Situation de la haute Couture française. Description des grandes maisons de couture.
PARIS — The show is over. But without the star. In the absence of André Courrèges, the Callas of French haute couture, the winter collections unvelled this summer have been like an opera sung by the chorus alone. And such performances can be boring even when the chorus is excellent.
At the height of his glory, Courrèges has abandoned art for industry, the hand-sewn for ready-to-wear and the clientele of Society for the ordinary Mme Durand.
Fame at 42 has made Courrèges as apprehensive as a wild gazelle, and when asked why he stepped down from the pinnacle of haute couture, his dark lean face turned pathetic. ''Because I want every woman to be able to wear Courrèges clothes.'' This is really nice of him. But there is probably another reason : haute couture has become a quite unreasonable business.
Artists and Accountants
As always, behind the artists are the accountants. And this is how they count: in a collection of 174 models, such as Dior showed this year, $200,000 is invested in labor and in materials. Then, each model is reproduced, one by one, to the clients measurements, with three fittings according to haute couture traditions. Each dress represents an average of 135 working hours — $470 just in labor costs. Plus the material — $80 — plus general overhead.
The seamstresses — 320 at Dior, which has the largest production facilities—must work in the same building where the dresses are sold. Necessarily, a haute couture house is located in one of the most expensive districts of Paris and at the cost of a square foot in these areas, the rent and taxes are wildly extravagant. If a manufacturer of shoes or records had to house his entire labor force in the building where his products were sold, his prices would be double.
Losing Money
Couturiers' prices run to $800, $900. $1,000 a dress. Even so, they lose money. Raise the prices? They have already reached a dangerous ceiling.
Only 382 taxpayers in France officially declare an income sufficient to regularly buy dresses for their wives or mistresses at those prices. And even counting tax evaders and rich foreigners, the total adds up to 3,000 clients for the 38 houses officially authorized to bear the label of haute couture.
Then too, even when they are able to afford it, young women of today no longer have the patience to corne for fittings. Chanel herself has never been able to coax Brigitte Bardot into becoming a client.
She has told her : ''Dress at my house and I will make you into an élégant woman.'' Brigitte replied: ''Elegance? I couldn't care less. It's old fashioned.'' And she has continued buying her dresses in the boutiques.
The oldest French fashion house, Lanvin, which dresses Princess Grace of Monaco, where Barbara Hutton orders the complete collection and which has had three générations of industrialists' wives as clients, has been unable to hold onto the industrialists' daughters and this year reduced its collection to 65 models and its workrooms to two.
Business of Prestige
At the house of Yves St. Laurent an aging countess orders her dresses one by one to have a pretext for coming almost every day. But the young Baroness Guy de Rothschild, one of the couturiers' best customers, gets annoyed when she has to have more than one fitting.
It is the prestige of the clothes, the twice-yearly publicity over the rising hem or the dropping waistline, which makes the label.
This is why businessmen still back couturiers or hire their talent or name. This is why Richard Salomon, président of Lanvin Charles of the Ritz, for instance, has just invested a large sum in Yves St. Laurent and taken control of his perfume ''Y.''
Nevertheless the couturiers carry on, even though their dresses are a mere facade of publicity for the famous names that sell quite different goods. Pierre Cardin makes ready-to-wear for men. Dior manufactures ties, lingerie, hosiery, shoes and lipstick. Dior's total annual turnover, thanks to its subsidiary activates, is $30 million, which is $10 million more than the revenue of ail the houses put together (Dior included) from their haute couture business.
All of them make perfume, the national specialty that brings in an annual turnover of $350 million. The revenue from haute couture is only $20 million, of which 60 per cent cornes from the sale abroad of reproduction rights.
Master Healers
This is why every 10 years the doctors assemble at the bedside of French haute couture and announce that death is imminent. Their diagnosis usually corresponds to the end of a fashion era, the moment when women begin to get bored with their clothes and foreign buyers claim that Paris lacks inspiration.
Then, suddenly, along cornes a master healer who revives the patient.
In 1946 it was Christian Dior who regained the supremacy Paris lost during the war. In 1954 it was Chanel, who made a triumphant Personal comeback. In 1965 it has been Courrèges whose show in January — his third in a year—made him a superstar of haute couture.
Chanel Protests
Christian Dior was financed by a textile industrialist, Marcel Bousac, who still controls the firm. Dior, a modest and superstitious fellow, accepted Boussac's proposition because his fortune teller had predicted success. His ''New Look'' triumphed because after the war years of mourning and hardship his flowing skirts and rediscovery of femininity became a symbol of abundance.
Chanel made her own fortune. She started out before 1914 as a milliner and opened a fashion house at a time when one could get rich in the business because labor was so cheap. Even today a seamstress earns only 90 cents an hour and it is becoming more and more difficult to find one.
Chanel had genius. She created her own materials and jewelry. She invented the famous No. 5 perfume with her own nose.
Chanel has since ceded manufacturing rights to Pierre Wertheimer, who also makes cheap perfume under the Bourjois label, but she still gets enough royalties on each bottle of No. 5 to give her one of the largest incomes in France.
Courrèges is Chanel's nightmare. Her clothes are a shield, covering a woman's imperfects. He does everything she hates: clothes without waist-lines, baring the knee and the upper arm. ''Everything that is most ugly in a woman,'' she says. ''Have they all gone mad?''
But when she examined a pair of pants cut by Courrèges she had to admit: ''He knows his business.''
Odds Favor Courrèges
Dressing women is a minor art, perhaps, but is it an art that can be industrialized ? This is Courrèges's wager, an interesting bet with the odds in his favor. It follows the trend of history and France's évolution toward an American way of life.
He will try on his own hook and in his own country what ready-to-wear manufacturera have been doing for 20 years in the United States when they buy Paris reproductions created by the couturiers.
Courrèges will create, reproduce and distribute his own models by the thousand instead of making ten of each. And he will be able to sell them at $200, five times less than haute couture prices, by doing away with the fittings and perfecting the technique of cutting - and assembling the clothes to reduce labor costs to the minimum.
Not a great many French women can afford to pay $200 (a secretarv's monthly pay) for a dress. Ready-to-wear clothes rarely exceed $100. and accordins: to the most recent Gallup poll, the majority of women think a dress should not cost more than $40.
But Courrèges is not aiming at this group. He has a very good chance of getting enough women to pay his prices. And if he succeeds in finding this clientele it may mean the death of the superb ceremonial of haute couture and its high priests.
Competing with a Pioneer
Faced with the pioneer, Courrèges. the craftsmen who still work as they did in the 19th century are not yet worried. At least not all of them.
The least happy, those whose clientele is wavering, recklesaly have tried to grind a little Courrèges pepper into their habitual menu.
The most cynical of them say: ''As long as we know how to attract American buyers over here by welcoming them like princes, giving dinners in their honor and inviting them to Maxim's, they will continue coming to Paris twice a year and have leave behind enough money for us to live on.''
Chanel, Balenciaga, Givenchy, St. Laurent are still quite convinced there will always remain a handful of women rich enough, refined enough (those who wear mink as a lining) or snobbish enough never to follow the crowd.
Cristobal Balenciaga has been making the same dress and the same suit for 15 years for women who are aging with him. He is 72. He began in Spain, where the rich are very rich and the seamstresses particularly badly paid.
When a new client enters his house it may happen that his manageress, the formidable Mlle. Renée, sends her away. Or, if she happens to be in a good humor, she advises: ''Come back in two months.'' The most enthusiastic of Balenciaga's recent clients is Inge Morath (Mrs. Arthur Miller) even though he refuses to make pockets so she can tuck away her camera.
When the young Marquis Givenchy decided to follow the same path of sophistication on the opposite side of the Avenue George V, Balenciaga helped him a great deal. Givenchy, who had been a designer at Schiaparelli, opened his own house with the financial backing of friends, owners of the large department store, Au Printemps. He, too, had his perfume. Even two in fact: ''Le De'' and ''L'Interdit.''
His brother looks after that side of the business. The most famous members of the Givenchy sect are Audrey Hepburn and Jacqueline Kennedy.
Since all artists have the temperament and nerves of a prima donna, none of the couturiers were happy to see Courrèges steal the limelight — and, incidentally the customers. But on second thought they argue: ''Ford didn't kill Rolls-Royce. Let Courrèges make Fords for one and all. We shall go on making Rolls-Royces.''
