Visit the website www.fashion-era.com and other web- or print-based resources and research about haute couture, its history and development, its influence on fashion, and the major names involved in it. Write a one-page report on what you think is the role of couture within the fashion industry. What is the relevance of haute couture to our society over time, especially today? What are the specific aesthetics of haute couture that differentiate it from ready-to-wear designers? And what does the future hold for haute couture?
Couture? Gesundheit!
Haute couture still creates and overall tone for the season, even though many ready to wear collections come out before couture, HC can be a fabulous snippet of what’s out there. Then RTW and medium to low-end designers and the common people try to emulate the qualities of the hc collections that can be translated to every day looks.
Since couture is all about luxury, exclusivity, and being the elite, the finest fabrics must be purchased to make the garments. This seems like a huge investment because the designs are not guaranteed to be sold, especially in this economic climate. So the fashion houses need to have a certain amount of projected sales (or savings) to even think about creating couture collections.
Most fashion houses can’t take that kind of financial risk and in turn the whole industry is suffering. Couture used to be a place designers could really take chances, since they were only looking for that one perfect client for the dress, rather than a whole target market. Those chances are what moved fashion along. Granted, maybe some of that power has been handed down to the RTW designers, but they are still being held to a notion of wearability and sales to a broader audience. There’s not as much space to be flamboyant and dramatic.
I think the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture should do a stimulus endeavor. The committee was assembled in the first place to protect the creative quest of the haute couture designer, but back then there was less distance between social classes and qualities of materials. It’s time for an evolution. Perhaps the criteria could be reevaluated. Maybe lowering the required volume of annual looks would give smaller fashion houses a chance to show haute couture designs. And less people are buying couture, and there is no rule on how much the garments have to sell for, perhaps young designers would rather their couture be seen by the masses than to sell each piece for “a Harvard education”[3]. At this point they don't even have the opportunity to make the clothes that would attracted high end buyers. This catch 22 needs to stop or haute couture will probably end altogether, and that would just be sad.
1. Blackman, Cally. 100 Years of Fashion Illustration. London: Laurence King, 2007. Print.
2. Davies, Hywel. Fashion Designers’ Sketchbooks. London: Laurence King, 2010. Print.
3. Horyn, Cathy. "Full Spectrum, Less Spectacle." Fashion & Style. New York Times, 07 July 2010. Web. 7 Feb. 2011. <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/fashion/08COUTURE.html>.
4. Rosa, Joseph. Glamour: Fashion, Industrial Design, Architecture. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2004. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment