Worth and his successors – Poiret and Vionnet among them – founded the first fashion brands. But although the designs of these Paris fashion houses were adapted and interpreted by provincial dressmakers, the couturiers were still effectively tailors, making individual items to fit specific clients. Haute couture was strictly by appointment only. The concept of mass-produced clothing hanging in stores did not exist. However, the mechanization of the textile industry and the emergence of department stores had combined to make the next step inevitable: ready-to-wear was just around the corner.
Yves Saint Laurent was by no means the originator of ready-to-wear (or prêt-à-porter, to use the French term), but he was probably its most creative exponent. As Didier Grumbach’s own 1993 book on the subject, Histoires de Mode, reveals, couturiers had been experimenting with branded series of garments since at least the 1920s. During that decade, Madeleine Vionnet signed an agreement with an independent Paris atelier to make labelled reproductions of her designs – with the proviso that no more than three of each were ever sold. And just after the Second World War, under the Marshall Plan devised by the Americans to speed Europe’s economic recovery, there was briefly a project to establish a factory that would produce labelled versions of French couturiers’ designs for export. At the time, the Paris fashion houses baulked at the idea.
A few years later, in 1950, a group of fashion insiders (among them Jean Gaumont-Lanvin, nephew of the designer Jeanne Lanvin) formed a company called Couturiers Associés. This would produce high-quality ready-to-wear lines based on patterns provided by designers. The label would bear the designer’s name as well as the name of the company. This time, five designers signed up: Jacques Fath, Robert Piguet, Paquin, Carven and Jean Dessès. Each designer would deliver seven patterns per season. The clothes were run-up in dressmaking ateliers. To promote the collections, fashion shows were held in selected department stores, casinos and hotels across France.
The company was the precursor of today’s luxury fashion empires – but it only existed for three years. The market for expensive mass-produced fashion was still small, and it was impossible to predict which garments would sell. This was an age before concerted marketing efforts and media coverage dovetailed to create the concept of ‘trends’. Market research was undertaken, but it came too late. Lack of capital, internal squabbling and failure to seduce an adequate target market combined to put an end to the experiment.
A far more successful approach to prêt-à-porter was devised by a designer forever linked with the Swinging Sixties as one of the popularizers of the mini skirt: André Courrèges. In a decade when technology was fashionable and fashion was being inspired by the street, Courrèges saw no reason why industrially produced garments should not coexist alongside hand-finished haute couture creations. Indeed, he showed both collections on the catwalk as a way of demonstrating that a less wealthy public could also get a taste of Courrèges style.
‘Courrèges was the first to understand that haute couture drove the dream,’ says Didier Grumbach today. ‘The haute couture collection established the necessary premium image of the brand, which then rubbed off on the prêt-à-porter line.’
The strategy worked. In 1967, Courrèges opened his first prêt-à-porter boutique in Paris. Over the next decade he expanded globally, opening 28 stores in the United States, 20 in Germany, 17 in Japan and three in Hong Kong. Sales rocketed from 17 million francs in 1970 to 68 million by 1973. Clearly, this level of output could not be entrusted to the Paris dressmaking ateliers. In 1972, Courrèges built his own factory in Pau, the town in the southwest of France where he was born. During the fuel crisis of the mid-1970s, the company was forced to retrench, but by then Courrèges had become one of the first global ready-to-wear brands.
It’s no coincidence that Courrèges is associated with ‘futuristic’ outfits like trapezoid dresses and shiny moon boots. Ahead of his time, he understood the importance of quality control when it came to brand image.
Even today, few ready-to-wear labels make their own clothing. A designer label is just that: the name of a designer sewn in to a garment made in a factory. Naturally, the manufacturers keep a low profile. Take Staff International, for example. The company was founded in 1985 in Noventa Vicentina, in Italy. Owned since 2000 by the Diesel group, it makes clothing for designers such as Martin Margiela, Marc Jacobs, Vivienne Westwood and Sophia Kokosalaki. Other names woven into its history include Karl Lagerfeld, Valentino, Costume National and Missoni. Through services like its ‘knitwear atelier’, the company ensures that the clothes we end up wearing match the designers’ original vision. But it helps them with other matters too: every brand has a dedicated team working on products and styling, research and development, sales and production. Staff International also has a press and communications division that advises on PR, brand strategy and advertising. And its distribution arm ensures that the clothes find their way into the right stores.
The production (or ‘confection’ as it’s known in France) of prêt-à-porter clothing has a long history. Didier Grumbach himself has been involved in the manufacturing of garments for designers. In 1954, as he recounts in his book, the young Grumbach joined C Mendès, a business started by his grandfather Cerf Mendès-France 80 years earlier. Over the years the company made clothing for the likes of Jeanne Lanvin, Jean Patou, Emanuel Ungaro, Guy Laroche, Givenchy, Balenciaga – and Yves Saint Laurent.
THE YSL LEGACY
Saint Laurent was the first designer to make ready-to-wear seem as desirable and – crucially – as prestigious as haute couture. Perhaps that’s because, despite his otherworldly demeanour, he was at heart a populist. Late in his career, he half-joked that he wished he’d invented the denim jean. He was born into a well-off family in Algeria, then a French colony, in 1936. In 1953 he arrived in Paris – a skinny 17-year-old kid with a bunch of sketches under his arm, demanding and getting an appointment with Michael de Brunhoff, the editor of Vogue. After taking one look at the sketches, or so the legend goes, de Brunhoff dispatched Saint Laurent to Christian Dior.
And there the precocious designer stayed, taking over at the helm of the house when Dior died prematurely in 1957. After creating six collections, some of which divided critics, he was called up to fight for France in the Algerian war of independence. Anybody could tell that Saint Laurent was constitutionally unsuited to military service. He was hospitalized after just 20 days with severe depression. By the time he emerged, at the end of 1960, he had lost his job at Dior. But now he was ready – or at least as ready as this timorous figure could ever be – to establish his own fashion house. And his partner Pierre Bergé was at his side, taking care of business while the designer wove his dreams.
The pair soon realized that Paris fashion could not afford to maintain its courtly posture – not in the fast and loose atmosphere of the 1960s. They created a separate brand called Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche and in 1966 opened a small boutique in Saint Germain. The name and the location were carefully chosen. At the time, the Left Bank of Paris was considered bohemian, literary and faintly unruly: two years later, its students would be at the centre of the May riots that almost toppled the government. It was certainly a world away from the glittering haute couture maisons and their haughty clientele. As such, it was an ideal rallying point for a fashion revolution that would put women in safari jackets, tuxedos and trouser suits.
In her 2002 biography of Yves Saint Laurent, the journalist Laurence Benaïm evokes the boutique’s uncluttered red and black lacquer interior and its angular Mies Van der Rohe Barcelona chairs. The long, narrow, former bakery was reconfigured by Isabelle Hebey, a designer who considered steel and laminate the contemporary version of wood panelling. ‘It quickly became a Paris nightclub for the daytime,’ writes Benaïm. As for the clothes, they were ‘not the luxury of wealth, but of attitude’. Pierre Bergé observed that while Chanel liberated women, Saint Laurent gave them power. Long before the statement shoulder pads of the 1980s, he created a pale
tte of styles for the independent woman.
Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche was far more than a spin-off line, as Didier Grumbach recounts: ‘[Saint Laurent] brought a new significance to prêt-à-porter. He discovered that the work of couture – solitary, constantly demanding perfection, immediately consumable – is, all things considered, less creative than that of prêt-à-porter... which anticipates the desires of women by proposing, in advance, new styles... From the very first season, he outpaced couture with his brilliance, mastery and invention, imposing with prêt-à-porter his [vision of] fashion on the entire world.’
Through a franchise system, Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche grew into a global network of stores. YSL also adopted the licensing strategy that later tarnished the images of some designers. Its most enthusiastic exponent was Pierre Cardin, another Parisian prêt-à-porter pioneer. Cardin licensed his name to the manufacturers of all manner of objects, from pens to cooking pots. Designers had realized that, with haute couture creating an ethereal dream at the top end of the market, they could make a fortune by chopping the dream into little pieces and selling it in the form of – often quite shoddy – branded goods at the bottom. Finally realizing the damage this was doing, most fashion brands reined in their licences in the 1990s. Today, while the majority of their profits still come from the sales of fragrances, sunglasses and other accessories, they keep strict control over the design and production of items that bear their names.
Although Yves Saint Laurent was happy to feed this hunger for licences, he fared better than most, launching highly successful perfumes like Rive Gauche (1971) and Opium (1978). In fact, according to Laurence Benaïm, by the time the Paris fashion house celebrated its 30th anniversary in 1992, no less 82 per cent of its income derived from fragrances and cosmetics. Of the 2,993 people who worked there, only 533 were concerned with couture. This reflects, in microcosm, the structure of the entire fashion industry. It was a clear confirmation that YSL had transcended the material: to millions of people around the world, the three letters evoked an enviable Parisian lifestyle that could be bottled and packaged. Inevitably, the house became embroiled in the brand-acquisition fever that gripped the fashion industry throughout the 1990s – and which is still having an impact on the sector today.
Elf-Sanofi acquired the fragrances and beauty arm of Yves Saint Laurent in January 1993, with Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé retaining control of the fashion house. Six years later, however, both the beauty business and the fashion house were acquired by François Pinault and his retail group PPR. The same group soon beat LVMH in a tussle to take control of Gucci. The fashion world had changed – firms that had begun as small, almost familial, concerns were now part of well-oiled business machines – and Saint Laurent found that it no longer suited him. By the time he died, he’d effectively been retired from fashion for six years.
Towards the end of his life, however, he had a chance to see how other designers might interpret his legacy. First, PPR brought in the American designer Tom Ford to oversee the YSL brand. Ford had become a star by transforming Gucci from a faded purveyor of upmarket bags to a sexpot fashion brand, complete with stores clad in black marble and sweaty ‘porno chic’ advertising. But Ford’s risky balancing act between sophistication and vulgarity did not sit well with the Yves Saint Laurent brand, which had a cooler, more ambiguous image. Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé signalled their disapproval by pointedly staying away from Ford’s YSL shows. Although the charismatic American had done a great job with Gucci, his magic was not having the desired effect at YSL. Eventually, Ford left PPR for new projects – including the creation of his eponymous fashion brand – and Yves Saint Laurent was ripe for another overhaul.
This time, the chemistry worked. Ford’s second-in-command at YSL was a tall, elegant Milanese named Stefano Pilati, who’d joined the brand from Prada in 2000. Rising to the top slot in 2004, Pilati, after a hesitant start, made the brand his own. Yet his sharp, urbane designs deliberately channelled the Saint Laurent spirit. The founder himself was said to approve.
A whole raft of historic French fashion brands have had to deal with this transition from creator to successor: Chanel, Dior, Givenchy, Balenciaga, Lanvin – the list goes on. Indeed, most of them have churned through several designers by now, with varying degrees of success. The challenge for the newcomers is to remain true to the essence of the brand while updating it and expressing their own creativity.
Pilati puts his wobbly beginning down to the fact that his initial designs were somewhat ahead of the curve. His tulip-shaped skirts were derided when he showed them in 2004, only to be appropriated by other designers later on. He admits ‘When I was 17, the design director at Nino Cerrutti, who was my first mentor, taught me that to be too much ahead is to be behind. The most important thing is to be right on time’ (‘At Yves Saint Laurent, a chic for tough times’, International Herald Tribune, 30–31 August 2008).
For a brand, the most important thing is to be profitable – a box that YSL had failed to tick at the time of writing. It lost €60 million in 2004 and managed to break even four years later. The dramatically improved picture may have something to do with Pilati’s creativity – but the strategy put in place by the brand’s new chief executive Valerie Hermann when she arrived in 2005 should not be discounted. Hermann felt that, in contrast to the licence-mania of the Saint Laurent era, the brand was not producing enough accessories. She encouraged Pilati to design a bag. The resulting creation, called Muse, was a bestseller. Pilati has since followed up with more accessories and footwear. He is dynamically creative, but not divorced from reality. In the IHT article quoted above, he first states ‘I am not a businessman’, before changing his mind: ‘I have become a businessman. The times require that.’
THE FUTURE OF COUTURE
Yves Saint Laurent took luxury fashion out of stuffy salons cluttered with gilt chairs and put it onto the streets. Ironically, the vitality and creativity of prêt-à-porter eclipsed haute couture, which began to look like an overblown anachronism. Now fashion had democratized, who wanted to spend a hundred thousand dollars on a dress? By the end of the 1990s it was suggested that there were fewer than 500 haute couture customers worldwide. A number of designers had packed away their sketchpads, unable to make a profit. Some commentators thought haute couture would disappear altogether. Others felt it was worth saving. After all, haute couture was the wellspring. It was the fairytale, the glittering spectacle whose pixie dust rubbed off on the rest of the fashion industry. Could anybody breathe life back into haute couture?
In his position at the helm of the Fédération Française de la Couture, Didier Grumbach was in an ideal position to see what should be done. Haute couture is an official appellation, rather like Bordeaux or champagne. In order to enter this exclusive club (it’s called the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture) a designer had to have ‘made-to-measure dressmaking activity in the Paris area’. But in 1997 membership was broadened to include ‘guest designers’, who would be voted in by existing members. They would show made-to-measure clothes alongside experimental ready-to-wear pieces.
Grumbach notes that the first guest designers to send collections down the runway during the haute couture shows – which are held at the end of January and the beginning of July – were Thierry Mugler and Jean-Paul Gaultier. Many others have followed. A recent selection included Cathy Pill, Felipe Oliviera Batista, Josep Font and Alexis Mabille (of whom we’ll hear more later). All these guests have added dynamism to a calendar that would otherwise have thinned out to only a handful of designers. There are also ‘correspondent members’ whose clothes are hand-made, but not in Paris: they include Valentino and Giorgio Armani.
Some designers who started out making ready-to-wear have since entered the world of haute couture. Jean-Paul Gaultier has progressed from ‘guest designer’ to full membership of the Chambre Syndicale, showing an haute couture collection every season. Giorgio Armani made his debut in 2005, showing 35 pieces in a collection that
he called Giorgio Armani Privé. According to UK newspaper the Daily Telegraph, Armani had invested in an entire dressmaking atelier. Customers seduced by the pieces on the catwalk could expect to undergo three fittings before walking away with their own bespoke version, which would cost them anywhere between £12,800 and £46,500 (‘Armani plots a new French revolution’, 25 January 2005).
For haute couture these prices were considered accessible. The vertiginous cost of an haute couture dress is also the price of an entire system: the designer’s salary, those of the women who hand sew and embroider the pieces, the cost of the runway show, the boutique and the personal shoppers who greet VIP customers in private salons... the haute couture client is paying for individuality and creativity, certainly – but for many other things besides. This inaccessibility drives the brand dream, which explains its appeal to designers. ‘Once upon a time, designers created haute couture and diversified into prêt-à-porter,’ points out Grumbach. ‘Now it’s the other way around.’
A number of contemporary fashion brands have adopted the strategy pioneered by the original couturiers: a pyramidal structure with haute couture as a shining lure at the apex and bags and perfume being hawked at the base. But designers also use haute couture as a field of experimentation – the ultimate expression of their art. The shows put on by John Galliano at Dior and Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel often feature creations that have little to do with what the average person thinks of as ‘clothing’. This artistic element allows couture to escape the accusations of excess, irrelevance and frivolity that are often directed at other sectors of the luxury business.
I asked rising designer Alexis Mabille for his take on the future of couture. Now in his early 30s, Mabille knows the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture intimately, as he studied fashion design at its school. With his long dark hair and impeccable dress sense – which often features long coats and a bow tie – Mabille could easily be a couturier from another age. Which is perhaps not a coincidence, as in the mid-1990s the school still had a somewhat 19th century feel about it.
Luxury World: The Past, Present and Future of Luxury Brands Page 3