Colin’s Column | Paris Couture Week, Continued

Colins Column | Opinion

PARIS, France — The weather was vile, the taxi shortage extreme. The gutters ran with filthy water from melting snow. We slid and slithered in ankle deep slush. In short, Paris was not at its best. But this was Couture Week (well, three days, which is symptomatic of how fashion ‘weeks’ have shrunk, but old habits — and titles — die hard in fashion circles) and we felt privileged to be there. But is everything shown in Paris during

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Colin’s Column | Is Haute Couture Poised for Reinvention or Irrelevance?

Colins Column | Opinion

Christian Dior Couture S/S 2013 | Photo: BoF

PARIS, France — Couture! This magic word was all but forgotten 30-odd years ago, except in the most exalted and privileged of social circles. Since its high point in the late 1940s and 1950s, couture clients had shrivelled away just as the lifestyles the couturiers once clothed had withered as well. Fashion had taken its lead from the arts, generally, and jumped on the democratic bus called youth and freedom. Even Yves Saint

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Colin’s Column | Are Fashion Exhibitions Measuring Up?

Colins Column | Opinion

Valentino: Master of Couture | Photo: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images Europe

LONDON, United Kingdom — Did the world stop? Did it move? Were we changed? Did fashion leap into the public consciousness as a result of the 2010 Alexander McQueen exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which broke a number of records, not least in sales from the gift shop? I would answer in the negative. The Alexander McQueen exhibition was about tragedy, darkness, drama, fame, notoriety and even horror much

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Colin’s Column | Making the Case for a Modern Couture

Colins Column | Opinion

Christian Dior Couture Autumn/Winter 2012 by Raf Simons

PARIS, France — Strange people in the fashion world. Take Dior. The couturier who founded the house with money provided by Marcel Boussac, the cotton baron, was secretive and superstitious, always looking for traitors hiding behind curtains. And nothing much seems to have changed since the man described by Cecil Beaton as “the Watteau of couturiers” first took the fashion world by storm in 1947, the year in which Christian Dior

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