Haute Couture is not a set. It is a naked demand.
It survives only through excellence.
And excellence, today, is faltering.
Artistic directors succeed one another like lightning.
Heritage faces disruption.
Craftsmanship resists industry.
Silence responds to overkill.
Haute Couture has become a barometer of the world.
Chanel offered a swan song.
A chiaroscuro studio.
Willo Perron created an intimate setting.
A gesture of reverence: tweed, wheat, the freedom of the body.
An invisible passing of the torch.
Dior chose silence.
Absence as a declaration of power.
Jonathan Anderson brings all the lines together.
A single face, a single voice, as in the days of Christian Dior.
Not a dispersion: an intensity.
Stéphane Rolland sculpted Ravel. Clothing becomes a musical score.
A theater of shadows and fire.
Franck Sorbier has brandished El Dorado.
Not a mirage, but a counter-fire.
In the face of digital illusions, he opposes centuries of craftsmanship.
Juana Martin has invoked Andalusia.
Black and white like fervor.
Semana Santa in Couture.
An identity transformed into a manifesto.
All this says one thing: Haute Couture still breathes.
Fragile.
Tense.
But alive.
It is not a survival.
It is a struggle.
Every silence, every fold, every sparkle affirms that this struggle is not over.
« Haute Couture does not follow time: it examines it, and sometimes, it anticipates it. »
CHIKH Larbi, for www.the-8th-art.com
Crédit photo: Julien Fournié
