Let’s be honest: this haute couture season was brief and left you feeling hungry. Maybe it wasn’t a famine for beauty, as Andre Leon Talley liked to say. There was way too much beauty – of the conventional kind. Hundreds of metres of tulles, thousands of hours of handwork, millions of digital impressions. But to me, this couture signalled one thing: it’s a growingly archaic commodity. Gone are the days when Raf Simons at Dior presented absolutely contemporary-looking vision of eveningwear. Or Karl Lagerfeld showing couture sneakers at Chanel. This season painfully missed true fashion moments. There was absolutely nothing close to a spectacle like THAT last John Galliano collection for Maison Margiela. Demna shows couture for Balenciaga only once a year, in July, but I really wished he saved this season. In the meantime he wore a T-shirt while being awarded with the title of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. And a plastic bag to Alessandro Michele’s debut Valentino couture show. I feel him.

Speaking of that debut, it was a brief moment of high this season, but as Angelo Flaccavento very rightly observed, this was a parade of great, convincing costumes, but not that great clothes. In the end, haute couture is a form of very precious, very costly applied art that’s being worn – at least once in its lifetime.

Michele really showcased all the possibilities of the Valentino artisan savoir-faire. To such extremes it felt dizzying (as the show’s title, “Vertigineux”, suggests), even nauseous. Huge ball-dresses dipped in embroideries and embellishments, meaty lace, massive crinolines, sumptuous excess all over: this certainly could be a separate costume department for a Fellini film. Unfortunately, as it’s the case with costumes, they wear the wearer. This isn’t very couture.

So, if Real Housewives of Salt Lake City’s Bronwyn Newport ever wears anything straight from that runway, Britani Bateman has full right to question it as costume.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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