Why Couture Clients Keep Buying Six-Figure Gowns

“Nobody really needs couture, to be honest,” said Demna after his Balenciaga haute couture show this week in Paris. No, most people do not need a bespoke gown that costs six figures and takes highly trained petites mains thousands of hours to make by hand. And yet.

Partaking in the official haute couture fashion week in Paris—which is rife with arcane rules about how the clothes are made—can pay off handsomely for the few designers left in the club. For the 15 or so brands that invest in the game, including Dior and Chanel, couture can multiply press and red-carpet opportunities, and have a trickle-down effect on sales of ready-to-wear and beauty and fragrance.

Then there are the orders, which can total in the millions for a single client. Wealthy couture diehards fly in for the shows and then quickly convene in cosseted showrooms to make their selections while munching macarons. Competition can be fierce, especially when a stylist nabs a gown early on for, say, Cardi B. When you’re paying this much to look unique, no one wants a duplicate.

Couture is famously over-the-top, and this season was no exception, with rampant feathered capes, obscuring hoods and trailing trains. But philanthropist, creative director and avid couture client Fredrik Robertsson told me he found the looks very wearable this season: “less PR showstoppers and more things people actually want.” He pointed to the calmer suits and cocktail dresses at Schiaparelli, which has in the past paraded out looks such as one bearing a faux lion’s head .

Couture can sag somewhat under the weight of its history. Craftsmanship, fashion’s favourite buzzword, can be a burden too, with designers feeling the need to embellish every gown with hand-embroidered butterflies and panoplies of pearls. But the following five looks show how a range of designers are making couture relevant today.

Balenciaga’s Sculptural Chaos

Demna, who goes by a mononym, is perhaps the contemporary designer most intent on bringing couture into the future. While he’s never far from Cristóbal Balenciaga’s archive—with its dramatic shapes and volumes—he’s also a student of streetwear. So the subcultures he reveres, from goth to skate kids, were present in his deceptively casual designs. Would the founder of the house turn in his grave at metal-band T-shirts masquerading as couture? Maybe not once he realised they were in fact hand-painted over a period of several days.

This top and skirt ensemble is made from unstitched cotton-jersey elements, which are then assembled and sewn together, and knotted on the model. It is a wearable sculpture, with the casual look of a pile of T-shirts.

Chanel’s Sublime Sweatsuit

Chanel, which is between creative directors after the departure of Virginie Viard, showed its haute couture collection at the Opéra Garnier. While many of the looks echoed the vibe of the classic theatre—including a sumptuous pink silk opera coat—some of the most successful moments were surprisingly dressed down. Robertsson, the Swedish couture client, exclaimed, “Chanel even had sweatpants!”

Shown on model-du-jour Amelia Gray Hamlin, the black Chanel sweatsuit was not technically a sweatsuit. It was a wool crepe jersey set trimmed in duchesse satin ruffles and organza. It was also shown in cream, and it will sell.

Dior’s Deceptively Simple Column

Maria Grazia Chiuri, one of the only female designers making couture, showed an elegantly restrained collection in a room filled with shimmering artwork by Faith Ringgold, who died earlier this year. Nodding to an Olympic year without being too heavy-handed, Chiuri presented Grecian-inspired draped dresses, flat lace-up sandals, and sporty tanks and bodysuits.

This long asymmetrical dress in cream-coloured silk jersey over a tank top is almost sporty, and a refreshing break from some of the more hobbling ensembles on display this past week. But that’s no ordinary tank top: It’s embroidered with silver-colored micro-tube beads that have hematite-clawed jewels on them.

Schiaparelli’s Faux Feathers

Daniel Roseberry, the charming Texan who’s revamped a dusty Parisian couture house, is a true believer in the art of couture. But he’s also savvy about its press potential, so this season, the show didn’t start until paparazzi magnets Kylie Jenner and Doja Cat had arrived.

The house’s founder, Elsa Schiaparelli, was a surrealist innovator who collaborated with her friend Salvador Dalí on one of the first trompe l’oeil garments . Roseberry continues his predecessor’s taste for trickery in his work. This jacket is embroidered all over with what appear to be small white feathers, but are in fact 10,500 silk-organza snippets. Because each “feather” is handmade, the jacket takes over 7,000 hours of work to create. Worn over a pair of smart black cropped pants, it’s almost work appropriate.

Jean Paul Gaultier’s Undressed Dress

Jean Paul Gaultier, which maintains a healthy and bustling couture business, has adopted the clever strategy of inviting buzzy non-couture designers to collaborate on its collections. Simone Rocha, Glenn Martens, Olivier Rousteing and Chitose Abe of Sacai have all worked it out on the remix with Gaultier. Nicolas Di Felice, the artistic director behind Courrèges’s Pinault-backed renaissance, was up this season.

Di Felice, whose friends span Paris’s creative industries, brought his cool-kid approach to Gaultier. Many pieces featured couture details like rows of hook-and-eye closures, and partially hidden tulle corsets. But there were Di Felice signatures, too: koala-pouch front pockets, narrow trousers, tiny party dresses. This cheeky gown is carefully constructed to look like the top slip is falling away to reveal a bustier.

Impact investing is becoming more mainstream as larger, institutional asset owners drive more money into the sector, according to the nonprofit Global Impact Investing Network in New York.

In the GIIN’s State of the Market 2024 report, published late last month, researchers found that assets allocated to impact-investing strategies by repeat survey responders grew by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14% over the last five years.

These 71 responders to both the 2019 and 2024 surveys saw their total impact assets under management grow to US$249 billion this year from US$129 billion five years ago.

Medium- and large-size investors were largely responsible for the strong impact returns: Medium-size investors posted a median CAGR of 11% a year over the five-year period, and large-size investors posted a median CAGR of 14% a year.

Interestingly, the CAGR of assets held by small investors dropped by a median of 14% a year.

“When we drill down behind the compound annual growth of the assets that are being allocated to impact investing, it’s largely those larger investors that are actually driving it,” says Dean Hand, the GIIN’s chief research officer.

Overall, the GIIN surveyed 305 investors with a combined US$490 billion under management from 39 countries. Nearly three-quarters of the responders were investment managers, while 10% were foundations, and 3% were family offices. Development finance institutions, institutional asset owners, and companies represented most of the rest.

The majority of impact strategies are executed through private-equity, but public debt and equity have been the fastest-growing asset classes over the past five years, the report said. Public debt is growing at a CAGR of 32%, and public equity is growing at a CAGR of 19%. That compares to a CAGR of 17% for private equity and 7% for private debt.

According to the GIIN, the rise in public impact assets is being driven by larger investors, likely institutions.

Private equity has traditionally served as an ideal way to execute impact strategies, as it allows investors to select vehicles specifically designed to create a positive social or environmental impact by, for example, providing loans to smallholder farmers in Africa or by supporting fledging renewable energy technologies.

Future Returns: Preqin expects managers to rely on family offices, private banks, and individual investors for growth in the next six years

But today, institutional investors are looking across their portfolios—encompassing both private and public assets—to achieve their impact goals.

“Institutional asset owners are saying, ‘In the interests of our ultimate beneficiaries, we probably need to start driving these strategies across our assets,’” Hand says. Instead of carving out a dedicated impact strategy, these investors are taking “a holistic portfolio approach.”

An institutional manager may want to address issues such as climate change, healthcare costs, and local economic growth so it can support a better quality of life for its beneficiaries.

To achieve these goals, the manager could invest across a range of private debt, private equity, and real estate.

But the public markets offer opportunities, too. Using public debt, a manager could, for example, invest in green bonds, regional bank bonds, or healthcare social bonds. In public equity, it could invest in green-power storage technologies, minority-focused real-estate trusts, and in pharmaceutical and medical-care company stocks with the aim of influencing them to lower the costs of care, according to an example the GIIN lays out in a separate report on institutional strategies.

Influencing companies to act in the best interests of society and the environment is increasingly being done through such shareholder advocacy, either directly through ownership in individual stocks or through fund vehicles.

“They’re trying to move their portfolio companies to actually solving some of the challenges that exist,” Hand says.

Although the rate of growth in public strategies for impact is brisk, among survey respondents investments in public debt totaled only 12% of assets and just 7% in public equity. Private equity, however, grabs 43% of these investors’ assets.

Within private equity, Hand also discerns more evidence of maturity in the impact sector. That’s because more impact-oriented asset owners invest in mature and growth-stage companies, which are favored by larger asset owners that have more substantial assets to put to work.

The GIIN State of the Market report also found that impact asset owners are largely happy with both the financial performance and impact results of their holdings.

About three-quarters of those surveyed were seeking risk-adjusted, market-rate returns, although foundations were an exception as 68% sought below-market returns, the report said. Overall, 86% reported their investments were performing in line or above their expectations—even when their targets were not met—and 90% said the same for their impact returns.

Private-equity posted the strongest results, returning 17% on average, although that was less than the 19% targeted return. By contrast, public equity returned 11%, above a 10% target.

The fact some asset classes over performed and others underperformed, shows that “normal economic forces are at play in the market,” Hand says.

Although investors are satisfied with their impact performance, they are still dealing with a fragmented approach for measuring it, the report said. “Despite this, over two-thirds of investors are incorporating impact criteria into their investment governance documents, signalling a significant shift toward formalising impact considerations in decision-making processes,” it said.

Also, more investors are getting third-party verification of their results, which strengthens their accountability in the market.

“The satisfaction with performance is nice to see,” Hand says. “But we do need to see more about what’s happening in terms of investors being able to actually track both the impact performance in real terms as well as the financial performance in real terms.”