Making the couture very haute

Press, 28 July 1986, Page 8

Making the couture very haute

By

IRINA BOSSY-GHICA

of Reuter (through NZPA)

France’s haute couture designers, who will start their twice-yearly shows in Paris this week, are expected to concentrate on evening garments that emphasise glamour, sophistication, and sheer elegance. Some of the country’s top 23 fashion-houses such as Lanvin, Patou, or Nina Ricci, have practically ignored day-time clothes, saying that haute couture is a form of art best expressed in the glamour of brightly lit cocktail parties or extravagant balls.

“In the day-time, the richest women in the

world want to be dressed like everyone else but in the evening they want to be different, unique,” said a designer, Maryll Lanvin, who ordered exclusive brass buttons carved by hand by a sculptor to go with her collection of body-clinging, short, embroidered dresses.

Gerard Pipart, Nina Ricci’s designer, who opens the five-day event with the Japanese-born Hanae Mori, and Torrente, said no trousers would feature in his autumn-winter collection, because women “do not come to haute couture for something they can find in ready-to-wear shops.”

“Haute couture customers are keen on

sophisticated suits, jewellike buttons and glamorous evening-dreses,” said Pipart, whose 80 creations include tight, short garments of stretch materials that cling better to an impeccable figure and romantic crinolines for late-night balls. The price of such precious garments, often higher than that of a house, does not count. Only a few hundred women in the world can afford them and that is why they are more comparable to priceless works of art than to pieces of clothing. That is also why Hanae Mori did not hesitate to create a dress entirely embroidered with hand-

made magnolias, which took her seamstresses three months to make.

Only a handful of these unique creations will be sold and most designers rely on ready-to-wear and licences to fund their haute couture collections, which cost between four and five million francs ($l.l million and 1.3 million).

That is why fashionhouses such as Paco Rabanne or Pierre Balmain have been sold to international business holdings in the hope of avoiding management and money troubles. But some have had the sad experience, like Andre Courreges, of being denied the money to