The Hilfiger Factor and the Flexible Commercial World of Couturewhich ensures the continuation of couture companies. It is this issue which
forms the focus of this chapter.
The Function of Couture ClothingAs Alexandra Palmer, has so well explained, the basic function of the making
of individual couture clothing is, and always was, to provide the etiquette-
correct ‘social uniform’ for its private clients.^3 The basic financial problem
within couture is the inevitability that it will only ever be bought by the
tiniest minority of women and that in times of economic trauma, they too
balk at spending cash on luxury clothing. Thus this industrie de luxe can
never run securely and smoothly. It never has. It is always subject to
vicissitudes caused by international economic crisis and has only survived
over the last 150 years because of its sensitive commercial flexibility.
Where the money is, couture clients will be found and then educated into
the specific consumption etiquettes of the trade. Up to 1914, the focus was
exclusively on the private European and US plutocratic rich. In 1900, the
Syndicat de la Couture Parisienne with its elite twenty-one members, already
exported 65 per cent of its products to the international elite circles of royalty
and plutocratic rich all around the world.^4 In truth, it was only in this 1890–
1914 period, in the first thirty or so years of Syndicat’s existence, that the
industry of couture was relatively crisis free. Unrivalled, Paris had no
challengers. It could produce and sell clothes at any price it chose to its eager,
captive, international clientele. With astute business acumen even then, the
couturiers were already selling to elegant department stores from New York
to Berlin. The Syndicatlaunched itself into public view for first time at the
Paris International Exhibition of 1900. The success of their pavilion was so
huge that the police had to be called in to hold back the crowds pressing to
see the staged scenes of wax dummies posed as if at grand soireés or at the
races. By this time, according to Anny Latour, the top six or seven couture
houses, such as Doucet, Worth, and Drécoll, were each employing 400–900
workers, at the Rue de la Paix or Place Vendome, with a turnover of 30
million francs.^5 Wealthy clients were to be found, often royal and aristocratic,
from St Petersburg, Stockholm, Madrid, London, Buenos Aires, Chicago and
- A. Palmer, ‘The Myth and Reality of Haute Couture, Consumption, Social Function and
Taste in Toronto, 1945–1963’, PhD thesis, University of Brighton, 1994, Vol. 1: Royal Ontario
Museum no. 1986. p. 165. - Latour, A., Kings of Fashion, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1958, p. 164.
- Ibid., pp. 64-165.