dresses of floor-length flowing lace. The reason is that fancy clothes look fancy, and fanciness now looks primitive. So many of the clothes, in their elaborately ostentatious materials, just seem regressive, overrich, brutally obvious. In feeling, they date back to a time when a complicated display of expensive materials was meant to be crushing evidence of wealth. Now wealth, wanting to crush, likes subtler evidence; that’s why more wealthy women buy Brice Marden squares than haute couture evening clothes.

Ungaro, though, has intelligently taken his show off the runway too and put it on the floor—in principle, so that you can see the detail work on the clothes, but with the side effect that you can also see a lot of the models inside them. None of the big-name girls are here—not Linda or Naomi or Claudia—but it is the B, or no-name, models who are the most thrilling to look at. This is partly because the name models are phoning it in; Linda Evangelista, at the Givenchy show, had exactly the smug “I don’t have to do this for a living anymore” look that Shecky Greene and Buddy Hackett used to have when they “dropped in” on Merv Griffin. The B list models, on the other hand, work: They throw out their hips, they flirt with their eyes, and when the photographers call out to them to smolder, they smolder. A great deal of time is spent—by regular guys anyway—explaining to themselves why the haute couture models are not really as desperately beautiful as you might think when they are even more beautiful than you can imagine. The trick—or, to put it another way, the consolation—is that their beauty has become so familiar that it is not so much a commodity as a commonplace. Looking at Kate Moss modeling Givenchy, you don’t think, There’s a heartbreakingly beautiful girl. Instead you just think, There’s Kate Moss. The projected fantasy bangs up not against her inaccessibility but, paradoxically, against her familiarity. She offers not a limitless horizon of love and elegance and great clothes but the reality of a known life. (You would have to avoid talking about Johnny Depp. You would have to tell her how thin she looks, or, rather—for it is the New Kate—how zaftig.)

But they are perfect! A twelve-year-old American boy who was visiting Paris that week had come equipped with his skateboard, and, to his shock, discovered in Paris not a skateboard hell but a paradise of broad, flat avenues and, at the place du Trocadéro, vast, flat concrete plazas. “How do you find Paris?” he was asked.

His eyes went round and reverent.

“Smooth,” he said.

I find the models smooth too.

One new girl in particular is so perfectly beautiful that she seems a composite of various imaginary smoothnesses. I later learn that her name is Honor Fraser, that she is English, and that she is being tipped by the fancy as the Next Great Model; she will be Miss England in next year’s Pirelli calendar. I feel like a novice horseplayer who has just picked the Kentucky Derby winner.

When the shows were over, I spoke with her about what it is like to be on the runway, instead of watching what happens there. She turned out to be a poised student of her own craft. “I love modeling couture,” she said, with a passionate eagerness. “It’s the only pure expression in fashion—the one part of the fashionable world where there are no commercial compromises at all. There’s something terribly moving about being an element of it—being its vehicle. The purity and the exactitude that the designers devote to every tiny detail of your clothing and accessories, as though they were working from some image deep in their minds, which they’re trying to approximate with you, the way people exhaust themselves in pursuit of an ideal—it’s really very moving. It’s quite extraordinary to be backstage, being made up for two hours, being transformed from who you are into this ideal of beauty that the designer keeps in the back of his mind.

“I love couture modeling too, because you have such a pure feeling of control and power when you’re out there. For a tiny period of time—three or four seconds—you have the chance to hold the entire room. This may seem like a strange comparison, but I’m fascinated by comedy, and I imagine that modeling couture must feel very much like being a comedian; it’s just you out there, having to win over an audience, with nothing except yourself and your attitude to do it. And then I, for one, find the clothes so lovely—those Valentino colors that aren’t quite colors and yet register as though they were. I feel lucky to have been a part of it.” I had never before come across someone who was articulate and knowing about her craft, was big enough to start at power forward, and looked great in a black velvet military coat with rhinestone buttons, black satin trousers, and a black silk top embroidered with black jet. (She had been wearing that, for Valentino, the first time I saw her.)

 

Tell about the pathetic collections. A certain number of the collections seem intended to be pathetic. Olivier Lapidus’s is my specimen pathetic collection. The house is full, and the B list girls do the modeling, and Olivier, who is the son of the designer Ted, looks like a very nice guy. But it is held at the Carrousel du Louvre, a place designed specially to hold collections—it is big and well lit and clean—which means, naturally, that absolutely nobody wants to show there. Olivier Lapidus comes onstage to point out that his collection is a mixture of past, present, and future and includes the first solar-paneled jacket ever made. He shows it off. You can control the solar panels, turning the heat up or down, and it also has a built-in plug that could brancher you right into the Internet, the first haute couture garment equipped to go on-line. The poor model has to take the plug out of the pocket and show it to the audience. Then you hear the theme from Star Trek. Nobody knows which way to look.

 

Tuesday night is Christian Lacroix. The show is held in the ballroom of the Grand Hôtel, and it is by far the most intently attended défilé I have seen yet; even Mme. Chirac is here. Lacroix is of the moment. I associate his clothes with the tasteless things about the eighties, the Ivana Trump era—clothes to wear for the big settlement. Tonight, when the lights go down, Linda Evangelista comes out in the ugliest dress I have ever seen. Even the program’s words can’t disguise its ugliness: “silk-crêpe dress stamped with a mauve-and-ochre-green ‘reptile’ design.” I am settling in for a good long bath of contempt.

But then something happens. First, the music begins to take hold. In most of the collections the music is either generic “sophisticated” soprano and synthesizer pop—the kind you associate with the singer Sade—or classical chestnuts, like Albinoni and Mozart. Lacroix, though, has had someone (the program credits a Laurent Godard) with an uncanny eclectic ear arrange his music. We begin with the breathless, chimelike sounds of the Swedish group the Cardigans and switch to Joe Jackson and then, without missing a beat, land in a Bellini aria. Lacroix works through his day wear and moves into the cocktail dresses and then the evening wear. In the program he announces that he has been spending all his time lately “with Vermeer.” He seems to have taken a wrong turn in the museum, for what you see is Goya: Goya’s duchesses, in their mantillas and black satin dresses, but wildly remade, as though for a Balanchine ballet of the life of Goya. There are lots of satins and silks in dark colors—navy blue satin and vermilion satin and black chiffon. The layering is ecclesiastical. For once, the program description actually describes the clothes: a long, lined black crepe sweater-dress tucked up over a crepe underskirt with a fuchsia faille bustle at the back, accented by a pistachio satin knot. The crepuscular colors mute the ostentation, so that it doesn’t look like ostentation at all but, rather, like art, like old painting. The music turns to the Beatles’ baroque period: the string part from “Eleanor Rigby” and then a long cello and harp version of “For No One.” The lovely sad yet modern tunes, the twilight, and the dresses themselves create, against all odds and probabilities, something touching, and even—Honor Fraser’s word is right—moving. The dresses aren’t really dresses at all; they are little buildings of crepe and silk and taffeta. The girls look out from them, like Spanish ladies looking out from a second-floor window. When a model named Victoria appears in a black satin corset with Elizabethan sleeves of tulle and worn over a deep lavender-blue skirt flecked with black lace—she looks like an actress dressed up as Viola for an impossibly beautiful production of Twelfth Night—the audience applauds, genuinely, not politely. When Karen Mulder comes out in a silver lace dress with an iced pearl bodice, I make exclamation points in my program.

It’s all too much, and that’s where the loveliness—the couture moment—begins. The clothes are extravagant and unreal, but they don’t seem camp. They don’t seem artificial or out of this world, just symbolic of a common human hope that the world could be something other than it is—younger and more musical and less exhausting and better lit. It proposes that the little moments of seduction on which, when we look back, so much of our life depends could unfold as formally as they deserve to, and all dressed up. It is as if we were wishing that the rituals of sex, those moments of painful sizing up, which begin with the thought That’s a nice dress, could pass by more consequentially, slowly—love walking down a runway instead of just meeting you outside the movie theater.

Couture is a romantic cartoon. It’s a caricature of the romantic impulse, with a cartoon’s exaggerations but a cartoon’s energy and lighthearted poetry too. The thing you feel in a couture moment isn’t “What a wonderful dress” or, as you do with higher kinds of art, “What a good place the world is,” but, more simply, “I’m in love.” The point of haute couture may be any one of a hundred things, ninety-nine of them sordid or silly, but its subject is women wearing clothes and all the emotion that rises from women wearing clothes. Offering romance in cartoon form, couture helps preserve the habit of romance. The best moments at Lacroix or Givenchy, far from being giddy or empty, were familiar and held out the promise of the beginning of a whole familiar cycle. Soon the fantasies, translated, will become purchases—This Fall’s Dresses—and these will become photographs, the kind you look at five years later (God, that dress is so mid-nineties!) to find that they have become a little piece of your time, a peg to hang a good memory on (“Remember that kind of satiny Lacroix knockoff thing you had? You looked great in that”). The sequence, one of the last romantic sequences we can count on, starts in these hotels; that they happen to be places where rich ladies cool themselves off in the cold seems a small price to pay to keep that emotion in circulation.

The emotion passes quickly, of course. In a minute Love walks back up the runway, changes into her jeans and T-shirt, and is on the phone to her agent. Still dazed by Lacroix, I stumbled across one beauty outside the hotel with her cell phone clutched in her hand. I heard her mutter, firmly, “I know I said I’d do it, but I can’t. It’s only Tuesday, and already I’ve got taffeta coming out my ass.”

 

Yves Saint Laurent, on Wednesday morning, is the last important collection, and the most “classic.” Here, for once, is a really well-organized show, where everybody slips inside on time. Lacroix is the haunt of the new Gaullist French government establishment; Saint Laurent is still the favorite of the old Socialist aristocracy, and they all turn out. Jack Lang, the former culture minister, is here, looking as though he owned the place. (The Socialists loved Saint Laurent because his clothes promised the pleasures of modernity without the sacrifices of modernism; that was the Mitterrand dream.) Saint Laurent just shows Saint Laurent, beautiful clothes that he could have shown in 1980 or 1990 just as well. The music is standard opera arias. Everything gets a hand.

The big news for the photographers is that Claudia Schiffer has come to YSL, having been snubbed by Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel, and she gets the first-desk position. Claudia, though, is not what you would call a team player. While the other models only occasionally respond to the photographers’ pleas for more, Claudia stands at the end of the runway for what seems like ten minutes at a time, making love to every camera in sight. The other girls, held up at the head of the runway and waiting for her to get through, give her exactly the look you see on the face of an impatient commuter at the Holland Tunnel who is stuck in the exact change lane behind a woman who has entered it on a hunch.

Then the blond, Botticelli-faced Karen Mulder comes out in the costume that every photographer has been dreaming of for years: robe de soir courte de mousseline et satin noir—a sheer dark silk nightgown that, for one reason or another, provides an undergarment below but not above. Karen holds one fingertip precisely in front of each breast, demurely, as she walks down the runway. The photographers go crazy. “Karen! Karen!” they moan. “Give us something.” Karen smiles. Nothing doing. She walks right to the end of the runway—right into the heart of the photographers’ lair—smiling, keeping her fingertips in place, not embarrassed but not giving anything away, either, and then she walks right back. The photographers groan, in disbelieving unison, as she disappears. You could have heard them out on the place Vendôme. “There was a fortune in it for all of us,” one of them says mournfully. I notice Claudia, on her way in, giving Karen a look. You have the feeling that Claudia would have dropped her hands, pulled off the gown, and jumped off the runway to autograph the negatives.

Afterward, in the Saint Laurent dressing room, I see that, while every other outfit, on every other girl’s card, includes three or four accessories, cover-ups, or undergarments, the robe de soir, listed on Karen Mulder’s card, is, by design or mistake, all by itself—nothing to help her out at all. For the first time all week, someone had left a fashionable vacuum. She had filled it with her fingertips.