WHAT HAPPENS TO COUTURE WHEN THERE ARE NO MORE COUTURIERS?
Virginie Viard's departure from Chanel incites larger questions about the future of fashion's most vaunted métier.
In a move that seemed at once surprising and long overdue, Chanel recently announced that Virginie Viard, the faithful right hand and successor to Karl Lagerfeld, would leave the company after 37 years, five of which were spent as creative director. Viard’s Chanel was a controversial one that never lived up to Lagerfeld’s critically and only managed to do so commercially thanks to outrageous increases in the company’s bag prices. But whatever I may personally think about the designs Viard sent down the runway, the news has made me ponder the state of couture overall.
Couture is not about charging as much as humanly possible for a garment or accessory. It’s a way of doing things, intricate methods of fabrication used to conjure the most sublime fit and finish. Perhaps even more so, couture is a state of mind, a philosophy of making.
I listened to a podcast a couple of months back featuring Amanda Harlech, the stylist who worked with Lagerfeld on every collection at Chanel and Fendi from the mid-‘90s until his death in 2019. When recalling her time as a collaborator, she said something that struck me. According to Harlech, Lagerfeld was more than a prolific designer: he possessed deep, specialized knowledge of couture technique, having committed practically every kind of stitch, tailoring method, manner of cutting, type of embroidery, specialty fabric, knitting process, and rare weaving practice from haute couture’s entire history to memory.
Lagerfeld talked a big game and it would be easy to dismiss this anecdote as overzealous in its estimation, but when it comes to historical fashion knowledge, there are few people I’d put in the same league. It’s important to acknowledge that this did not start out being the case. Initial coverage from WWD recounts Lagerfeld’s earliest days at Chanel, where he seemed as much besotted with as he was unsure about the possibilities of a couture atelier.
Viard spent over 30 years immersed in everything Lagerfeld had learned. While I do not think she used that knowledge to its best advantage, there’s something to be said about their relationship as a passing of the torch from master to apprentice – a once common act that has practically ceased with the dying off of the couture tradition.
This sense of lineage immediately made me think of a keen observation made by Cathy Horyn in Valentino: The Last Emperor. When speaking about the impending retirement of Valentino, Horyn said, “It would be very much the end of an era for many reasons. There’s really no one who can replace or succeed Valentino because if you weren’t learning about couture in the 1950s from people who learned the craft in the 1920s, you’re not going to get any more information.”
Let that sink in.
How many people are out there who, like Viard, had a true and extensive apprenticeship in designing couture? Imagine what gets lost when this throughline is severed. There are boundless tools in a couturier’s toolbox, but they remain available only to those who know they exist in the first place. At this point, we’ve seen more than a few Gaultier shows with guest designers that resemble amateur hour. That isn’t solely due to tight deadlines or other logistics. It’s because most of the people tasked with creating those collections are operating the equivalent of a Bombardier having previously only presided over a puddle jumper. There are fewer and fewer institutions where the eager student can come to grasp what couture is. That’s just one reason Chanel, as a house, remains so important.
Whoever gets the Chanel job will have a tremendous task that involves balancing the nuances of couture with the ravenous demands of ready-to-wear and accessories, private clients and the masses – all at once. They must be artist and product engineer. But with its massive influence, can Chanel’s eventual appointee make the house’s couture more than an exercise in prestige and advance one of the defining and most revered design jobs in fashion since Charles Frederick Worth established the first couture label in 1858?
And the assistant became the executor.