Essay On Haute Couture

1549 Words4 Pages

A fashion capital is defined as a city that exerts international influence on the trends of the fashion world, thriving on consumers, designers, manufacturing, sites of consumption (such as department stores, highstreets, boutiques), and branding and marketing through major fashion events. These characteristics are all evident in the traditional fashion capitals, London, Milan, New York and Paris. The development of these universal fashion cities can only be fully understood if we look at their historic contribution to the production of textiles and the emergence of haute couture. Haute couture is high end fashion, exclusively designed, with meticulous detail, using high quality and expensive material. Whilst haute couture has been a major …show more content…

King Louis XIV can be credited as a significant contributor to the fact that Paris is one of the most influential fashion cities in the world, for he recognized the importance of luxury goods to the economy, bringing the textile trade under the control of the royal court. Consequently, the highest quality materials were found in France, encouraging seamstresses and tailors to establish themselves there. So in 1858, British born dressmaker Charles Frederick Worth opened the first prestigious haute couture house in Paris, leading to the establishment of Le Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture in 1868. This law was set to determine what distinguished a couture house in an attempt to regulate the augmentation of houses and more importantly as a method to protect France’s historic reputation whilst unifying design and fabrication. Paris soon attracted an international clientele and couture was considered a ‘phenomenon impossible to relocate to another city’ (Claire Wilcox, The Golden Age of Couture 2007, pg 14)-as president of the Le Chambre Syndicale, Lucien Lelong, claimed ‘it is Paris or it is nowhere’ (Lucien Lelong in The Golden Age …show more content…

Couture houses such as Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, Schiaparelli, Gimabattista Valli are all among the strongest and longest reputable of global brands that established themselves in Paris at this time. The sustained reputation for the city can be credited not only to the emergence of fashion’s main innovations (such as the little black dress by Chanel) but also the credibility of the city as a centre of fashion. Brands started to use the French legend for their advertisement and fashion houses make their money because ‘Paris’ is part of their logo. They have become a sign of fashion, a fundamental to the understanding of that brand as a fashionable brand. Similarly, can be said for New York’s urban landscape, that brands such as DKNY have adopted the dramatic architectural backdrop as an integral part of their brand-‘clothing and architecture were projected as archetypes of national identity”. Certain films, such as the ‘Devil wears Prada’, or ‘Sex in the City’, which represent Paris as the world of glamour, consolidate this myth of Paris as elegantly chic. Advertisers, photographers, stylists, bloggers unite urban culture with the consumption and experience of fashion. People with jobs in fashion relocate to fashion

More about Essay On Haute Couture

Open Document