In the cobbled courtyard of sunny La Monnaie De Paris, two Indian master embroiderers sat at their frames embroidering a landscape with tigers and a chiffon veil with flowers. In his haute couture collection for autumn, designer Rahul Mishra paid tribute to the thousands of Indian artisans and embroiderers who transform his and their imagination into reality on silk, chiffon and tulle gowns each season. Accordingly, small images of their figures, bent over their embroidery frames, decorated the exquisite gowns alongside tigers, swans and lotus ponds.
The dazzling landscape embroideries covered silvered chiffon dresses, long slender filmy coats and enlarged petal-shaped organdie tops further embellished with gold and silver sequin feathers. The Mishra silhouette is long and slender this season, with black and silver coats and trousers to counterbalance the beautifully detailed decoration.
At sunset two days later, on the steps of the historic Chateau de Chantilly, Pierpaolo Piccioli’s entire atelier of petites mains (the highly skilled craftspeople who hand-make haute couture in France) followed the models in Valentino's catwalk finale.
It was a fitting reminder that there would be no haute couture without these often unseen artisans who bring a designer's vision to life. Where would Elie Saab and Zuhair Murad be without the craftsmen and women in Beirut who create the lavish beading and braiding on their couture gowns, or the ladies in Morocco who weave Sara Chraibi’s sfifa ribbon decoration?
“The creators became the inspiration behind the collection,” Mishra said after his show, pointing to the master embroiderer beside him who was absorbed in stitching a tiger motif. “India is the most populous country in the world and I started to think how the brand exists because of the people that work with us,” says the socially conscious designer. “I wanted to show that while they are sitting there, their imagination is in some far-off magical place and this collection is about melding the imagination and the reality of the artisan together.”
Couture has always been about transporting us to magical places, other eras and other worlds. For Elie Saab, fresh from the success of dressing Princess Rajwa, Queen Rania and the Princess of Wales at Jordan’s royal wedding, his imagination stepped back to medieval times. Another era, another royal court.
In the stone cloisters of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, dashing hooded cloaks, jewel-toned velvet Elizabethan gowns and ultra-feminine dresses with intricately embellished corsetry, cowls and trailing trains appeared to the monastic soundtrack of a tolling bell. The effect was both feminine and dramatic with silver, gunmetal and Tudor rose embroidery, created in the ateliers of Beirut, echoing the motifs of the period to opulent effect.
There was a similarly gothic mood at Zuhair Murad, where sequinned ravens, moths and silver spider's web embroidery created a dark, mysterious atmosphere. For a designer known for his bright joyful colours, this season felt very different. Dramatic black feathers, lace and veils, a batwing structure outlining corsets and intricate metal embroideries resembling the gothic Victorian railings of an abandoned mansion served to enhance this mood. A trench coat covered in spider studs and the macabre rose motif on a wedding dress suggested Murad's aim is to serve those who come alive at night.
An altogether sunnier disposition was Rami Al Ali’s collection, which was inspired by Henri Matisse’s time when he was living in Monte Carlo and too ill to paint. This latter period was notable for the French artist's colourful avant-garde cut-out motif collages. “I love a Matisse quote when he says: ‘I am starting to draw with scissors,’" said Rami Al Ali after his show (appropriately held in Paris’s Museum of Modern Art). “It very much resembles what we do as designers: we draw with scissors.”
Accordingly, Al Ali created striking sculptural shapes in silk faille and glossy fabrics embellished with floating appliques redolent of Matisse’s famous figures and amorphous shapes. Evidence of the designer’s scissors at work featured on jumpsuits and dresses where two contrasting fabrics were combined not with a straight seam, but the wavy palm frond outlines with which Matisse played. Even the colours referenced the artist, from blush pink and raspberry to teal and sky blue.
That sense of carving and shaping fashion with a pair of scissors was strong too at Schiaparelli, a house with strong artistic roots in surrealism. The spring collection from creative director Daniel Roseberry set the internet alight by sending out three gowns adorned with faux taxidermy animal heads.
This season was also about dramatic black and white silhouettes, including a winter white coat embroidered with a trompe d’oeil figure on the front. There were nods to several artists, from the blue powdered faces of the models inspired by Yves Klein, gilded palm frond jewellery from Matisse and a dress covered in the painterly brushstrokes of Lucien Freud suggesting a woman’s body.
An haute couture show is a performance and two couturiers took us to the Paris opera house to make that point. American designer Thom Browne was celebrating his 20th anniversary with a special one-off haute couture offering, where the audience was part of the performance sitting on the stage at the grand Palais Garnier, while the seats in the gilded auditorium were wittily filled with suited cut-out figures of Browne himself. Meanwhile, Stephane Rolland used the grand marble staircase of the opera house to stage his homage to one of the greatest opera divas of all time: Maria Callas, the soprano who performed at the Garnier in 1958.
Rolland's collection was naturally diva-esque with models’ hair and make-up styled to resemble the great Callas, and wearing dramatic sculpted gowns adorned with crystal chokers or sculpted three-dimensional embellished shapes. Each outfit was inspired by Callas’s operatic roles, including Tosca and Medea.
Browne, who is also chairman of the Council of Fashion Designers in America, has used the Palais Garnier once before for a ready-to-wear show, but this was an haute couture debut for his conceptual designs. His narrative was of a lonely figure (model Alek Wek) sitting forlornly amid her luggage on a station platform as passengers walk by. The station bell tolls, Visage’s Fade to Grey is on the soundtrack and interesting characters in grey cloche hats and moulded bell-shaped coats wander by along with passengers in tones of grey tailoring finely embellished with silver embroideries and gold bullion braiding.
Everything is grey, even the landscape patchworks on slim city coats and skirt suits, except for the bride in a white coat dress and two mysterious shamanic-type figures at the end who seem to persuade the lonely figure that life is better than she thought.
There is craftspeople, there are artists and, at haute couture, there is also the customer. One interesting footnote to the shows is how couture houses such as Dior, Balenciaga and Alexandre Vauthier are casting models of different ages. In using veteran models such as Carmen Kass and Georgina Grenville at Vauthier, Maria Cristina at Balenciaga and Chrystelle at Schiaparelli among many others, designers are recognising who many of their clients really are.
