Dior - the storytelling behind haute couture
The magic behind haute couture.
I own a beautiful coffee table book, Dior: Couture Photographs by Patrick Demarchelier, Text by Ingrid Sischy. The foreword explains how the public’s curiosity about fashion to the growing affluence of the time, the power of advertising, and the constance coverage in magazines, hits upon an idea that is key and still true today:
“It has to do with our collective need to believe in some kind of magic.” - Ingrid Sischy
Fashion is pure escapism and a creative expression of daily reality and culture. And that is what captivated me to join the industry in my early twenties.
The highest echelon of fashion is haute couture and to produce a show requires Olympian statistics: a show, such as Dior, for example, necessitates approximately; “9750 yards of material: 22 miles of pattern canvas; 100,000 working hours; 500-700 working hours for a dress; plus 300-400 working hours for the embroidery on that dress.”
A typical collection employs collaboration between artists workshops, milliners, hosiers, shoemakers, corsetières, embroiderers, textile manufacturers, not to speak of all the talent that is contributed by the in-house staff, the assistant designers, the seamstresses, tailors, the stylists and of course, the superstar who reigns over the atelier, often referred to as the creative director. We’re clearly not talking T-shirts.
