Haute Couture Revival

Dior

At present  haute couture is the most modern way to dress because it's very individual," says Pier Paolo Piccioli, who with Maria Grazia Chiuri designs Valentino's ethereal gowns. "It's like customizing your life; it means uniqueness."

The current state of couture has emerged from the ashes of economic turmoil. "Couture seems more relevant now than it was in the boom years," says designer Donatella Versace, who this season returned Atelier Versace to the official couture runway after eight years of low-key presentations. "The global downturn has made people think about the value of things. Couture may be expensive, but as a reflection of the designer's art, and as an expression of pure creativity in fashion, it is unsurpassed."

This evokes a culture very different from that of traditional haute couture: wealthy socialites in grand dresses from designers such as Jeanne Lanvin and Christian Dior. For many years, that's certainly what it was. Now, they stand in stark contrast to the discreet shopper of today, it's difficult to find women who so openly display their membership to the couture club.

Couture seemed to hit rock bottom in the middle of the last decade, when Christian Lacroix, Yves Saint Laurent, Emanuel Ungaro, and Balmain all showed their last collections. For the labels that remained, couture became a way to stand out amid the clutter of hundreds of ready-to-wear lines. For the likes of Dior, Valentino, and Chanel—which all typically reserved a sky's-the-limit budget both for dramatic staging and the collections themselves.

As haute couture undergoes the process of revival once more, its insular and quintessentially Parisian nature is changing. Perhaps it's only fitting for what appears to be couture's ever more global future.

reference: WSJ

Zippers

Zippers are more than an embellishment. Their tale begins throughout the past century and up to the present becoming an ornament and a sartorial element to clothing.

Zip fasteners come out the first time in 1851 on jeans, but by the end of the century, there is the concern for a patent “separable fastener”. Only during 1913 was the zipper fashioned and used primarily for galoshes. It frequently rusted and got stuck. For a relative amount of time, before being used by immensely popular couturiers like Elsa Schiaparelli, zippers didn’t have an easy life. They were considered maladroit and too industrial.

Within 1934 Tadao Yoshida, instituted the Yoshida Kogyo Kabushikikaisha, or, YKK, engraveing them on zippers for years that have been used all around the world. It’s the brand of the bulk of zippers that are around us, from clothing to leather goods, from footwear to furniture. And since 1936, thanks to YKK’s mass production, zippers are part of our lives forever.

It’s not possible to survive without them and, above all, to think of a life devoid of that heartening up and down. There is technology but also sensuality into that swift hand motion we do whilst opening a zipper an onomatopoeic sound. From aged sleeping bags to the high-tech warfare-proof suits, from the pencil case we used to have in school, to suitcases, or boots.

Sticky Fingers Album Art 

via:29-25.com 

And then there are those unforgettable illustrations – or in other words,icons: James Bond’s wet suit, Marlon Brando’s motor bike jacket, Gilda’s “scandalous” dress, the chic jumpsuit worn by Roger Federer at Wimbledon in 2009. But also the clever introductions in the clothing designed by Fashion Houses like Dior, Givenchy, and Versace. In 1973, Esquire identifies the zipper as “A brilliant tailoring design that has among its numerous advantages the one of avoiding the possibility of the unintentional and embarrassing disarray in menswear”.

In that year an ad for children’s clothing with zippers was published: in this way they can dress by themselves. It was in 1971 when another small record was broken: the Rolling Stones placed a zipper that works on the cover of their Sticky Fingers album created by Andy Warhol.