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Why Couture Clients Keep Buying Six-Figure Gowns

How designers brought the antiquated craft of haute couture into the future at the shows in Paris

By RORY SATRAN
Mon, Jul 1, 2024 9:14amGrey Clock 3 min

“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.



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Fed Cuts Rates Again, This Time by a Quarter Point

Powell says he has no intention of leaving Fed before his term expires

By NICK TIMIRAOS
Fri, Nov 8, 2024 4 min

US: The Federal Reserve approved a quarter-point interest-rate cut Thursday, the latest step to prevent large rate increases of the prior 2½ years from weakening the labour market as inflation eases.

The decision, coming the same week as the election of Donald Trump to a second presidential term, followed an initial cut of a half-point in September and will bring the benchmark federal-funds rate to a range between 4.5% and 4.75%. All 12 Fed voters backed the cut.

Officials have said those moves are warranted because they are more confident that inflation will return to the central bank’s target and because they believe rates are still high enough, even with the latest cuts, to dampen economic activity.

The move was expected. Stocks and Treasury yields were steady after the announcement.

“We are committed to maintaining our economy’s strength,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said at a news conference. He said officials are confident that with an “appropriate recalibration of our policy stance,” inflation can continue heading lower with a solid economy.

Trump’s election victory this week has the potential to reshape the economic outlook, with presumed GOP majorities on both sides of Capitol Hill enabling a broad shift on taxes, spending, immigration and trade. Economists are divided over whether the mix of policies will boost or weaken growth and drive up prices.

The shift in the outlook, in turn, has fuelled questions on Wall Street over whether the Fed will alter its earlier expectation that rates could be steadily dialled lower over the coming year or two.

Powell said it was too soon to say how the next administration’s policies would reshape the economic outlook.

“We don’t guess, we don’t speculate, we don’t assume” what policies will get put into place, Powell said. “In the near term, the election will have no effects on our policy decisions.”

Powell also said he had no intention of leaving the Fed before his four-year term as chair expires in May 2026. “Not permitted under the law,” Powell said when asked if he believed the president could remove him or other Fed personnel from their positions before their term expires.

Since the Fed cut rates in September, longer-dated bond yields have climbed notably, meaning the cost to borrow for a mortgage or car loan has gone up. Yields have increased in large part because better economic data has led investors to reduce their worries about a recession, which could have triggered larger rate cuts.

But some analysts think the bond-market selloff may also reflect concerns by some investors about higher deficits or inflation in a second Trump administration.

Either way, the market has generated an unusual result: Borrowing costs rose after the Fed cut rates. The average 30-year mortgage rate has jumped since mid-September, to 6.8% this week from 6.1%, according to Freddie Mac.

Over a similar time frame, investors in interest-rate futures markets have steadily reduced their expectations over how much the Fed will cut rates over the next year or so. They now see the Fed cutting rates to around 3.6% by 2026, up from an estimated trough of 2.8% in September, according to Citi.

Officials are trying to bring rates back to a more “normal” or “neutral” setting that neither spurs nor slows growth. But they don’t know what constitutes a normal rate. Policies that boost economic activity or prices could also lead officials to conclude that they should maintain a moderately restrictive rate stance. That means they would hold rates somewhat higher than a normal or neutral level.

Before the 2008-09 financial crisis, many thought a neutral rate might be around 4%, but after the crisis and an extremely sluggish recovery, economists and Fed officials concluded the neutral rate might be closer to 2%.

Interest-rate projections that officials submitted in September show most of them expected that if the economy expanded solidly with inflation continuing to cool , they could cut rates to around 3.5% next year.

Inflation based on the Fed’s preferred index was 2.1% in September, from a year earlier. A separate measure of so-called core inflation that strips out volatile food and energy prices was 2.7%. The Fed targets 2% inflation over time.

Because officials don’t have much conviction over where the neutral rate sits, they are likely to be guided by how the economy performs in the months ahead. If inflation keeps slowing and the demand for workers looks soft, officials could conclude it makes sense to continue cutting rates along the path they envisioned in September.

“We’re going to move carefully as this goes on so we can increase the chances that we get it right,” Powell said. “We’re trying to steer between the risk of moving too quicky…or moving too slowly. We’re trying to be on a middle path.”

If inflation progress stalls or ebullient financial markets raise concerns that inflation might get stuck above their target, officials might face more reservations around continuing to cut rates at a steady, meeting-after-meeting clip.

The most immediate focus is whether the Fed will cut again at its upcoming meeting in December. In September, 19 participants were about evenly divided over whether to cut rates one or two more times this year. Nine of them penciled in no more than one cut in either November or December, while 10 penciled in two cuts.

“There’s a lot to learn between now and the December meeting,” said Diane Swonk, chief U.S. economist at KPMG. “They can’t leave the door wide open, but they can’t close the door either.”

Powell said Thursday it was too soon to rule anything “out or in” at that meeting. Slowing down the pace of rate cuts is “something we’re just beginning to think about,” he said. “We’re on a path to a more neutral stance. That has not changed at all since September. We’re just going to have to see where the data lead us.”

Even before the election result, recent data suggested that cutting again would be a finely balanced decision because inflation looks like it might end the year slightly above officials’ projection, while the unemployment rate has edged lower recently, said Matthew Luzzetti, chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank.

The election result— which sent stock markets to new highs while raising the prospect of stronger growth, higher inflation and better labour-market outcomes—boosted the odds that the Fed forgoes a cut next month, he said.

“Those could present a strong case from a risk-management perspective to potentially skip that meeting,” said Luzzetti.

MOST POPULAR
11 ACRES ROAD, KELLYVILLE, NSW

This stylish family home combines a classic palette and finishes with a flexible floorplan

35 North Street Windsor

Just 55 minutes from Sydney, make this your creative getaway located in the majestic Hawkesbury region.

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