Couture is latest fashion victim

IT’S enough to make Coco Chanel turn in her grave. Just three decades after the queen of chic stalked off to the great cat-walk in the sky, haute couture is following hot on her heels.

A mere nine couture collections were unveiled at the Paris fashion show this week - less than half the number that exhibited in the French capital in 1987.

And for those who love the exclusivity of the twice-yearly event which offers them one-off handmade designs costing up to €500,000 a throw, things are about to get worse.

Threatened with extinction, couture is fighting back by embracing its antithesis - mass market appeal. In a move which has ruffled the feathered trims on the front rows of Paris Fashion Week, the event which epitomises the height of global chic faces a redesign as the decidedly down market Luxury Week. This notion comes from none other than the houses of Chanel and Dior, two of couture’s leading lights, suggesting that reinvention is the only route to resurgence.

The acknowledgement that couture as we know it has an increasingly small place in the 21st century came at a meeting of the Federation Française de la Couture, high fashion’s ruling body, shortly before Paris Fashion Week began on Tuesday. Françoise de Montenay, president of Chanel, and Sidney Toledano, president of Dior, came up with the idea of transforming the fading couture event into a luxury fashion week.

They plan to include luxury leather goods, watches, shoes and jewellery, all crafted in France.