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.

Former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu delivered a warning to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a recent visit to Washington: Already-high airfares will surge if the war in Iran doesn’t end soon.

Sununu, a Republican who represents some of the biggest airlines as president of the industry group Airlines for America, has for weeks sounded the alarm to Trump administration officials about the economic fallout from high jet fuel prices. The war, Sununu has argued, must come to a close soon, or things will get worse.

Administration officials have gotten the message.

Privately, President Trump’s advisers are increasingly worried that Republicans will pay a political price for the rising fuel costs, according to people familiar with the matter. Many of those advisers are eager to end the war, hoping prices will begin to moderate before November’s midterm elections.

The fallout from the U.S.-Israeli attack in late February has slowed traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane, triggering a sharp increase in oil, gasoline and jet-fuel prices.

That means consumers are grappling with high costs ahead of the summer travel season, as they consider vacation plans.

Sixty-three per cent of Americans said they put a great deal or a good amount of blame on Trump for the increase in gas prices, according to a new poll conducted by NPR, PBS and Marist.

More than 8 in 10 Americans said struggles at the gas pump are putting strain on their finances.

Jet-fuel prices roughly doubled in a matter of weeks after the war began, and they have remained high. Airlines have said that will add billions of dollars of additional expenses this year, squeezing profit margins.

U.S. airlines spent more than $5 billion on fuel in March—up 30% from a year earlier, according to government data.

Carriers have been raising ticket prices, hoping to pass the cost along to consumers, and they are culling flights that will no longer make money at higher price levels.

In March, the price of a U.S. domestic round-trip economy ticket rose 21% from a year earlier to $570, according to Airlines Reporting Corp., which tracks travel-agency sales.

So far, airlines have said the higher fares haven’t deterred bookings and they are hoping to recoup more of the fuel-cost increases as the year goes on.

Earlier this week, Trump said the current price of oil is “a very small price to pay for getting rid of a nuclear weapon from people that are really mentally deranged.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that if Iran got a nuclear weapon, the country would have more leverage to keep the strait closed and “make our gas prices like $9 a gallon or $8 a gallon.”

Trump has taken steps in recent days to bring the war to an end. Late Tuesday, the president paused a plan to help guide trapped commercial ships out of the Strait of Hormuz, expressing optimism that a deal could be reached with Iran to end the conflict.

Crude oil prices fell below $100 a barrel on Wednesday, after reports that Iran and the U.S. are working with mediators on a one-page framework to restart negotiations aimed at ending the conflict and opening the strait.

Sununu said Trump administration officials are conscious of the economic fallout from the war: “They get it…and I think that’s why they’re trying to get through the war as fast as they can.”

But he cautioned that it could take months for prices to return to prewar levels.

“Ticket prices won’t go down immediately” after the strait is fully reopened, Sununu said. “You’re looking at elevated ticket prices through the summer and fall because it takes a while for the prices to go down.”

Since the initial U.S.-Israeli attack in late February, Sununu has met in Washington with National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, representatives from the Transportation Department and senior White House officials.

A White House official confirmed that Hassett and Sununu have discussed the effect of increased fuel prices on the airline industry. The official said the conversation touched on how the industry can mitigate the impact of high jet fuel prices on consumers.

“The president and his entire energy team anticipated these short-term disruptions to the global energy markets from Operation Epic Fury and had a plan prepared to mitigate these disruptions,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said, pointing to the administration’s decision to waive a century-old shipping law in a bid to lower the cost of moving oil.

Rogers said the administration is working with industry representatives to “address their concerns, explore potential actions, and inform the president’s policy decisions.”

A Treasury Department spokesman pointed to Bessent’s recent comments on Fox News that the U.S. economy remains strong despite price increases. The spokesman said Treasury officials have met with airline executives, who have reaffirmed strong ticket bookings.

“We’re cognizant that this short-term move up in prices is affecting the American people, but I am also confident, on the other side of this, prices will come down very quickly,” Bessent told Fox News on Monday.

The war has already contributed to one casualty in the industry: Spirit Airlines. Company representatives have said they were forced to close the airline because the sustained surge in jet-fuel prices derailed the company’s plan to emerge from chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The Trump administration and Spirit failed to come to an agreement for the company to receive a financial lifeline of as much as $500 million from the federal government.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has argued that the Iran war wasn’t the cause of Spirit’s demise, pointing to the company’s past financial struggles, as well as the Biden administration’s decision to challenge a merger with JetBlue.

Other budget airlines have also turned to the federal government for help since the U.S.-Israeli attack. A group of budget airlines last month sought $2.5 billion in financial assistance to offset higher fuel costs, and they separately wrote to lawmakers asking for relief from certain ticket taxes.