The Fashion Businessout far more than it leaves in, with a sense of bravado which would astonish
even the most bold professional confidence trickster. These accounts are
awesome traps for the innocent and gullible reader. Aided by many fashion
journalists and by a range of professional acolytes, these books promote and
hype only the notion of couture fashion as high art, as beyond-reality dreams.
The designer is placed centrally as ‘genius’ and the clothes become miracles
of creative invention.
Until the mid-1990s there was little debate which explained that since the
1970s nearly every couture house in Paris had run at a financial loss. There
was little public acknowledgement that the main function of a couturier over
the last thirty years has been to create the glamorously seductive house image
used to launch the million-dollar global manufacture of over-priced ‘designer’
products. You will find in the glossy books no end-of-year financial reports,
no details of prices of the garments and certainly no listing of profits or
losses – in fact nothing that indicates the real function of haute couture and
elite fashion companies. This is quite simply the need to make decent,
preferably very large, profits.
Certainly, the glorious clothes of this industrie de luxe exist, as they have
since the eighteenth century, the clothes eulogized over in the glossy books.
We all respect, admire and acknowledge the creativity of designers, the
perfectly cut tailoring, the astonishingly high levels of needle craft and the
artisan skills of weaving, knitting, embroidery and so on. Yet, as every effort
is made to maintain the glamorous image of the couture world, we hear
little about the serious problems that have beset the trade since the inter-war
period. Revisionist history has ensured avoidance of debate about failures of
companies or collections, or the subsidies poured in to keep companies
running. The fact that the couture trade has lurched from one economic crisis
to another since the late 1920s has not been properly acknowledged. As a
result, one of the main strengths of the Paris couture industry has not been
fully recognized – its business flexibility.
The trade’s design flexibility, has, by contrast, long been admired. We know
all about Worth and Doucet and the socially correct clothing they designed
for the international elite in the 1900 period. We are all aware that Chanel’s
alertness in recognizing the ‘new poor’ client in the inter-war period led
couture into innovative, new, creative directions. Jean Paul Gaultier is admired
today for pulling in younger clients through the freshness of his new range
of couture garments launched in 1998. But the trade’s brilliance in commercial
flexibility has been hidden from history. It is knowing, manipulative and
clever, building with vast success on the uniqueness of couture’s sartorial
elitism. By avoiding any discussion of business activities, these glossy books
successfully obscure the fact that successful business is the driving factor