Haute Couture or not? The meaning of this concept in 2021

  • By:karen-millen

05

02/2022

FashionThe latest collections of the haute couture season once again put the fundamentals of this unique form of fashion construction under scrutiny.

By Sebastian Cabrices

Haute couture acts in and on the body, it happens internally and externally. It pleases the physicist, both one's own and another's, and by transcending the superficial, the cutaneous, it satisfies whims and flirts with perceptions. A dress has the quality of existing, of creating its own space and generating interaction around it. It can become an irrefutable element of society, as well as being allusive to a moment or a character. Would it be crazy to attribute human faculties to a dress?

As journalists, critics, and even fashion customers, we demand too many explanations about our clothes. This contemporary trend of how humans want to control every piece of information and find meaning in every seam has made it easy for designers to use their creations as a means of commenting on time and human experiences, meaning that there is always someone who can find space for your history or ideology in a garment.

The Fall 2021 Haute Couture season collections once again put the foundations of haute couture under scrutiny, some speak of a new, earthy approach, a democratic, more attainable concept. While others bet on preserving the idea of ​​a couture that starts from and lives on fantasy; perhaps even elitism. What criteria must be met, then, to classify as haute couture? If beauty lives in fantasy, but there can be no beauty without form, and in this case, there is no haute couture without technique.

When it is the creator himself who puts his concepts to the test, he initiates a new debate about the true essence of this art. In early 2021, Valentino's Pierpaolo Piccioli presented Code Temporal, a couture collection that went beyond the ornamental to base his discourse on savoir-faire. “No stories, nothing figurative. I wanted to work on the surfaces, not in a decorative sense, but in the workmanship that becomes the surface itself” he said. According to the theory that Piccioli suggests, it is in timelessness where the success of couture lies, where true beauty happens. With dresses detached from moments, without decorations corresponding to a trend; without a specific name, or even a gender, embroidered (by hand) on a label.

In the process of deciphering the time of an ancient painting, a constant element that researchers turn to is the clothing, the quintessential indicator of time. Just as the jewels in a portrait tell the story of a monarch, it is an exercise in reflection to try to project what contemporary fashion will say in the future. The message that will be recorded in what we wear today will surely be diverse, perhaps cloudy, there are so many ideals that we discuss now with our dress, that before falling into confusion, many designers also opt for silence.

As was the custom for Cristóbal Balenciaga, Demna Gvasalia presented his first couture collection in an atelier where silence reigned, without music to support a story, only the sound of the models walking, the rustle of fabrics and the murmur of a surprised audience, accustomed to the immersive presentations of the French house. “It was my minute of silence for the heritage of Cristóbal Balenciaga, but also a moment of silence to just shut up for a minute,” Demna told Vogue, giving her clothes absolute power to speak to her vision of today.

Specifically in the Fall 2021 Couture season, the designers emphasize deciphering the essence of this time that is still so confusing, burdened with the weight of a pandemic and influenced by social movements that call for collective reaction. Contrary to the silence with which Balenciaga expressed himself, other fashion responses were just as forceful in his own way.

Five days after being unveiled at a Paris salon, a Cannes red carpet outfit simultaneously changed the way we understand haute couture and brought the internet to a standstill. On the bare chest of the model Bella Hadid and accompanied by a low-cut dress, a trompe l'oeil necklace in the shape of lungs, designed by Daniel Roseberry for Schiaparelli, wanted to talk about the way in which fashion interacts with the human experience. At first glance, an ensemble that ticks the boxes of the fascinating: gold-plated bronchi covered in Swarovski crystals worn by a beautiful woman; but under Roseberry's eyes, the piece speaks in a provocative way of the most affected organ during the pandemic.

The power of this piece, beyond its media coverage, is how it explains the role of perceptions and fantasy in understanding haute couture. Their power is that, rather than being lungs, they can look like corals and make you reflect on the way you put effort into your own breathing in order to witness their beauty underwater. Raja in the emotional, since just like the coral, the lungs get sick by the action of man; feel and are essential. Schiaparelli managed to create an eternal piece, because when you think of a man who dies from a lung failure, as was the case with my father, you understand that haute couture, even if you want to subtract its unattainable factor to make it earthly, cannot live without someone being in his fantasy. Because the ordinary is forgotten.

Perhaps haute couture, like beauty, is observed by everyone from his trench. Some live it from their screens and others surround themselves with it in the atelier. It is true that in this form of art not everything must be ideal, aesthetics and architecture are necessary; but no one can be judged for their mistakes, because fashion can be like Russian roulette, a game where everyone shows their own version of beauty, in which someone will receive the bullet.

 Haute Couture or not?  The meaning of this concept in 2021
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