Couture Tries to Find Its
Place in the Real World
by Vanessa Friedman
20
PARIS — Sometimes it seems as if the first month of the new year is one giant runway show — and that’s before you even get to the official collections.Between the red- carpet goddess- gown extravaganzas of the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild Awards, Nike’s debut of its (tennis) dresses at the Australian Open, the first lady’s sartorial diplomacy in India, and Sunday’s Super Bowl, with Moschino outfitting Katy Perry for the halftime show, a consumer could be forgiven for feeling as if life itself had become an endless catwalk. Which raises some meaningful questions about the purpose of the official fashion season. Especially the couture.
Oh, yeah: that most rarefied of fashion forms, clothes that are made to order by hand for the 0.001 percent who can afford them. But aren’t they less relevant to our lives than that Bibhu Mohapatra coat Mrs. O wore to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi? The neon backless number Serena Williams sported to crush Belgium’s Alison Van Uytvanck in Melbourne?
These are issues that have not been lost on the designers themselves. As Pierpaolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri of Valentino, a design team that tends to speak, as it works, in one voice, said before their show, “Fashion has to reflect and respond to the times you are living in.” Even the most seemingly removed- from- reality kind of fashion.
Indeed, in many ways Fashion Week told a tale of brands eschewing the escapism normally associated with couture, opting instead to connect it to the real world. At varying levels and degrees of success.