COUTURE & THE HIGH STREET: How does Designer Fashion relate to YOU?

Oscar de la renta spring 2023 collection

Many people roll their eyes and grumble about waste & excess whenever they encounter the idea of Haute Couture. At eye-watering prices for what is an essential item (clothing), its not hard to blame the average man for being ignorant of any higher value.

The pomp, circumstance, and gravitas attributed to high fashion doesn’t help this sense of designer fashion being a bunch of malarky, either. Fashion devotees attend the seasonal shows with the same reverence some people attend church.

To begin to understand high fashion, you have to start with the TRICKLE DOWN EFFECT theory of fashion design. This theory explains the “trickle down” of design inspiration & direction that starts at the top with Haute Couture, and drips down to the various layers (and price points) of high street fashion.

Haute Couture refers to artisanal garments made by artisans and craftsmen at the highest skill levels, under the direction of some of the finest design minds of the day. Usually only made of the finest, or most intricate materials - Haute Couture is the modern descendant of the finery made for kings & emperors of a bygone time. Each piece of Haute Couture can take anywhere from 100-2,000 man hours to make. Due to this skill investment, each garment is totally unique and incredibly valuable. Modern Royal wedding dresses are made in this way, adding to their priceless historical value and meaning.

To wear Haute Couture is an experience you will never forget. For many lucky enough to own Couture, it is a type of sacred experience - like owning a Picasso or Monet you can drape on your own body. This is fashion as a wearable art form. I personally like to think of Haute Couture as one of the finest ways we can appreciate the human capacity for beauty, and pay tribute to the spark of the divine in all of us.

credit: Fashionista.com

Designer Ready-to-Wear fashion takes direct influence and artistic direction from Haute Couture, and the general zeitgeist of society & culture. All art forms and the current events in society can influence Designer fashion - making the seasonal fashion shows a visual display of how art channels the human experience we are all living to one degree or another. Like artists paint, and movies are made - fashion designers can dial in on, or collage the human experience according to their artistic framework & vision in the moment. Color, shape, length, cut, embellishment, etc, all the elements of fashion design can evoke a piece of this human inspiration in a single garment.

Similar to Haute Couture, Designer RTW is designed by designer, and worked on by skilled seamstresses, but unlike Haute Couture, RTW is simpler in construction & is typically made in multiples for limited retail sale. There is not the same degree of artistic refinement, or rarification.

Trickling down from Designer fashion you have the pantheon of Boutique fashion retail brands. Think JCrew, Banana Republic, Polo, Marks & Spencer, Mango, Zara - all of these brands take inspiration from both designer fashion and their own personal read of society through the lense of their own brand imaging. This is wearable fashion for the every-man with taste and an eye for quality, but at a much more approuchable price. Depending on your income, clothing from this category can be your Sunday best or your play clothes - and the brands don’t mind catering to both. This is fashion as democracy.

As with RTW, Boutique fashion becomes even further removed from the artistic refinement of Couture. There is usually a design team working on a collection of garments across several categories, and then to a team of technical designers creating digital specifications to then send off to a manufacturer to have the garments made in bulk, then sent back for quality testing, and so on until it is all stocked uniformly in the retail store. Therefore you can see how instead of having multiple skilled hands on a single garment, you have many hands on many multiples of an assortment of clothing. The design influence is less specific, but still very much present.

When you see Haute Couture, Designer Ready-to-Wear, and Boutique Retail fashion as a steady progression and blend of human artistic expression and practical need to cloth, you can begin to see the “point” or at least, the reason for Haute Couture. Like fine art - couture is mankind’s way of expressing at the highest skill level into something that we can wear, creating a beautiful dialogue between the art & its creator and/or wearer. And like all forms of human expression, high fashion has the capacity to help mankind connect with each other’s experiences, and reach higher for the source of all beauty. The TRICKLE DOWN EFFECT describes how that same artistic expression then proceeds to effect us all, no matter our affiliation with high fashion or art.

HOWEVER, There are times when the drip down has suspended in air & entirely changed course, defying gravity and going from the bottom up. WE influence art at the highest levels. Famous examples like the Burberry macintosh trench coat - translating beyond the actual trenches of agriculture & the battlefield to the highest artistic levels, have proven that inspiration can truly come from anywhere. It’s tempting to call this the anarchy of fashion, but I prefer to call it the “cross-pollination” of fashion. When inspiration is in need of something new and different to continue to create.

Whatever the direction the inspiration goes, by seeing fashion as a wearable expression of the human experience, I hope that you begin to see fashion as something to be valued and enjoyed.

Previous
Previous

A WARM EMBRACE: The Modern Legacy of Irish Galway Wool

Next
Next

THE MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS: A Tale of Chocolate & Business Ethics