Business: Haute Couture

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The art of creating costumes is obvious; the business, obscure and confused. The haute couture— must risk its millions of francs of profit upon the artistic fecundity of 40 or 50 designers. The wages of 300,000 cutters and sewers, 150,000 embroiderers, glove makers, bag makers, hundreds of thousands of copyists the world over depend upon their creations. If they fail, the price is instant oblivion. If they succeed the rewards may be as great as those of Charles Frederick Worth, draper's assistant who revolutionized the haute couture in the 1850's and whose sons and grandsons have prospered mightily. No aspiring Paris dressmaker ever forgets the fact that Gabrielle Chanel, the country girl from Auvergne, was said to be worth $15,000,000 as late as 1932 and is considered one of France's richest woman. Even 35 years ago openings attended by such widespread public interest as those of last week were unheard of. Before the War the couturiers of Paris were a small, select group catering to the queens and grandes dames of Europe. Even these moneyed customers consulted a couturier only when they wanted dresses for particularly grand occasions and were willing to spend as much as $1,000 for a brocaded ball gown. For everyday clothes—street dresses, afternoon frocks, sportswear— the grandes dames considered the little dressmaker around the corner good enough. But after the War there was little demand for expensive robes-de-style and no money to pay for them. So the couturiers set out to supplant the little seamstress around the corner by designing all women's clothes, even down to the negligee. These designs, simple, practical, not too expensive, brought the haute couture down from the ballroom to the tennis court.

War had an even more important effect on styles in the U. S. Before 1914 only the wealthiest of U. S. matrons bought their gowns in Paris. To the women of the great middle class, Worth, Redfern, Poiret, Callot Soeurs were simply glamorous names. After 1918 the couturiers began for the first time to dress the whole Western world. Their designs, altered and adapted to suit cheaper grades of materials, began to flow out over all Europe and the U. S. Paris became the hub of world fashion. It still is.

That change laid the haute couture open to further inroads by the hordes of unscrupulous style pirates whose activities are currently the industry's chief economic headache. They contrive through spies to pet detailed information on nearly every important opening without going to the expense of buying models. They make up copies from this information, bootleg them as bona fide originals at greatly reduced prices. French law prosecutes style pirates relentlessly: 400 were once jailed in a single drive. The fight against piracy was led by an Egyptian named Trouyet, head of the house of Vionnet. He is described as "a horrible person, but smart."