Couture – no Opulence any more, but responsibility

Anything that appears opulent today turns out to be out of time, out of the human context we are living in – opulent fashion is not current, it is waste and consumerism

About Couture SS24 – Fashion month, fashion week, wanna be

Someone called it fashion month. It’s a collection of those fashion weeks that have filled the agendas of so many wannabes. In this historical moment, in the context we are living, there is an attitude that seems out of place: opulence. By attitude we mean the way of posing, presenting oneself, arranging oneself, choosing oneself – it follows by logic how an attitude is intrinsic to a reasoned definition of fashion. Everything that passes, appearing and presenting itself opulently, is not fashion. It is out of place, out of the current, cultural, and human context we are living in.

Giorgio Armani: we must not live surrounded by stuff

Not only does it exclude elegance: opulence today is reminiscent of rudeness. Dwellings overflowing with objects, layers, fabrics; plastic jewelry; clothes in strong colors that get that prominence because they are printed on synthetic fabrics by chemical processes. Giorgio Armani says we don’t need so much, that we don’t have to live surrounded by stuff: it’s not good for us, not for our minds. It is not good for the planet. Armani adds that today we cannot produce, but neither can we define, beauty if beauty comes at the expense of other human beings.

Haute couture shows in Paris: Couture SS24

One could link couture to opulence, but I am here to write the opposite: couture could be – I would rather say should be – that moment when fashion takes detachment from opulence by rediscovering its value of research and time-telling. Haute couture is the industry least connected to a mass trade: the clothes are one-of-a-kind or limitedly replicated pieces, sometimes expected to be made to order when they are already sold. They are generally priced in excess of forty thousand euros. The haute couture shows are reserved for ladies who are regular customers, for commercial people who can reach them; for celebrities from film and show business. 

The press is invited, for representation: they can write about it, but the couture clothes are hardly photographable. After the fashion shows, appointments with the ladies who have arrived in town take place. Fashion houses see couture as a moment of income for which they maintain confidentiality. Some customers do not like to see the clothes they buy advertised. If magazines are blurring into a digital and viral spread rather than consolidating into an authorial and authoritative context, photographs in newspapers do not seem necessary.

Métiers d’Art: crafts, art, decoration and design

Just above, I write that couture features one-piece garments, made with handmade workmanship: embroidery for which hours of finger work are spent by those with experience; fabrics made with ancient looms not possible in modern times; reappears a velvet overlay made of silk, not nylon. In France, the state protects the Métiers d’Art, craftsmen who now pose the question of what is art, what is decoration, what is craftsmanship, and what else can be designed. Métier d’Art is a technical skill for making artifacts that define what lies at the opposite, today and tomorrow, of the concept of opulence, and what I like to call wonder.

Couture and the responsibility of manufacturing districts

Couture could tell the message of tomorrow’s fashion: a fashion that transforms manual labor into a noble craft for which new generations want to cultivate and try their hand. The system can make a prospect of substantial economic remuneration plausible: the artisan can become a professional of first ambition. Centers outside the big cities would return to a social life based on local wealth. 

Both in France and Italy: provincial districts would be reborn as central places, no longer neighboring corners from which young people dream of leaving to live in studio apartments in Milan or Paris. Fashion has an aspirational and conducting value of the textile industry: to find a new value, it must recover rigor.

Couture SS24 – Couture, Haute couture: the rigor of artisanal, limited, sustainable production – not industrial, not scalable

Rigor is the key: if mass production has to compromise by quantitative scalability, couture can require transparent and positive production at every stage. Without shortcuts. It is customary to define couture as production of such quality that it cannot be industrialized: to this code should be added the complete short supply chain; the total absence of plastic and synthetic fabric; the colors and fibers only natural; the leather from never intensive farming; so proceeding.

Couture could present these details and push creativity within these boundaries. Fashion is not just a fashionista obsession of a billionaire audience that spends for emulation and appearance. Fashion can tell the dream of this work, make the world see the craftsmanship and make the economic value understood.

Carlo Mazzoni